NATIONAL BESTSELLER A New Yorker , GQ , The Daily Telegraph (London), and Library Journal Best Book of 2025 A 2025 Washington Post Notable Nonfiction An NPR Books We Love Most pick Winner of a Certificate of Merit from the 2025 ARSC Awards for Excellence An unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultural criticism, illuminating how streaming is reshaping music for listeners and artists alike. Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed. Building on her years of wide-ranging reporting on streaming, music journalist Liz Pelly details the consequences of the Spotify model by examining both sides of what the company calls its two-sided marketplace: the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all. The music business is notoriously opaque, but here Pelly lifts the veil on major stories like streaming services filling popular playlists with low-cost stock music and the rise of new payola-like practices. For all of the inequities exacerbated by streaming, Pelly also finds hope in chronicling the artist-led fight for better models, pointing toward what must be done collectively to revalue music and create sustainable systems. A timely exploration of a company that has become synonymous with music, Mood Machine will change the way you think about and listen to music. “Pelly helps us see this business model as haphazard and contingent, not immutable or inevitable. . . . Pelly’s focus on cracking the black box of the platform itself, not least through exhaustive interviews with insiders and musicians, gives us the first clear picture of Spotify’s transfiguration of the musical field.” —Mitch Therieau, The Nation “Pelly’s writing has long helped shape discourse about these bigger questions. Mood Machine is no exception: Before the book has even been released, its initial excerpt in Harper’s caused no less than Jack Antonoff to comment that Pelly’s writing about how streaming services devalue music ‘sums it up perfectly.’” — Jonathan Bernstein, Rolling Stone "Pelly is a romantic, but her book isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. It’s about how we have come to view art and creativity, what it means to be an individual, and what we learn when we first hum along to a beloved pop song." —Hua Hsu, The New Yorker "Pelly has established herself as the most lucid and rigorous critic of the rot at the heart of an apparently magical service. Her new book, Mood Machine , promises to become a new standard text for tech-skeptic artists." —Franz Nicolay, The Washington Post “Mood Machine persuasively demonstrates how Spotify guides its users down certain roads—but it’s not impossible to choose a detour.” —Brad Shoup, The Atlantic "With this cool-headed but powerful polemic against letting the algorithm take charge, Pelly issues a sombre warning against chilling out as you click on the Sleepwalking into Oblivion playlist." —Sunday Times “Passionate and rigorous… Pelly has reported on Spotify’s impact on musicians for the best part of a decade, and she […] hammers home her message to wake us from our streaming-induced stupor… Uplifting and instructive.” —Max Liu, The Financial Times "Tension between art and commerce is hardly new . . . Yet Spotify has proved quite innovative at finding ways to update the industry’s less savory traditions, and Ms. Pelly meticulous documentation makes Mood Machine an important book." —Frank Rose, The Wall Street Journal “ Mood Machine stands out as the definitive book on how we should think about Spotify as a phenomenon, not necessarily because her account is the most comprehensively reported, but because Pelly provides a sustained look at how the company has affected, and continues to affect, the world it took over.” —Nicholas Quah, Vulture "A reported look inside the guts of an app millions of us use daily. The book digs into the app's origins, the economic toll its influence has taken on artists, but also how it's shaped the way we all listen to music – or, maybe I should say, muzak ?" —NPR "Drawing on interviews with musicians, industry experts, and former employees, journalist Liz Pelly traces the evolution of Spotify, from its beginnings to its current status as a streaming giant — and argues that the platform’s model is focused on maximizing profits at the expense of both users and artists. Ann Powers says, “Pelly picks up every piece of the streaming puzzle and places it in perfect context. This book will intrigue the layperson, inform the artist, and cause music fans to think deeply about the hidden co