Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

Joel Goodman: It’s the Future Perfect Book Club

Ron Bronson: We’re back another episode. Who knew? We’re real. We’re official.

Joel Goodman: I’m Joel Goodman,

Ron Bronson: I’m Ron Bronson.

Joel Goodman: And we’re reading Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly. Liz is a writer and editor based in New York. And Mood Machine is her first book. Ron, tell us about the book. Give us a short synopsis.

Ron Bronson: A short synopsis is we’re talking about Spotify, how it’s evil.

Joel Goodman: It’s true. So let’s just start it off here. Like, did you like the book?

Ron Bronson: You know, I, there was a lot that I liked, um, the things I really enjoyed weren’t so much about the deep dives into Spotify, which is a lot of stuff that had been covered before. And I knew about, it was actually learning about all the, uh, sort of historical connections, height things that were interesting to me.

Reading about Thomas Edison, learning about the history of Muzak, learning about some of the sort of older payola stuff in radio versus what’s going on now. All that stuff really appealed to me.

So yeah, in general, I thought it was a very good book by someone who’s clearly a journalist and a writer. I thought on balance, it was, it was a good book.

Joel Goodman: For me, same thumbs up. I enjoyed, 95 percent of it. I wish there were more solutions, but it’s really hard when you’re like, in the middle of writing something that’s happening right now, and as you’re seeing all the effects. But same as you, I, I knew a lot of the algorithmic stuff that was happening, but it was the little details, that came up around the history, like you said, also, even the history of Spotify in terms of like the products that they have acquired and how that affected other products that we love, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. It was interesting to see this topic of kind of algorithmic control being applied in a different sort of way in a different sort of medium.

So yeah, Ron, let’s dive in. Let’s, uh, let’s talk about some of this. Let’s dig into some of the themes. Was there anything that surprised you? And if not, because I don’t think a lot of this was surprising, what do you think was like the, the most and I guess the most important thing or like, especially with all the stuff that you’re thinking about and working through right now?

Ron Bronson: You know, I, I think that you know, we were music fans. We was one of the reasons we became good friends is we both bonded over music. And I think that if you think about the sort of lineage of music in the, even in the, in the streaming era. So, talking about like early 2000s, like I remember being able to use Audio Galaxy to like get MP3s.

I would leave it on for hours to get one song, you know, through the Zune Pass era through where we got Rhapsody. I mean, every streaming service I’ve used it. And all of those were pretty organically designed MySpace, designed for you to like, to really immerse yourself more into music.

And I feel like, the Spotify era started perhaps that way, but then it’s evolved into this really terrible, how do I create, more engagement through things like fake music, fake artists?

That like that stuff was really the stuff that really I found the most like Horrifying is this idea that you could create fake artists that are on Spotify so that you could keep the money within Spotify, not pay royalties to actual artists. I mean like the breaks my brain in terms of like the incentives the silliness of it all and yeah, so that that part for me for sure was that I thought the most interesting, but also the most horrifying part of this book.

Joel Goodman: I’m with you on that. I, I think it was interesting to consider kind of the, birth of Spotify and what it was meant to do. Which I think to your point, a lot of people think that, the marketing is the reality. That it was really meant to be this thing that’s democratizing access to music and is making sure that artists get paid more and, that there’s more discoverability.

But, you find out through this and I mean, through a lot of reporting over the years that the guys that started Spotify, or they were ad men like they were looking at ways to monetize. And I think what was super, surprising to me within this is that Is what you’re saying is just how derivative Spotify actually is. Like it, it was revolutionary sort of, um, but mostly because there was such a long gap between like music’s dominance of kind of public space music, or functional music as, as Liz talks about it a lot.

And, less about it being a completely new idea. Because, you alluded to this in the intro, like this all started out, actually with Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and then eventually like spun off a whole record distribution arm, which I had no idea about, like, that was

Ron Bronson: Yeah, I had no, I had no idea either. It was fascinating to me. I had no idea.

