‘The End’ by The Doors was recorded in late 1966.
If a time machine were available, and an acetate smuggled from the Los Angeles recording studio to the surrounding households the year before, its effect would have been staggering.
‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ by The Beatles was released only a year after ‘Help!’ and ‘I’m Down’, still innovative but more conventional. With Revolver’s final track, many of the band’s teenage fans struggled to conceive what they were listening to. It wasn’t music as they had ever heard before. It was a maelstrom of seagull noises, pounding and insistent drums, and various lyrics about the Void. The psychedelic was not yet in the popular lexicon.
Now imagine a song from 2026 being played to an audience in 2025. Would we be at all surprised? Clearly not. What if we played a song from 2025 to an audience in 2001? What about then? The main surprise would have been how unsurprising it sounds.
In around the year 2000, commentators have noted, major breakthroughs simply seem to have disappeared. Every previous decade brought the new, ruthless in subverting the old guard: The Beatles, Krautrock, David Bowie, punk, New Wave, rave, jungle, ambient, grunge, metal. The last great major rock album, Is This It? (2001) by The Strokes isn’t entirely reducible to post-punk, but it is fairly close. Its effect would not have been dizzying and confusing to audiences thirty years before, as say, Aphex Twin may have been to listeners in the 1960s, or Jimi Hendrix on the gramophones of the 1930s. Still less innovative was The Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006), released in the slipstream carved by The Strokes’ debut.
The Arctic Monkeys’ first album was so similar to the post-punk of critic Mark Fisher’s youth that he believed it had come from the 1980s. Fisher popularised a term to describe the stagnation in culture: “the slow cancellation of the future”, first coined by the communist thinker Franco Berardi. Following Frederic Jameson, Fisher believed that various material forces, including the internet and constant digital stimulation, had rendered the present moment incapable of expression.
The ‘sound’ of the 2020s feels far more ephemeral and indistinct than those of previous decades.
I want to take these intuitions seriously while focusing on a different end: the apparatus and machinery of Spotify, which favours the old over the new and, increasingly, the artificial over the real.
Psychedelia is a sharp place to watch this unfold. Psychedelia is treated as a special and mystical genre. Psychedelic drugs are credited with spurring creativity, which is subject to increasing scientific research. Psychedelia has also been an historic wellspring for many genres, including hard rock and metal, funk, soul and hip-hop: the very innovative burst that has now apparently stalled. But psych rock has undergone its own putative revival. Since 2007, a flurry of festivals and scores of bands, especially from Australia, have become popular: Tame Impala, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, MGMT, Mac DeMarco, Mild High Club, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, Kikagaku Moyo, Melody’s Echo Chamber, Connan Mockasin, and many others.
The main change since 2000 has been in the manner of distribution more than the specific production of musical content. Notwithstanding their financial problems, one may still expect that record labels would invest in their long-term future through finding new artists. This is no longer the case in a meaningful way. By rendering all of history’s music available at one instant, old music benefits from a ‘first-mover’ advantage and the economies of scale wrought by mass media. Old music is new music’s direct competitor, and the former is winning. Tracks older than eighteen months make up more than 70 per cent of the US music market.
In this sense, YouTube and Spotify appear like carnival mirrors of our hopes for an abundant library of music.
Mind Music
Psychedelic music may be distinguished from other genres by its claim to simulate and produce a mind-altering effect. While folk, soul, gospel, and other genres are associated with common moods and themes, their character and intent are not defined by a specific mental effect. We may review psychedelia in a long history of psychoactive sound. Music has long accompanied ecstatic rituals.
In 1921, Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, released Mood Music, a guide to over one hundred records said to reliably occasion desired states of mind in their listeners. He called these experiences ‘re-creations’. In the armaments factories of the Second World War, the BBC would broadcast “Music While You Work” to raise morale and output. Defence plants were soon wired for sound to feed muzak into assembly lines, inducing a sort of trance among workers: a psychomusical lubrication assisted by Taylorist management techniques. Huxley imagined in Brave New World (1932) that music and the arts would be reduced to their base impulsive effect in the form of “feelies”, which could be triggered on command.
Pelly’s Mood Machine follows this Ariadnean thread to the modern day – to Spotify’s most profitable playlists. So-called ‘passive listening’ to assist with work is readily promoted in playlists like ‘Chill Vibes’, ‘Chillhop’, ‘Lo-Fi Beats’, ‘Musical Therapy’ and ‘Study’. These playlists were promoted during the COVID pandemic, which CEO Daniel Elk rightly diagnosed as a growth moment for a “mindfulness revolution”. A former Spotify editor described the platform’s essential function as “reduc[ing] friction and cognitive work”; the playlist must proceed in a machine-like manner, well-suited to the spirit of cognitive capitalism, which in Bill Gates’ memorable phrase “proceeds at the speed of thought”.
