**Hello Profits My Old Friend **
Mood Machine is a critique of capitalism masquerading as a book on Spotify. Rather than engage the author, I will explore the post smartphone music industry, fed by facts uncovered between Mood Machine’s soliloquies.
First, music operates within the attention economy. This economy is distinct from the now-defunct entertainment industry, where entertainment was a growing share of humanity’s time and consumers could paid ever-increasing prices for top content. With smartphones, entertainment addresses the entire, finite market of human attention. Music must share that attention with everything else, from class to TikTok to calls with Grandma. As it happens, music is not dominant medium in this arena. Video content is worth roughly $500 billion annually, video games $250 billion, and even books command a $150 billion annual market. Music has shrunk from $33 billion in 1999 to $30 billion today, with only newspapers faring worse.
Within this shrinking puddle, in the face of infinite supply and indifferent consumers, that Spotify must compete. Anybody who thought this would be anything other than the next generation of capitalism would be fooling themselves, the author included. Major labels owned 18% of the platform from the beginning, and now, streaming accounts for 84% of recorded revenues.
Spotify’s monetization follows a familiar tech-industry pattern: attract power users with a low monthly fee, introduce ads, and raise prices once competitors exit and aggregation theory takes effect. What’s more interesting than Spotify’s inevitable takeover of music is the way it competes in the arena of attention. After reaching critical mass among consumers, the best way to improve margins is to reduce costs, which makes Spotify a vertically integrated machine, with ghost music makers behind the credits contributing to lower-cost ambient music.
Another approach is expanding the market share of music. *The core of Spotify’s success is that they are not merely providing music; they are filling people’s time … our only competitor is silence. * Thus Spotify pushes the boundaries of music overall, creating a renaissance of ambient music. This was a genre once relegated to the back of the new age aisle with only Brian Eno as its headliner. By doing so, study and work time become part of the music’s addressable market. The author dislikes this shift, but as a long-time ambient listener, I’m a fan. Listening, like watching or reading, is increasingly algotorial, where a combination of machine learning and human framing creates playlists tailored to each individual’s preferences.
One can lament Spotify’s influence on the music industry, but this is the inevitable confluence of infinite supply, customer indifference, and cheap AI. I’m not going to visit my local library to pick up music in person, and compared to a pre-Spotify world, my ability and willingness to explore niche music have both expanded. How music survives in a world awash in screens and visual stimulus remains an open question, but at least there’s a tech giant fighting for listening in the age of screens.
**7th book of 2025 **