Joel Goodman: With all of this talk and research into how you can control listener behavior, control people’s, I mean, you know, they put it in terms of like affecting mood.

So you want people to be happier. So how do you do it? All of that’s really like, 1984, dystopian, Brave New World type of shit, you know? That’s not it can sound it can sound nice, but it’s uh, it’s kind of scary.

Ron Bronson: Yeah, you know, I, I just, and I think it, the gig is up now in terms of hiding it, right? And for a long time, they sort of were able to sort of hide it and people were raising the alarm very early. Hey, we make no money on Spotify. You know, and maybe you make that trade off because of the visibility and the marketability of being able to be in a platform that allows you to get, some eyeballs you wouldn’t get.

I found lots of artists, on Spotify, but I didn’t find them through the curation of Spotify. It was a sort of a combination of the algorithm though, less so now. And, but more importantly, this idea that people would create playlists and because of all these user generated playlists that allowed you to find stuff you wouldn’t find because, for a long time, like DangerMaus, the guy who was half of Gnarls Barkley, had a Spotify playlist he updated regularly.

Questlove, from The Roots, had a Spotify playlist he would update regularly. Like, I thought this was the coolest thing that people I know only know them from their playlists on Spotify that I met on Twitter years ago. And there are so many really good ones, some are still updated. but because now, of course, everything is algorithmic slop, what you end up having is a playlist that I’ve listened to for years, and because I can’t get a good shuffle on it, it plays the same songs over and over again.

Because, because this person’s paid Spotify some money, and so now, because, you know, you and I use Last. fm, shoutout to Last. fm, I remember there was an artist, his name was like, Saha Baby or something, I don’t know, he’s like a rapper or something. I definitely have never intentionally ever listened to one of his songs.

But because he was on some weird payola playlist that I listened to, it kept playing his songs. So I had to go to the last. fm and delete every mention of him, and then I had to block him on Spotify, to stop putting his songs in my playlists. Cause I didn’t want to hear it. Um, it just. What it does to music listening really, really, really is problematic.

It’s really problematic. And it’s something that if you’re a passive music listener, even if you’re a big music listening fan, it wouldn’t occur to you that is happening in real time.

Joel Goodman: And I mean, I think this is really personal to both of us too, because we kind of bonded over playlists. We both have history with doing that. Like shout out to audio galaxy, because like, that’s like a super niche, file sharing platform that a lot of people like, huh?

Um, Just one of those other weird crossovers that you and I have in our shared entertainment history. but like the art of the mixtape goes back, decades, generations. And, I approach a little bit differently, but I, I think like in the olden days of, our combined, favorite streaming service, RIP, Rdio.

That was the coolest part for me. Sure, I could like find stuff and I thought their like discovery and their playlist generation stuff was really good. Then Spotify bought the company that did that stuff. It was even better when you could see what your friends were listening to and then just follow their playlists all the time.

And those are features that Spotify eventually ripped off and put into their, much worse user experience and much worse platform, but, maybe it’s, you know, Ron, maybe it’s better that, that Rdio got purchased by Pandora because maybe it would have gone the same way. and I like, having that moment in time where it was, you know, unbastardized and just purely a great product.

But, my old school way of doing mixtapes was, uh, you’re a lot more intentional. I was, I was always the, toss, uh, a bunch of albums that I like into a playlist and then just hit shuffle, you know, it’s like I’ve got some seasonal playlists in quotes on Spotify where, it’ll be like winter and I’ll just throw a bunch of albums on there that I think are winter albums that you’ll kind of have that mood.

And then I toss it on shuffle in the car and listen to it. And I think that that’s kind of like the hybrid method of how a lot of people listen to music these days, or at least a lot of the mainstream, listener base listens, and maybe that’s why Spotify was like, huh, we could start to game this, like we could really get in, and, uh, these people aren’t really paying attention to what they’re listening to. Maybe we could just, shove some of our own stuff in here and pay fewer royalties out to people.

