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“When I hear the words ‘reduce friction and cognitive work,’ I hear ‘think less,’” said music journalist Liz Pelly, describing a haunting phrase she uncovered while researching Spotify’s internal approach to user experience. That phrase, she explained, summed up the quiet power of today’s streaming platforms: to make listening effortless, even if that means discouraging listeners from thinking critically about what they hear.
Pelly, author of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, visited Sanford for a public conversation on her national bestselling book. The event was co-sponsored by Sanford’s Cyber Policy Program and The Forum @ FHI.
The evening opened with a warm introduction from Tift Merritt, Duke’s current Artist in Residence and an acclaimed singer-songwriter whose own work explores the intersections of art, authorship, and community. Merritt noted that as music becomes increasingly data-driven, it risks losing the sense of shared humanity that drew people to songs in the first place.
Then came Pelly, standing before a packed audience of students, faculty, and local community members, ready to dissect one of the most powerful companies in modern culture.
From playlists to politics
Pelly’s book draws on more than a hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians. It chronicles how Spotify’s business model reshaped not just how artists are paid, but how listeners think about music itself.
“Spotify is a music streaming service,” she said. “But it is also an advertising engine, and it is also a data collection platform.”
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Her reporting began in 2016, when she noticed how few people in music journalism were talking about streaming’s impact on listeners. She set out to uncover what she calls “the invisible architecture” behind the interface, who controls the real estate of the app, and what cultural assumptions shape the playlists people consume every day.
As she traced Spotify’s evolution, Pelly found that the company’s transformation from a simple search bar to an emotion-driven recommendation engine reflected a broader shift in digital culture. By 2012, Spotify’s marketing had pivoted to the slogan “Music for Every Moment,” complete with sun-drenched stock images and soft acoustic soundtracks. The rebrand, she explained, was not just about design, it was about teaching users to view music as a companion for productivity, calm, and convenience.
Organizing songs by moods and moments, she said, became a way to “sell people not just on music, but on the promise that mood stabilization is something within their control.”
Part of the goal of targeting people on an emotional level is to help them think less about music. As a critic, I want people to think more about the context in which they’re relating to music.
Liz Pelly
A system built to think for you
In the years since, that strategy has defined much of modern streaming. Spotify’s algorithms now learn from every skipped song and every playlist a listener makes, producing what Pelly calls “a frictionless experience” that privileges passive engagement.
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To Pelly, that is not accidental, it is a form of design philosophy. “Part of the goal of targeting people on an emotional level is to help them think less about music,” she said. “As a critic, I want people to think more about the context in which they’re relating to music.”
Her book also documents how Spotify fills some of its most popular playlists with what she terms “ghost artists,” anonymous, low-cost stock musicians whose songs are commissioned to save money on royalties. She also examines Discovery Mode, a program that offers artists algorithmic promotion in exchange for a 30 percent cut in their streaming royalties. Both, she argued, reveal the underlying economics of a system built to favor scale over sustainability.
“Spotify pays 70 percent of its revenue to rights holders,” she explained. “That sounds fair until you look at who those rights holders are, and how much of that money ever reaches working musicians.”
Merritt, who shared her own experience as a recording artist, helped translate those economics into lived reality. “Last month I released a new song,” she told the audience. “It had nearly 200,000 streams, and I made $45.”
Algorithms, AI, and art as data
In the discussion that followed, David Hoffman, Sanford’s Steed Family Professor of the Practice of Cybersecurity Policy, joined Pelly and Merritt to explore the broader policy implications of her research. Hoffman asked how artificial intelligence is shaping the future of music, both in how people discover songs and in how songs themselves are created.
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“There isn’t one single algorithm on Spotify,” Pelly clarified. “There are many models built from different data sources, and all of them are designed to optimize engagement.”
She noted that the rise of generative AI music adds another layer of complexity. “Right now, the major labels are suing AI music companies for copyright violations, while also negotiating deals with them,” she said. “It’s striking how history repeats itself.”
Still, she warned against focusing only on generative AI. “It’s a mistake to talk about AI music as something new,” she said. “Algorithmic recommendation and hyper-personalization have already been shaping how we relate to music for more than a decade.”
Pelly’s comments echoed one of Hoffman’s guiding questions: what happens when data about our listening habits leaves the platform? “Every click, every playlist, every play is recorded,” Pelly said. “And Spotify partners with some of the largest data brokers and marketing firms in the world. The idea that ‘it’s just music’ is misleading. That data doesn’t stay on the platform, it’s part of a much larger surveillance system.”
What makes culture less interesting for listeners is also what makes it less sustainable for artists. But knowing that the opposite is true, that working collectively to improve material conditions for musicians benefits all of us who love music, is where there’s power and possibility.
Liz Pelly
Music as a public good
Despite the heavy themes, Pelly ended on a note of possibility. Her book highlights collective action among artists and communities pushing back against the streaming economy, from independent cooperatives to public libraries creating local music archives.
“These are not technological solutions,” she said. “They’re social solutions. They’re ways of reimagining how relationships and communities can shape technology.”
She also described promising policy experiments abroad, such as Ireland’s pilot program offering a basic income for artists. “It’s a way of valuing art not by how well it performs online, but by its contribution to the cultural fabric of society,” she said.
When a student asked what lessons future policymakers should take from her research, Pelly did not hesitate. “Music is the canary in the coal mine,” she said. “If you look at how music has been transformed by technology, you can see what’s coming for other forms of culture too. The question is what we do about it.”
For Pelly, the answer begins with awareness. “What makes culture less interesting for listeners,” she writes in Mood Machine, “is also what makes it less sustainable for artists. But knowing that the opposite is true, that working collectively to improve material conditions for musicians benefits all of us who love music, is where there’s power and possibility.”