Book Club | Mood Machine by Liz Pelly | Thurs, 21 May | Method Kala Ghoda

Venue: Method Kala Ghoda

Date: Thursday, 21st May

Time: 7 PM 

What Are You Actually Listening To?

It's open on your phone right now isn’t it? Don't lie. Some of you opened it this morning maybe before you were fully conscious. And it proceeded to give you exactly what you asked for without you asking for anything. That right there is the Spotify trick and what Liz Pelly spent years documenting, nailing with precision things that should ought to make every subscriber at least a bit uncomfortable. Mood Machine is a text about what happens to music when it gets processed through a system that has little interest in what it means. But before that, accountability hour:

Spotify didn’t do this alone. You did this too. The listener who decided that paying for music was a kind of tyranny, and that friction in the listening experience was a design flaw to be optimised away.

Lucky for us, FRICTION is a physical record store catering to the exact demographic Pelly is addressing: the ones who still possess the muscle memory of what music felt like when it cost you something. So let's not do the comfortable thing and aim all of this at a platform. Let's aim some of it at ourselves, at the scene that also uses Spotify to promote its nights and its releases and its artists. Let's see where a bit of friction takes us...