Ron Bronson: You know, you still can follow what your friends are listening to, but you have to, uh, only use the desktop app and it shows up on the side bar, but they definitely hid it and it definitely doesn’t work the same way. And you also, there’s no way to message music to people. For a long time, you could send things within Spotify to someone you haven’t been able to do that for years. Um, on Rdio, our favorite streaming app that RIP, I remember years ago when Twitter was still a thing, I remember tweeting about it and I would do it all the time. And I think one time I mentioned something like, yeah, we, we, you know, we really all miss Rdio, but we realized that had that site still existed, there’s no way that it would have made it through this era because the beauty of Rdio was that it groups and you had, you could comment on records and this is all pre like spamming everything and certainly pre algorithmic anything.

And so I remember someone who had worked there responded and said, Yeah, you’re right. We talked about that, that we knew that eventually you’re gonna get comment spammed to death on some of these records, or you know, whatever, and so we knew that it, those features weren’t gonna be able to sustain themselves long term, so your, your thought process is right, and

I’m like, oh, that’s good, but.

You’re right, I’m glad we had that, I think it, what that site did, I think, speaking from our, both of us as designers, and talking about it from a craft perspective, for people that are out there and you listen to this and you’re a builder of something, know that even if your thing didn’t last forever, that if you build something with care and intention, that people appreciate that, that there’s still value in that, even if it doesn’t last forever, sometimes just having that moment, But you made your Flappy Bird and everyone played it for a while and they had a really good time like that’s okay Sometimes you can’t everything can’t last forever

Joel Goodman: I think the fact that that kind of central unit where, you know, it was groups, I think like on Rdio, it was really about people. It’s about the people that you were listening to music alongside. Of it was personal too, but they weren’t just pushing genre or mood or whatever.

Spotify shifted that into something that, you know, you’re listening to playlists that were created by people you don’t know. And like, I mean, curation. Sure. Like, I mean, if you, if you knew the people cool, but like all the stuff they were pushing at users and subscribers was their own stuff. You know, all this, like the title of the book, all this mood centric playlist type of stuff.

On page three of the book, there’s, there’s a short little quote. That says, ” don’t just respond to users, musical interests, but manufacture them at the same time.”

That’s what Spotify started doing with that. And it opened up that whole, you know, resurgence of payola, basically.

And, what’s interesting there is that it turns into this thing where passive listening isn’t something that you just like to do and can continue doing. It turns into something that’s actually kind of dangerous in a way. Where you don’t really know what’s coming up, but you’re talking about that artist just showing up and having to block him on last FM.

So as it show up, that’s the sort of stuff that’s, that’s really interesting to me.
Ron, what’s a, what’s payola? This is an old term.

Ron Bronson: Yes is definitely an ancient term in the 60s or 50s you had a radio stations would basically get paid to play certain songs from record labels. And so you had entire labels doing this giving money to stations to make sure that they can amplify or boost certain artists songs

Joel Goodman: and that sounds a lot like Spotify.

Ron Bronson: Is, it is very much, it is very in line with what is happening now. Payola was, Payola is the kind of thing that was very open in the sixties and that you knew it was happening. And by the eighties we had denied like it was not happening anymore. Like, oh, no one’s doing that. No one, I’ve never seen any, I’ve never seen anybody accept any money from anybody, but of course it was still happening.

You know, until radio became a less dominant form. Spotify streaming is the radio now. You know, we talk about Apple music playlists and all these things that people put through the charts of I was number one in Amazon, whatever that means, so, you know, streaming is the new radio now,

Joel Goodman: it totally is. and radio for a long time was that sort of functional music and it just, you know, you turn it on and put it in the background and I, there’s probably a generational gap and probably, probably a fan, a fan, a level of fandom gap maybe. And, it’s kind of interesting to me like one of the one thing she talks about is sort of this difference between function and fandom and I think that the differentiation for someone like you or me and a lot of our friends is that we will even if we’re listening to if we were listening to radio or even if we’re listening to something a little bit more passively.

