Active Listening

Jenn and Liz Pelly

Jenn Pelly, Liz Pelly (photo by Ebru Yildiz)

There’s a scene that was left on the cutting-room floor from my podcast series Ways of Hearing (2017), where I interviewed sisters Jenn and Liz Pelly together about their personal listening habits in the streets of New York. It was written for Episode 2, “Space,” and would have served as a transition between a scene with urban historian Jeremiah Moss, and one with architectural historian Emily Thompson. But my producers at Radiotopia told me the audio was confusing because they couldn’t tell the two Pellys’ voices apart. They’re twins, I explained. (I can’t even always tell Don from Phil Everly by voice alone.) And why these two young writers in particular, they asked. You’ll see soon, I said. (By the end of that year, Jenn had published a book on groundbreaking punk band The Raincoats in the popular 33 1/3 series. And Liz had published the first in a series of influential articles for the Baffler about music streaming.)

I lost the argument, but I was right that podcast producers would likely have no problem identifying the individual Pellys today - even if they might still confuse their voices on tape. This past year, Jenn wrote articles for NPR, the New York Times, Vulture, the Guardian, i-D, Pitchfork, and Hearing Things, as well as extensive liner notes for two box sets from the Numero Group. Meanwhile Liz completed her first book, a blockbuster exposé called Mood Machine: the Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. An excerpt is currently on the cover of Harper’s.

Here’s the script for the deleted scene, and an audio file with some rough cuts that had been prepared for it:

ACT: Jenn Pelly: Often I take my headphones off on the subway and it's startling how quiet it is… You don't think of being in the subway and it's so quiet you could hear a pin drop if not for the rattling of the train itself. But I feel like when I look around on the subway, usually in the morning everyone has headphones on.

That’s Jenn Pelly. Jenn is an editor at the music website Pitchfork – which is now part of the Condé Nast publishing empire, headquartered at the rebuilt World Trade Center.

Liz Pelly: I don't really have a long commute anywhere — it's a 15-minute walk here or there. I don't listen to music while I'm walking. The headphone jack on my phone doesn't work.

And that’s Liz Pelly. Liz edits a zine called The Media, and works at a DIY venue in Bushwick called Silent Barn.

Oh, and they’re identical twins.

Jenn: OK do you want to go first, you’re older.
Liz: Sure, I'm Liz Pelly.
Jenn: You have to say more than that!
Liz: No you wanted to say who we are, and then where we are. I’m not going to say I'm Liz Pelly and I'm at our apartment and then you’re like I’m Jenn Pelly and I'm also at our apartment… Let's just start over.
Jenn: OK I’m Jenn Pelly and this is my sister Liz Pelly and we’re at our apartment in East Williamsburg where I’ve lived for the past four years.

Liz and Jenn are nothing like the people Jeremiah Moss says don’t actually want to be in New York. They started coming to the city as teens in order to escape the suburbs. And they never looked back.

Jenn: After 9/11 a lot of people in the suburbs wouldn’t let their kids go to the city and our parents always gave us basically free rein and we were allowed to get on the train and do whatever we wanted… We were very eager to not be in the suburbs. I never got a driver's license because I was like there's no way I'm staying here, kind of.
Liz: Jenn never got a driver's license because I drove her everywhere.

But Liz and Jenn’s different jobs make for two very different engagements with the space of the city.

Jenn and Liz: Definitely. 100 percent. Polar Opposite.
Jenn: I think it's interesting that we have similar interests and I mean we on paper are both writers but we have very different daily existences. It's hard to think of two more opposite environments than the Freedom Tower and Silent Barn.
Liz: Yeah it's pretty nuts.

And those opposite environments extend to sound. Here’s Liz explaining why she isn’t bothering to fix her headphone jack:

Liz: I'm just thinking about how I've had a lot of these experiences over the years where my phone dies or you know my headphone jack breaks or something. And then when you're walking through the city you start picking up on all of the sounds that you're missing out on. There were so many things I wasn't hearing because I always had my headphones on when I was walking around the city.

And here’s Jenn, talking about her rush-hour commute to the Freedom Tower, at the heart of the hypergentrified city:

Jenn: Yeah I always wear headphones on the subway, and sometimes I can hold a book but then you have your coffee, so you need to be strategic about it if you don't want to feel like you wasted an hour of your day - especially as I'm most alert in the morning. There's absolutely no way to predict what your environment is going to be when you're on the subway. So I find that if I don't have some big headphones to kind of focus myself, it's just kind of a toss-up what will actually happen.

