Millions of AI-generated tracks, playlists designed like products, invisible artists: is music becoming just a stream? In “The Spotify Machine. The Commodification of Music in the Age of Streaming” (Actes Sud), American music journalist and critic Liz Pelly reveals the inner workings of a system that is changing both how we listen and the lives of musicians.
Music has never been more accessible and maybe never stripped of what made it unique. In late January, Deezer admitted what many artists had suspected: by 2025, the platform had detected 13.4 million AI-generated tracks. By January 2026, they were receiving 60,000 per day, accounting for 39% of their daily uploads. The service claims to have identified up to 85% of AI music streams as fraudulent and decided to license their detection tool to Sacem. The question is no longer theoretical. It has become industrial: who plays, who gets paid, and who disappears into the noise?
It is in this very precise moment that The Spotify Machine. The Commodification of Music in the Age of Streaming, the investigation by Liz Pelly, appears in French. The interest of the book lies precisely in this: it not only recounts how Spotify changed the music economy but also how the platform transformed listening itself, its form, its rhythm, its passivity, its imagery. Spotify becomes a way of organizing attention here.
Devastating Impact
The book opens almost like an anthropological observation. Pelly describes an audience that no longer seeks a song, an album, a world, but a ready-made atmosphere. “They just needed music – any music – to accompany their days.” The shift is immense: we are no longer listening, we are furnishing. Study playlist, dinner playlist, chill playlist, gentle sadness playlist. The artwork gradually ceases to be a meeting; it becomes a functional backdrop, tailored to mood, moment, output.
It is here that the book becomes frankly political. Pelly shows how Spotify populated certain playlists with cheaply made tracks, designed to “match” an atmosphere rather than an artistic vision. Internally, this program had a name: Perfect Fit Content. Official definition: “Customized music for a specific playlist/mood offering better margins.” Everything is there: a song is no longer primarily an aesthetic proposition, but content optimized to cost less, last longer, fill a stream. And for musicians replaced by these “perfectly suited” tracks, the effect, she writes, could be “devastating.”
Reducing Music to Vibes
What is most troubling is that this logic eventually produces a parallel culture. Spotify not only broadcasts music: the platform categorizes, segments, reformats, renames, and then sends it back to listeners under the guise of discovery. Pelly puts it sharply: “It is not the musical culture that playlists and AI DJ selections broadcast, it is Spotify’s culture.” That is to say, music reflected in the mirror of data, flattened into “vibes,” micro-genres, sound profiles, advertising identities. The platform no longer documents taste: it manufactures it, then sells it to the user in a personalized form.
What it does to artists, the book objectively shows. Firstly, an organized opacity: Spotify does not pay for “listening,” but through a pro rata share, remunerating rights holders (labels, distributors, aggregators) who then redistribute based on variable agreements. Result: even the symbolic figure of “0.35 centimes per stream” conceals a maze of unreadable mechanisms. However, Pelly writes, it had at least one merit: to make it clear “what streaming brings to most musicians, which is nothing or almost nothing.” This statement comes at a time when Adami indicates that 86% of artist-performers are worried about their future, while CNM documents, in its latest employment barometer, the persistent fragility of the music and live entertainment sector.
A Profitable Art Rather Than Singular
One would be wrong to think that the problem lies only with a few “fake artists” or the recent arrival of AI. The book instead shows a continuity: Spotify first sold “effortless listening,” then “intelligent” personalization, then playlists “made for you,” before pushing automation further with the AI-created playlist. In September 2025, Spotify claimed to have removed over 75 million spammy tracks in twelve months and promised new protections against deceptive AI. In other words: even the platform now recognizes the extent of the problem. But it continues, in the same breath, to defend a model where music is treated as a stock of fluid, undifferentiated content, available infinitely.
Ultimately, what Liz Pelly writes is not just a book about Spotify. It is a book about what art becomes when it is supposed to be profitable before being singular, recognizable before being risky, functional before being necessary. Deezer, with its January figures, has only made visible the next stage: after ghost artists, industrial tracks, mood playlists, and genres invented by interfaces, here comes a wave of synthetic tracks, fake streams, automated fraud. Streaming had promised an infinite library. It increasingly resembles a factory of atmospheres. And it is perhaps the strength of Pelly’s book to remind us, in the midst of this logistical chain of vibes, that a song is not just a sonic wallpaper but a form of work, memory, and world.
The Spotify Machine. The Commodification of Music in the Age of Streaming by Liz Pelly (Actes Sud), GBP 21.50. 384 pages. Available in bookstores on April 1, 2026.