You know, I’m not listening to Spotify. I’m listening to Apple music. But if I’m shuffling through something or, you know, or have like the, the generative radio on, like, I’m, I’m, I’m like, I’m kind of paying attention to something piques my interest. I’m going to like go and look up what it is and go and find it.

Or even if I’m sitting in a brewery or bar somewhere, like the same sort of thing. I’m going to do a Shazam style thing and, and scrobble it. But if we take like the definition of functional music that came from Edison through to Muzak, and now into Spotify, there’s this difference that that Liz calls on. I think there’s actually a term from Spotify. It’s lean back music versus lean in music, right? And they’re counting on people that are listening to not actually listening. You know, they they’re counting on them to just be hearing the music that’s there but not actually listening to it.

One of the more interesting stories is that, I found was how the whole lo fi genre started out as this, like, super vibrant online community and forums of people just sharing beats back and forth and making their music together. And then eventually it just descended into this functional music that was co opted and, homogenized by Spotify and by certain labels that were just trying to make this music that they saw was popular on Spotify and was making decent money through the streams that it was getting and is getting a lot of placement on these playlists by the Spotify staff.

And why that’s interesting to me is that I have so many friends that talk about how much they’re really into lo fi beats, especially when they’re working. It helps them focus and that sort of thing. And it just kind of like proves the point. Like, I mean, you can, you can kind of like an overall vibe of a certain genre, right? But at what point does that just become music that you’re a fan of the genre and not, you’re not, you’re not actually a fan of the, of the musician or a fan of the actual band or whoever it is.

One of the quotes that really stuck with me is that, “algorithmic stuff doesn’t create fans.” I don’t know. I don’t know where that line is on fandom, I guess. Like we we’ve talked about some of this offline, but there’s like, yeah, I don’t know, like, what, what do you think? Like, in this case, like the artists became de emphasized in favor of their labels and in favor of the actual sound that they were making how do you reconcile that?
I mean, I don’t reconcile it, but like, what are your thoughts on that?

Ron Bronson: You know, I think I’ve come a long way on this because I was pro-streaming for such a long time because as a big music listener, music fan, I didn’t really think about the fact that people aren’t like us. Well, I like me where I like. You know, tuned into new music and make it in playlists for make my, I make monthly playlists and have a radio show, doing all these different things, it didn’t occur to me that people don’t have that same sort of listening until I dealt with other folks to realize to a different degree that they just don’t.

And so I think it’s true that the algorithmic pestle of like, you know, like this sort of like, slop that we create musically, people just care about the sound. They don’t remember artists names. I have a hard time remembering artists names cause everything sounds the same. Uh, you know, if they’re not like somebody that’s prominently in my mind, or it’s not a whole record that I like, I’m often having to go back and go, wait, who is that?

Because so much stuff these days really sounds like the other thing. And I think that that is definitely something that would not have been true even 15 years ago.

Joel Goodman: Yeah. And I want to break it down a little bit, just so that it’s clear, to folks, that haven’t read this book yet. Like the reason that it all sounds the same, is purposeful. Spotify designed this stuff to sound the same or designed the mechanisms for how people create music, because basically what Spotify did was when they started focusing all of the navigation and all of the content serving around these mood based playlists, like, study focus and Chill vibes and dinner party, you know, whatever. They would have these curators at first on staff that were, that were picking stuff and like, actually, I don’t have a problem with that. Like, that’s kind of cool. You get good curators, like you get cool music together. But as they realized that they were spending a Outsized amounts of money on royalties to actual artists, um, labels anyway.
They thought, well, how can we reduce those payments? And so, they would look at what music was getting the most amount of streams and which playlists were getting the most amount of streams and they would say, okay, that’s doing well. This is too expensive. Let’s commission cheaper music by fake bands, essentially, but you know, they called it Perfect Fit Content. Let’s commission music that kind of sounds like this and fits into the vibe. And because most of our listeners we know aren’t actively listening to this stuff, we’ll just toss those songs in cost us less money. They probably won’t notice.

