What Filmmakers Can Learn from Musicians

Lessons from Liz Pelly's righteous investigative critique of Spotify

Liz Pelly’s new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, is a scathing indictment of Spotify and its corrosive influence on the music industry (which has been rooted in exploitation since its inception). As I read it, I was continually struck by the parallels between the music world and the film world.

The VC-backed streaming gold-rush disrupted the music economy before it disrupted the film economy, but it has ultimately transformed/wrecked both in equal measure. The shady moves being made by music execs and music platform CEOs this year are the tricks film execs and movie platform CEOs will try to pull next year.

We filmmakers can study the music industry to learn and prepare for what might be coming next. And from musicians who are building alternative distribution and marketing models — discovering new ways to connect with audiences — we can find inspiration to better imagine what alternative film ecosystems might look like.

Netflix is the Spotify of movies, and Spotify the Netflix of music. Both companies hold over 20% global market share and are trendsetters in their industries.¹ There are other places to stream movies and music, but none with equivalent reach or subscriber bases. Netflix and Spotify dominate and influence the direction of their respective marketplaces.

If it is not abundantly clear: Netflix and Spotify do not care about art or artists in any meaningful way. They care solely about one thing: the bottom line. They would both be exploitative shoe or candle companies if that was the more lucrative play. I guess there is something particularly profitable in taking advantage of artists, and I bet artists (sadly) are particularly easy to exploit.

Is culture something to engage with, or something that plays in the background?

Spotify believes that music should be half-listened to while doing something else. “Apple Music, Amazon, these aren’t our competitors,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek once said in a meeting. “Our only competitor is silence.”² Spotify is not designed for discovery or active engagement but so you never turn it off.

“We really want to soundtrack every moment of your life,” Daniel Ek said in 2016. “So what excites us [is] when we are able to do that in moments which may seem counterintuitive at first. Take sleep as an example. Millions of people every day (or night!) now go to sleep listening to Spotify. This is a behavior that is brand new for a huge chunk of that same audience. So as we think about Spotify in the future, it’s really all about bringing music (and other media) to more moments in your life.”³

Netflix has a similar desire to keep their users half-watching at all times. Will Tavlin discussed this in his deep-dive investigative critique of Netflix. “Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is ‘have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.’”⁴

“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”⁵

Maybe these big players in the attention economy don’t care or want the viewer’s total attention but instead are most interested in the passive half-attention of people who are distracted by other things. In other words: companies and products like Spotify and Netflix value and prioritize uncritical consumers over critical ones.

“How did it come to this? That might be a question that leaves musicians and devotees up at night, but Spotify’s questions were different: Why were they paying full-price royalties if users were only half-listening? So its music programming execs tried something new: they developed a scheme to lower royalty costs by populating the most-followed mood playlists with low-budget filler tracks; stock music from background music studios to fit certain moods and genres, licensed by Spotify under what former employees and a review of internal records confirmed were special, cheaper deal terms… Internally, the program had a name: perfect fit content, or PFC. Spotify’s official definition for this material was ‘music commissioned to fit a certain playlist/mood with improved margins.’”⁶

We can recognize similar trends in the film industry. What is all the “casual viewing” content commissioned and released by Netflix if not PFC designed to cheaply maximize algorithmic efficiency and keep people passively half-engaged at all times?

Things will only get worse with the proliferation of AI models that are capable of generating gross but approximate cultural regurgitations. Spotify is currently flooded with music generated by AI and the company’s leadership is embracing it. “If creators are using these technologies — where they are creating music in a legal way that we reimburse and people listen to them — and are successful,” said Spotify’s Chief Product and Technology Officer Gustav Söderström, “we should let people listen to them.”⁷

We are cascading towards a moment — maybe we are already there — when all popular culture will look and sound the same. “Corporations didn’t intend to make the culture stagnant and boring,” wrote

Ted Gioia

. “All they really want is to impose standardization and predictability—because it’s more profitable.”⁸

Unique perspectives and viewpoints will continue to be lost in favor of safe and homogenous voices. Work that challenges the status quo will be even harder to produce, release and discover. Creating high-risk work was always risky, but there used to be alternative systems in place beyond the mainstream to make it feasible.

So what can we do about it?

We know that the film industry, like the music industry, will pay artists as little as possible both for labor and in royalties. Unions are an important counter to that (as we saw recently with the WGA and SAG strikes). We know that both industries will rely on ghost artists and AI slop whenever possible and that this usage will become exponentially more frequent. And we know that both industries are heavily invested in using their algorithms and user data to prioritize and push PFC designed for mindless, addictive consumption.