Liz and Jenn Pelly aren’t people who want to disconnect from the life of the city. On the contrary, Liz and Jenn are busy making the most of New York. And they are doing what they can to stay there - Liz calls it hyper-employment, analogous to Jeremiah’s hypergentrification.

The privatizing of public space that Jeremiah Moss rails against – like the redesign of Astor Place into a “pedestrian plaza” – is supposed to make the city more comfortable, more “livable.”

But the type of development that represents – the glass towers, the chainstores, the spiraling rents – has an opposite effect on people who have to rely on the last remaining truly public spaces, like the subway, to live and work in New York.

It’s an irony that the tools people are using to make that public space more bearable – headphones, and digital audio – are also privatizing. Everyone on the subway at rush hour today is listening to something different, something they’ve tailored for themselves.

Each is in their own headspace.

The privatization of space I wanted to emphasize with this scene has only become more extreme since that interview was recorded in the summer of 2017. Tellingly, the DIY venue where Liz was then working has been lost to high real estate prices, and the version of Pitchfork where Jenn worked as an editor has been lost to corporate consolidation. Yet both Pellys have persevered, writing about music as a public good and with a seriousness and purpose that has only deepened with time.

Liz Pelly’s new book Mood Machine is a thoroughly researched, superbly written takedown of Spotify’s privatization of audio space. The technology of streaming “was going to ‘level the playing field’ for artists, Spotify obsessively promised,” writes Liz. “What we actually got, though, were playlists heavily dominated by major label acts, endless feeds of neo-Muzak loaded with ghost artists – anonymous, stock music commissioned at a discount – and a series of pay-to-play schemes.” Mood Machine dissects each of these moves by Spotify, aided by “the major label oligopoly of Universal, Sony, and Warner,” laying bare the anti-musical motivations of its founders and investors.

“The story of Spotify… is the story of the twenty-first century’s overeager and opportunistic tech solutionists, of billionaires and their overhyped machines, looking around for problems to solve, arrogantly disregarding the social problems left in their wake. It’s a story of listeners being sold music more as a utility than an art form, and musicians starting to see themselves more as content creators than artists. It is a story of precarity, hyper-commercialization, individualism, and all of the above being obfuscated under the notion of ‘vibes.’ And it’s the story of how those problems then played out over the span of many years, as music became personalized, playlisted, autoplayed, and algorithmic.”

And that’s just the intro. Read the book cover to cover, and you come away with facts and statements from insiders that should make you never want to open the app again, regardless of its “convenience.” Liz has a particular knack for letting Spotify executives hang themselves with their own rope. “The benchmark we set for ourselves wasn’t existing music services,” says Spotify employee #1, CTO Andreas Ehn. “It was the file-sharing services. Two music start-ups came out of Stockholm, Sweden. Spotify and the Pirate Bay. That’s what we saw as our competition. And it wasn’t because we were out to kill piracy. We didn’t mind piracy particularly.”

“When I started Spotify,” adds co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek, “I didn’t actually know that I needed licenses from record labels.”

And this from Spotify executive Jim Anderson, in response to a musician’s question at an industry conference in 2019: “The problem was to distribute music. Not to give you money, okay?”

For the record, the founders of Pirate Bay have all since served time in Swedish prison.

I’ve been well aware of Spotify’s dismissive treatment of musicians, our labor and our intellectual property, and am actively engaged in campaigns to combat that. But what I learned from Mood Machine is how dismissive Spotify has been of their listeners as well. Liz Pelly gained access to some of Spotify’s internal communications, and documents the company’s deliberate manipulation of audience away from music and toward “lean-back” listening. “It all started to feel Orwellian,” one ex-employee recounts. “The vast majority of music listeners, they’re not really interested in listening to music per se. They just need a soundtrack to a moment in their day. I think Daniel Ek was the first person to really exploit that. I honestly think that the core of the company’s success was recognizing that they’re not selling music. They’re not providing music. They’re filling people’s time. And he said at a company meeting, I remember he was like, ‘Apple Music, Amazon, these aren’t our competitors. Our only competitor is silence.’”