Hint: some of them noticed.

But you know, all of this was around trying to reduce their costs, but at the same time, what they ended up doing was, uh, similar to Muzak, they started basically controlling the listening patterns of the people listening to it. So like Muzak would program functional music that would make regular listeners then choose Muzak, you know, and that’s essentially what Spotify has done too.
They have, shaped these playlists and moods and the preferences of their listeners to certain playlists and moods to the point where they can just insert whatever they want and people don’t really know the difference. And so you, do end up having those playlists where everything just sounds the same and it doesn’t really matter who the artist is.

Cause it is about the vibes.

Ron Bronson: You talk about the curation piece and the, the getting rid of the curators. And it’s really interesting because. So much of this, this creation of fake. everything Um, I think that we won’t get into it in this show, but there’s a broader critique around society and how we’ve delegate these, things to algorithms or to agents where we say, okay, well, you know, I got a lot going on and I just want to hear something right now.

I’m just going to delegate that to the robot and let it pick me a song. You know, I, it’s, I’m really stressed out, man. I just, we just asked the robot to tell me what time it is, you know, or to order some food for me. Cause I don’t have time for that. And, over time, you don’t know what you like, it’s too much work, cognitively, to figure out what you should, what kind of paper towels to buy, I’m just gonna let the machine figure it out for me, but this is where we get into Ron Does Critical Theory, and this is not what you are listening to, so I won’t do that to you right now.

But someday I will.

Joel Goodman: well, I, but I think it’s, I think you’re right, Ron, like 100 percent right. And I think the, I think it’s important to talk about the danger of all this, right? cause what do you lose? And Liz Pelly goes into, she pulls out some of my, uh, my favorite, critical thinkers, from my Media Studies days, brings up some Walter Benjamin.

And, one of his more famous essays is on, is on aura and how, when you take art or you take a work and you take it out of its context and you continue to reproduce it in different ways, away from its actual natural context, it loses its aura, it loses the actual value that’s there or like in our case, we want to simplify it loses its artistic merit, right?

And. I mean, that’s really what’s at stake here with music. I think we’ve had these conversations in the design world with, you know, it’d be like, Oh, you’re commodifying design, you’ll Canva comes out and you no longer have to know how to use Photoshop or whatever else to the point where now it’s like, well, You can just put a prompt into Midjourney and you don’t need to know how to take a photo or you don’t need to know how to do any sort of photo manipulation or whatever.

It’s kind of the same here. and the larger questions do abound, like at what point do we just ignore art entirely? where we don’t place any value on it. We don’t fund it, you know, as a society, we, we, all these things we actually see happening, honestly. And what does that do to us as people?

And what does that do to us as a society? that’s the thing that scares me the most

Ron Bronson: You got, you’ve given me several threads, but I wanna, double back to your Walter Benjamin mention. Joel, what year did he talk about the aura? What year did he write about that? 1936.

Joel Goodman: it’s 36, man.

Ron Bronson: that in 1936. That just breaks your brain to think about. And obviously the lineage to McLuhan and like But like, thinking about, I’m a big fan of Nam June Paik, who was a visual artist and theorist, who really did a lot of really neat things, you should look up.

But, 1936, he’s talking about this. this idea that, I’m gonna deviate slightly here and talk about how, you know, when radio first came out, people who made recorded music got really upset about the fact that radio was going to stop live performers from making money. The reason royalties exist is because the government had to figure out a way to get live artists their money because radio, recorded music was still a new thing.

Radio was still a new thing. And so it’s wild that here we are a hundred years later, and now what we’re discussing is guys like the CEO of an AI, LOL, music app called Suno. Who a few months ago said, Nobody likes making music anyway, it’s really hard to make music, and like, Who’s got time for that? Like, I don’t, no, people don’t want to do that.

So why wouldn’t we just like, Let my sloppy ass app do it? Because, Come on, let’s be real, Music classes, ha ha, am I right?