The first thing to remember is there is actually a huge number of people who actively want to pay for and engage with thought-provoking movies and music and are being underserved by the current system (see: Keri Putnam’s essential survey of the American independent film landscape). Just because we are fed slop does not mean it is what everybody wants. It is up to independent musicians and filmmakers to develop and cultivate direct relationships with audiences who will dig and support their work. I find tremendous optimism in the fact that the studios and streamers are delusional and live in the past and aren’t actually interested in the same audience I am. There’s a gap in the markets — not all audiences are currently being given what they want — that will be filled by innovative filmmakers who have made intelligent films (at least I hope so).

A lot of filmmakers nowadays, when discussing alternative distribution strategies for their films, use the term “road show” and propose some version of “touring the movie like a band tours”. The quintessential case study for the potential upside of this model is Hundreds of Beavers, a silent black-and-white slapstick comedy which started its theatrical run as a vaudevillian road show and eventually made over a million dollars (and counting) at the box office. At the same time, I am often reminded what Santigold said on Instagram when she cancelled her 2022 tour:

“As a touring musician, I don’t think anyone anticipated the new reality that awaited us,” she wrote. “After sitting idle for the past couple years, [musicians] rushed back out immediately when it was deemed safe to do shows. We were met with the height of inflation, many of our tried-and-true venues unavailable due to a flooded market of artists trying to book shows in the same cities, and positive [Covid] test results constantly halting schedules, with devastating financial consequences. All of that, on top of the already-tapped mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional resources of just having made it through the past few years. Some of us are finding ourselves simply unable to make it work.”⁹

Touring isn’t actually a sustainable model for many musicians and therefore might not be a sustainable model for most filmmakers (cases like Hundreds of Beavers notwithstanding). Having said that, would it be easier for a few movies to go on the road together? What about partnering with local filmmakers to screen shorts before the feature presentation, or supporting local artists to mount an accompanying exhibit? Why on earth are there no merch tables at film screenings? What about movies touring with bands or related acts? Or working with local partners to eventize the screenings? How about adapting scenes of your film for one-off live theatrical events? What about smaller tours that focus on a state or region (like Hundreds of Beavers focusing first on the midwest)? A big part of touring is hanging out with fans before and after the show. Musicians are figuring out how to utilize platforms like Patreon and Substack to maintain and strengthen these direct connections with true fans while supplementing their income in meaningful ways and maybe even gaining more control over their work. How can filmmakers create opportunities to cultivate direct relationships with their fans beyond hitting the road with their film? Could Substack become a place not just to release essays about film but to release films themselves?

Chance Operations

and

The Hudson Film Club

are already exploring the possibilities.

The influence of Spotify and Netflix will grow, and they will continue to homogenize everything they touch, and their respective industries will follow suit. To fight back, musicians have begun working collectively to build artist-owned streaming and distribution platforms. There is something about the narrative film world that is specifically and dangerously individualistic — says the guy with the AMAUTEUR newsletter — and combatting this mentality with a collective approach is essential for progress. It’s already happening in the doc space; fiction filmmakers need to get on it!

As Liz Pelly writes at the end of Mood Machine, “We’re not having a serious conversation about the future of music unless we’re talking about public funding, cooperatives, unions, and international solidarity — and unless we realize that the fight for a more liberated and de-commodified cultural sphere is part of the broader struggle for a better world.”¹⁰ She concludes, “we can’t just think about changing music, or changing music technology. That’s not enough. We need to think about the world we want to live in, and where music fits into that vision.”

Film and music are crucial vehicles for the transmission and progression of knowledge and ideas. A life of half-watched movies and half-heard music is a half-lived life. Yet we cannot discuss the future of culture without also discussing the future of society, and we cannot attempt to fix one without attempting to fix the other.

Art is a tool in service of life, not the other way around. <3

AMAUTEUR is a production & distribution newslabel that makes, releases & writes about indie and nonDe (non-dependent) movies & music. Want to show your support? Send a few bucks via Tip Jar or Venmo. For contributions of $5 or more, share your email address in the comments (or DM me) and I’ll send you a private link to watch my first feature, Good Funk, on Vimeo or YouTube. Rock on!

1. Netflix has around 23% of the global subscriber market; Spotify’s global market share is closer to 31%. Netflix has a market cap of $399 billion; Spotify’s market cap is $111 billion.

2. Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria Books, 2025, p. 38)

3. Ibid (p. 36)

4. Will Tavlin, “Casual Viewing: Why Netflix looks like that,” n+1, Winter, 2025, https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/

5. Ibid

6. Pelly, Mood Machine (p. 58)

7. Emma Wilkes, “Spotify Co-President says AI-generated music is welcome on the platform – but it won’t generate music itself,” MusicTech, November 20, 2024, https://musictech.com/news/industry/spotify-will-host-ai-generated-music/

8.

Ted Gioia

, “The World Was Flat. Now It’s Flattened,” The Honest Broker, March 5, 2025, https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-world-was-flat-now-its-flattened

9. Santigold, Instagram post, September 22, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/Ci_OuWzJ-_M/?hl=en&img_index=1

10. Pelly, Mood Machine (p. 235)