It was all the fault of Scandinavian social democracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Sweden became a global centre for music piracy largely through a perfect storm of universal and high quality broadband, well-funded music education, and assertive personal privacy laws. Something had to be done. Record industry CEOs talked about the Nordic country as a lost market. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) leaned on Congress to apply pressure. Audible in the background was the rise of Piratbyrån, a kind of underground Swedish think tank obsessed with copyright liberation, which unleashed a new BitTorrent search engine — The Pirate Bay — that threatened global consequences.

Years down the line, both Spotify and the major record labels — Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony, and Warners — would benefit in different ways from a neat story in which the plucky Swedish tech upstarts disrupted a complacent and declining music industry, running into town to save it from freewheeling pirates and bringing it back to robust growth. But that call was coming from inside the building.

Throughout the 2000s, major labels had worked on all-you-can-eat music subscription services. Forgotten enterprises like Press Play and Music.Net were hard sells during the profligate CD boom years. The majors wanted it, but couldn’t yet get away with it. ‘It’s becoming very obvious to me and my peers,’ reported one artist manager to The New York Times in 2002 after finding their client’s music streaming for free, ‘that we’re becoming victims of what is a huge conspiracy.’ Those platforms failed, but their intentions did not.

‘The very concept of Spotify,’ writes Liz Pelly in Mood Machine, ‘was designed for the benefit of extremely popular, major label music.’ When Pelly began reporting on Spotify in 2016, it was the mid-point between the company’s 2006 inception in Stockholm and its current status as the global music hegemon. Pelly’s book, built on interviews with over a hundred Spotify employees, artists, and industry insiders, aims to tell two separate stories: the devastation that Spotify visited on independent music; and its disastrous flattening of music as an aesthetic experience.

By the end of the 2000s, Spotify was pitching itself as the solution to music piracy’s problem, going direct to influential figures like Sir Lucian Grainge (today the sole most powerful music executive on the planet, then merely the head of UMG’s UK operations) to license major label music. The majors agreed. By 2009, the majors collectively owned an 18 percent stake in Spotify, the firm’s success was wholly contingent on their say-so, and that say-so meant sweetheart deals that could mine Spotify for equity, advances, and free advertising, and the domination of the platform’s increasingly influential playlists.

But what about the independents? Between the late 1970s and the 2000s, independent labels in the West had achieved hard-won gains. In the UK this is a story that starts with countercultural Notting Hill bohemians setting up the Rough Trade distribution network (or, in Morrissey’s memorable coinage, ‘Oxbridge ganja dissidents’). This led eventually to slick behemoths that could throw up cash-printing mainstream artists like Adele, Oasis, and Arctic Monkeys. You didn’t have to love those labels’ outputs to recognise that their profits were being circulated and re-invested in new artists at a rate the majors would never countenance. But by the late 2000s, this structure was wobbling. The CD boom was contracting.

The organisation that the indies set up to manage the unfamiliar world of digital distribution — the Merlin Network — was in its first year when Spotify came knocking. Independents signed up for Spotify’s one-size-fits-all model. It took a couple of years for the indies to realise that they were being had, competing for attention on a platform that was designed to be rigged in the majors’ favour (even if they succeeded, they were rewarded with low and unfair royalty rates). Spotify soared, but indie revenue did not.

In 2025, it is easier to be clear-eyed about exactly where all of this has led. Spotify’s message to independent artists is that of other platform capitalists: build your brand, grow your audience, hustle. If streaming was ever sold to artists at all, it was as a shop window for them to then maximise profit from touring. If that notion was ever credible, it certainly isn’t now. A 2024 investigation into the ‘cost of touring crisis’ by the Guardian writer Daniel Dylan Wray exposed a broken live music model, in which tours make a loss and ostensibly successful larger indie acts subsist on universal credit, living with parents and sofa surfing. These are not dynamite conditions for working-class creativity; no wonder artists from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate the top table of British pop.

Anyone looking for a villain here does not have to venture much further than Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive. Ek speaks like a feudal lord about the workers who make music for the platform, telling musicians in 2020 that ‘you can’t record music every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough’. Ek is a billionaire — for context, fewer than ten musicians, Jay Z and Paul McCartney among them, have ever become billionaires — and has spent the last two years cashing in Spotify shares to his enormous financial engorgement.

Pelly argues that Spotify, and by extension streaming, has not just materially damaged music workers — an open and shut case — but has damaged the quality of music itself. The reporting here is exhausting and often punishingly grim. In its pivot from music enthusiasts to more casual listeners (something Spotify internally terms ‘laid back listening’), it has created a huge incentive for blander sounds. Some of this has been recorded by ‘fake’ artists on Spotify’s dime to avoid paying out royalty revenues, and much of it will soon be delivered by AI. More obliquely, Spotify’s vision of an eternally available personalised music experience is an example of the atomised and narcissistic cultures that tech companies help to fuel. Mood Machine is correct to recommend the United Musicians and Associated Workers’ (UMAW) Justice at Spotify campaign and the Music Worker Alliance’s #StreamingJustice initiative as important antidotes.

But what if streaming is not the problem here? Streaming has allowed audiences to gamble on becoming exposed to a wider range of music, even contributing significantly to the once unthinkable decline of America as the global pop superpower. Some of the incentives that Pelly writes about are no more alarming than those created by Hits Radio. Models like Bandcamp show that streaming can be organised in line with workers’ rights, even if it isn’t currently.

There is a glut of literature right now focusing on Spotify, but very little on the major labels. Popular music in the 2020s is under extreme corporate capture. In 1999, there were six major labels. By 2012, through a process of aggressive mergers and acquisitions, there were just three. Having consolidated their power and market share, they operate an effective oligarchy, of which Spotify’s grotesque inequality is a high-profile manifestation.

They are only consolidating this power. Last October, UMG completed its 100 percent acquisition of European indie giant PIAS (‘I am selling my shares,’ protested PIAS chief Kenny Gates, ‘not my soul’); he now partially owns the influential online radio station NTS.

This corporate consolidation has happened at the same time that neoliberal gains in the West have shut working- and lower-middle-class musicians out of the industry, tramping down living standards and kicking away the social security systems that once allowed them to flourish. Fix streaming, sure. But how to really fix the music industry? Break up the major labels. Regulate the music industry. Change the economy.