Joel Goodman: Yeah. and it goes back to what you said earlier around craft, right? and it’s not, everyone cares about craft. And that’s, that’s true. I don’t know that that’s fine, but like, it’s a reality you know, I, I wrote the theme music for this podcast and it sucked. Like it was not, it was mostly not fun doing it.
It took a long time to get to the fun parts and that’s because I don’t feel that I’m as good of a musician as I should be, and that sometimes I can’t get the ideas that are in my head out through my fingers into the keyboard or into the guitar or onto the bass or whatever, and that’s important, like putting work and time and craft into creating something is valuable. There’s value in so many different areas and when we do just outsource all of those things, we don’t just lose the value of the work that we’re creating like we just kind of lose our value as humans because we don’t know how to do anything at that point.

We’re like, if we don’t know how to do anything, what stops other people from, just, just doing everything over us, over the top of us.

Ron Bronson: I go to a lot of shows, as you know, but this year’s been weird because I, I would say I go to a lot of shows, but a friend’s son is in a jazz band at a high school not far from here, just over the border in Washington state, and I’ve gone to a few of, his band’s jazz shows, and it really is like, one, it takes me back to being in high school myself and being in, you know, concert band, jazz band, and all of that.

I played baritone horn, um, was not as good at playing baritone as this young man is playing a trumpet. No, and his peers are at playing their instruments, but it still feels so good to me to see kids connecting to music. I joke that you’re playing a lot of them playing just jazz and I’m like, They haven’t been heard enough yet to understand how to really play jazz music, right?

Like it sounds technically good, but they haven’t been you know jazz you got to grow up to feel it. But nonetheless, they’re really really technically us absurdly good. And I just think in a world where, you know, people like us who spend a lot of time reading about and thinking about all this stuff with AI and all these things, even them, probably, GPT and God knows what, but seeing them on that horn or on that piano or on the drums and seeing them just killing it, gives me so much hope for, okay, We’re gonna, it’s gonna be different, but maybe we’re still clinging to something in this, because it’s not all doom and gloom.

This is the most positive part of this whole podcast. Don’t get excited. It’s not gonna persist, but this is a positive moment that I’m giving you. Be grateful. And so, but seeing the kids doing that really has been validating for me, so to know that, you know what, things are bad. But not everything is as bad as I think it is when I read all the dystopian stuff I read.

Joel Goodman: So to me, there’s, two big dangers that, Liz brings up in this book. I think the, the art one that we just talked about is one of the, it’s the more existential ones. You know, it’s, it’s the one that’s, uh, I don’t know if there’s answers to it. Like it’s, just, to your point, we got to keep, got to keep kids connecting with. With the instruments and got to try to, as, as people that value craft and value music, try to get other people to do it at the same time.

I think the other thing that is somewhat related is just the fact that Spotify’s methods have devalued the artists that do exist. They’re not being paid, for the work that they’re doing there. You know, back to your, talk about royalties, right?

Like the only place that they really can make money is out on the road because they get paid less than a penny per stream on Spotify and on most of these platforms. There are a few that do better. Tidal is pays the most in royalties. Apple Music, I believe is still second place. Though, Apple’s not doing much better than Spotify in terms of fake music and that sort of thing.

Well, Spotify is as far as I know, the worst in terms of how much they actually pay the artists. And there aren’t enough humans subscribing and enough time for humans to listen to that music, to change that, you know, to, to make it so that these artists who feel like they have to rely on Spotify for marketing, but don’t actually get paid off of the Spotify side of things.

the vast majority of them can’t afford rent. They can’t afford to, to have a, even just a comfortable, relatively stress free life as professional musicians. And so, I mean, you and I, like you go to way more live shows than I do right now. Part of that’s because you live in a better city for it at the moment.
but you know, I, whenever I go to live shows, like I make it a point to go to live shows of bands that I support or bands that I stream on apple music. I make it a point to buy. Their record, you know, whether that’s at the local record store or it’s ordering from their website or it’s going to a show.
There’s something about live music that one, I think is just viscerally very helpful to connect back to the art of what’s going on, but it’s also the best way to try to offset some of the damage that streaming is doing to these people’s livelihoods.