Spotify plays on a fear of piracy and a fear of silence – the first to sell itself to the music industry, the second to consumers. The net result, as Liz Pelly effectively argues, is what one indie rock label owner describes to her as “emotional wallpaper.” “It’s not sustainable to put out challenging records,” explains another label head, Darius Van Arman of Jagjaguwar and the Secretly Group. “To be sustainable, you have to put out records that are going to get repeat listens in coffee shops… that are going to be playlist friendly and easy on the ears.” Mood Machine is above all an indictment of how much Spotify has done to debase our musical environment. The vast amounts of data they collect, and the algorithms they develop using that data, are not used to benefit connections between artists and listeners. As Liz writes,

“There are a lot of assumptions about the neutrality of technology baked into the idea that the patterns and data gleaned from such a system would provide an honest look at the world of music listening. In the streaming environment, personalization algorithms were employed to retain customers more than anything else. And when the mode of listening (or hearing) is so deeply shaped by economic incentives, what can you actually get from the data? In the end, it’s not data about listening to music, it’s data about listening to Spotify.”

The listening that Spotify discourages – active listening that is unafraid of silence, that doesn’t mind a broken headphone jack now and then, that removes headphones on the subway just to hear how surprisingly quiet it is - perhaps also matches the kinds of music that Spotify discourages. As Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) says to Liz Pelly, “If your art practice is so ingrained in the brutal reality that Spotify has outlined for all of us, then what is the music that you’re not making? What does the music you’re not making sound like?”

Jenn Pelly in her journalistic career has I believe been documenting precisely the kind of music Lopatin is alluding to, music outside the “brutal reality that Spotify has outlined.” In her book on the Raincoats, Jenn embedded that band in intellectual history as well as a musical one, explaining their connections to feminism, avant-garde art, and politics. None of these links might lead to a popular playlist on a streaming platform, but they can take a music fan on a wild ride that could change their thinking forever. And Jenn makes clear that even a band as unique as the Raincoats - no one else really sounds like them - is part of a continuum in music through a commonality of purpose. That is the kind of variable which no algorithm can calculate.

In Jenn Pelly’s 2024 profile of Alynda Segarra (Hurray for the Riff Raff), she uses the music writer’s tool of biographical detail not to sensationalize but to deepen our understanding of Segarra’s story and allow us to find connections with it. She gives Segarra room to be individual - as unique as the Raincoats - yet through that individuality speak to issues of social concern. Personally, I came away from that article feeling more connected to Segarra’s story than I ever thought I could be, given my difference in age and personal history. Yet the Hurray for the Riff Raff record was one of my favorites last year, and the article helped me understand why I responded to it so emotionally.

Another work by Jenn Pelly in 2024 - the liner notes for a box set of Margo Guryan's recordings - was, by contrast, directly connected to my own history: Margo was a friend of my parents, and even babysat for me when I was small. Jenn interviewed my mother as part of her research, which was so thorough that when my mother saw the finished liner notes she wrote me, “She found out more about Margo than I knew from all those years of friendship.” (My mother also wrote, “She is so intelligent and a gifted writer… she can write my biography any time!”)

Music criticism in the manner that Jenn Pelly practices it — paying close attention to recorded sounds and to the artists that create them — is antithetical to streaming’s demands on the listener. A good music writer can establish relationships with their readers that enhance connections between artist and audience. It is a sharing of audio information in a public space, the opposite of Spotify’s privatization for profit. And Jenn clearly makes the musicians she interviews feel heard as individuals - again, the opposite of the alienating manner with which streaming treats “content.” You can see this in the way that artists open up to her, and in the way she handles their stories. (I know my mother wouldn’t let just anyone tell hers.)

In the conclusion to Mood Machine, Liz Pelly writes about a question she is asked often (as am I). “Everyone wants an answer: What’s the ethical alternative to Spotify?” It’s not simply switching to another platform, she says.

“On a collective level, we have to be active participants in the cultural economies we want to see flourish; we have to validate the culture we want to see in the world. The corporate culture industry entrenches its power not just through controlling the marketplace but also by controlling the popular imagination, by convincing us that there are no alternatives. The alternatives are growing all around us, though.”

Jenn and Liz Pelly are working to activate our listening, alerting us to sounds outside the mainstream. You might just have to take your headphones off to hear them.

Listening to: Davey Graham, The Complete Guitarist

Cooking: Hojicha