Ron Bronson: You know, we, we, we talked a lot about, the fake artists. I want to note that several things, one, the Spotify vehemently denies ever creating fake artists and putting them on Spotify playlists, which to me feels like something a legal person would write to ensure that you’re not admitting to the fact that fake artists probably exist on Spotify, because they do. And it’s because you didn’t put them on a playlist doesn’t mean they didn’t somehow make it on a playlist, algorithmically.

We didn’t put them there, it just happened, magically. But Spotify calls this PFC, or Perfect Fit Content, which is, you put that in your dystopian vocab book, for later, when you need something else. But to your point, You know, obviously going to a lot of shows, I didn’t start collecting vinyl. You know, you collected vinyl a lot longer than I did.

And I come to your house and you’d put on some record. And I was like, I should do that. But it always felt like too much work. And during the pandemic, I finally decided to kind of get into it. And now, because it’s one way for me to give money to an artist, without just only going to a show and getting show money or whatever if I can buy a record from an artist.

Especially an artist that is like newer or up and coming or an artist that is older That I love the record of theirs and I want to have it in the archives.
So that has been something that I’ve been doing more intentionally over the last couple of years that I had never done in the past and it fixed me feel pretty good. But I think it’s a good way to like you said to sort of and she talks about in the book is a way to like Buy direct from artists, you know, like try to find artists that are on these indie labels and being able to support them to support artists.

And so I’ve been very more intentional about that. There are a lot of these rich reissue labels that I tend to like that put out stuff for things that, you know, old music that I like, but the artists are still alive. Um, and so I don’t know that as humans, as people ourselves, that, you know, we have to own our own decisions, but I think that this is much bigger than all of us.

And so I don’t think there’s any shame in just sitting down and listening to some tunes when you can. I think this book has been helpful for thinking about how gamified all this is, how rigged the game is, and how even though you think your taste is, Ah, I’m refined, I listen to whatever, whatever. In reality, so much of this is being shaped by the fact that 85 percent of music right now is streaming, which is If you are, if you’re over 30, that was not your existence as a child or a teenager, so it’s wild to think about that.

So Joel, I know we, we, this book has been really cool for us because it allows us to talk about music and algorithms and in the A. I. Slop era. Two things that we’re both really passionate about. the perfect, Venn diagram of our interests right now, like, this was, this was, this book was perfectly timed for where our heads are right now But uh, I do want to I guess I said there was one positive part of this podcast.

I’m gonna give you another positive thing. Joel, what’s one like nostalgia that this book brought out for you and thinking about you know I know shots of yacht rock and all the old things that we used to care about and music But is there anything that this book brought out for you in a nostalgia sense musically?

Joel Goodman: So in undergrad, the college I went to was very musically inclined and I had a lot of friends that were in bands. I was going to be in bands and realized how much worse of a guitar player I was than everyone else there. So I did a lot more, you know, monitor engineering, front end engineering for shows and stuff.

And, um, Like pivotal during that time for me, you know, early aughts was, the whole, music blog culture that was going on. It was that was how you marketed yourself as a new and upcoming artist like you would try to get, your single dropped on one of those sites and then it would, you know, go crazy.
And then like the bigger magazines, like Pitchfork would pick it up and then, you know, whatever else. And, uh, and we had a couple of friends that did that.

Oh, you know, one of our, one of our friends kind of made his career doing exactly that as, as a remix artist. And, there’s still a little bit of, of that going on, but I think the shift to streaming is really, it just, the, the findability stuff feels so less heavy without someone talking about, Oh man, I found this cool band and they’d all this stuff and here’s the person and take a listen to the song.

So I, I do really, I do really miss that. Um, I, that’s one of those things that I think was not just good for the artists, but I think for for all of us, they didn’t maybe want to read commercial music journalism like we, you know, we didn’t really care about what the big, you know, Rolling Stone type of thing was even Pitchfork like their reviews are always terrible, at least for music I liked. But being able to read these blogs that were people that were just as, or maybe even a little bit more nerdy about music than you were. There’s just something powerful about

The early 2000s you talk about was really an interesting time for me too because it was a time for me to really get into like musical discovery in a way that, you know, I had always been a big interested in a lot of things, but I feel like that was a time that I made friends who got me into other things.

Ron Bronson: You know, I really got into hip hop because, uh, a friend, of course you know a friend of both of ours. Josh, my college best friend, uh, got me into hip hop. And he’s showing up and he’s like, Yo, Ron, do you like a blah blah blah blah blah blah? And he’d bring me a record and I’d listen to it. And then it turns out I liked that record and I would give him a record.

Um, he’s never given me a bad rec. Talk about human curation. If he sends me something good, I know it’s gonna be good. Uh, but I think you really touched on this thing about how so much of the old days, even really, I guess not too long ago, where having that cosign or that recommendation from somebody . Allowed a thing to be better than it was, even not that long ago, like, it’s funny that I’m mentioning this guy because I look at Eva’s music, but Little Nas X, you know, he goes viral online, but it took a Billy Ray Cyrus cosign for his song to become the most streamed, you know, number one hit ever, right?
Like, that cosign is still really important. But you know who gives cosigns? Humans, not AI agents, not Spotify, not bots. And so the question is going to become in the next iteration of music, right? Where TikTok is still the dominant form of listening to music for a lot of the kids that are under 20, right?

What’s going to happen to that cosign? What is that going to look like? But I really miss the, the, I enjoy now that there’s nostalgia for the blog era. You know, I listen to a lot more rap than you do. And there’s a lot of consistent nostalgia for what they call the blog era of rap. It’s kind of like the 90s stuff where nobody ever called it that at the time, but now we call it that because it’s been so long, and it turns out it was a moment in time.

And so I’m really enjoying, and it’s a certain sound that you, it’s kind of like college radio, I say that to you, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And blog era rap is exactly the same thing, so most people right now would go, oh damn, like, you know, like, early Lupe Fiasco, and you’re like, yeah, exactly, or like, You know, whatever, like, uh, Shabazz Palaces or something, like, It’s really interesting to think about how that happens, and how people who didn’t grow up in that era really appreciate what we thought was sort of, just, was just Tuesday for us.

But now, we’re not gonna ever have those moments back again, and it’s really interesting to think about what that does, how culture’s been flattened so much in a relatively short period of time. And not really for the better, I would argue that AudioGalaxy, Rdio, the blog era, all these things are improvements to our experiences.

And I would say now that we’re in this like, declining, era where things don’t
have that same excitement, that same value for us.

Joel Goodman: We we’ve just, we’ve given up way more control over the things that we like and the, our own tastes to algorithms, than, I mean, maybe we were giving over parts of that, but at least it was real people, you know, before and now, it’s just being shaped by stuff that’s like. You know, the herd mentality around stuff that you like, and I, I think it’s, I think it’s hard to, it’s hard to be a true fan when you’re not hearing new stuff at all.

You know, when you, when you’re not challenging the stuff that you want, it’s hard to be a true fan of the, of the bands that you do like, because everything just kind of sounds the same. But, there is so much more in this book to. It was. Yeah, it felt longer like, like reading through it. It was just jam packed with stuff. So, I would say that I recommend anyone pick it up, and read it, especially if you are interested in music and consider yourself a music fan.

Um, and even better if you are curious about all the algorithmic stuff that’s happening in our world. but it’s great. A book was mood machine by Liz Pelly. There’s a link in our show notes to bookshop. org where you can buy it. We don’t get any, uh, sort of money from that, but you do get to support local bookshops, when you order through them and not Amazon and more of that money goes directly to the authors and so we’re going to keep we’re going to keep hyping the the Bookshop links as long as we can. so go pick it up.