What we historically deem ‘psychedelia’ may be viewed as a rather contingent techno-cultural artefact of mid-20th-century capitalism. And one distinct effect of psychedelic drugs is their liability to suggestion: what was once contingent and specific becomes, through repeat loops of influence and performance, a sort of Platonic figure, that of ‘psychedelia’, which would have been very different in another place and time. In American Trip (2021), Ido Hartogsohn charts how the very term ‘psychedelic’ is itself an artefact, one of post-analytic psychiatry, which encodes its own loops of expectancy on prospective users, making the drug an explosive device for a ‘mind’ metaphorised by psychological disciplines.
Retromaniacal AI
What may also be distinctive about the modern day is the accelerated nature of its retro culture. What Simon Reynolds has called ‘retromania’ is rather different: it is the obsessive and detailed catalogue of the recent past. ‘Legacy’ acts dominate festival line-ups; third-rate and obscure records from decades before are documented, remastered, hyped, and blogged; deceased artists beloved by one’s parents are discussed with the contemporaneity formerly bestowed on young and vibrant bands.
Psychedelia holds an important place within retromanic culture. The 1960s were the first decade documented en masse with television. The swell of Baby Boomers and adolescents, and their later takeover of major cultural networks, ensured the prestige of 1960s recordings. Psychedelia exists in constant dialogue with its own recent past. The central motif of the 1960s, of course, is the hippie, with its costume of moccasins, cowboy jackets, paisley, buttons and badges, and long hair. To dress as a hippie today, as many psychedelic bands do, is to perform as a living index of a certain era. Many psychedelic bands sound alike or wear their influences on their sleeves. Sometimes, the bands may sound so standardised that they appear like “AI psychedelic bands”.
As musical styles have become more routinised, it is not surprising that artificial intelligence programmes have become effective producers and simulators.
A large ecosystem of AI-generated psychedelic music is now hosted on YouTube. There are 1.63 million AI covers on YouTube. Deezer estimates that one-third of its daily uploads are AI, and almost no one can tell the difference from a human creation. Depending on one’s algorithm, around half of their search results on YouTube for “psychedelic rock” or “acid rock” may now be fictitious AI albums and bands. In a kind of performance art, channels advertise “lost” records from the original rock era, with varying levels of transparency about the album’s provenance. Some commenters believe that these records are genuine, and may be driven to purchase digital or CD copies and other merchandise from the websites of “labels”. Research has found that the aged are less able to distinguish counterfeit from genuine content, especially when it relates to musical and nostalgic themes that potentiate their intuitive reasoning.
The channel and label SynForge, whose band “The Fossils” has scored over half a million views on YouTube, reports combining AI tools with his own lyrical and musical compositions, using technology as a collaborator and sounding board. They agree that psychedelic music, which aims to express and manifest the human mind, bears a certain tension with AI tools that risk substituting the imagination. “There's a lot of AI-generated music being mass-produced out there with minimal effort, and I try to do the opposite, to make sure the final product feels as human as possible, even though AI is part of the process”, the owner, whose name was not shared, said to Psychedelics.Community. “Not everything I make is great, but I'm learning and improving with every project.”
"My dad used to play the Fossils in our '78 Buick on his 8 track... brings back memories," one commenter wrote. A 67-year-old fan declared, "I just discovered this new band Fossils 1969 a few days ago... and am more impressed & moved by their music than by any other band in a long while."
"Saw her live in 63 at Madison Square garden", another wrote, and "i saw her in 44mm with some other Fossiles in a burn out car," to more psychedelic recollections like "So very stoned! I'm 74 now in this body. I remember," and "I saw this band live on the dark side of the moon back in the late 60s when I was on an acid trip." One user shared how their elderly mother smiled on hearing The Fossils and said, "Son thank you, me and your daddy would jam to this on our way to San Francisco in our 1963 VW Bus." Another recalled their late friend Helmut had bought one of the few copies of Hologram Heart by The Purple Door, an AI band. "I'm sure Helmut is smiling from heaven as he sees me listening to it!!"
VibeAIRecords’ owner, Romek, agreed with the psychedelic rock subreddit’s policy of banning AI content. “The model learned what a guitar is by absorbing an enormous amount of music, and then it synthesizes the idea of a guitar from scratch. It’s not playing a recording of anything. It’s generating it from scratch. That is trippy to me,” said Romek. “Genres are basically groups of copycat bands… What always stands above the sea of copies are the originals.”
Before the arrival of AI and “fake artists”, we had Spotify’s Perfect Fit Content (PFC) programme. PFC tracks are often produced by musicians under precarious conditions, exchanging upfront payment for copyrights with production companies like Firefly Entertainment and Epidemic Sound. The songs are seeded into Spotify playlists often under an array of fictional personas, with headshots, biographies, and fake names. PFC has been historically common on highly profitable playlists like ‘Ambient Relaxation’, ‘Deep Sleep’ and ‘Deep Focus’, whose listeners are mostly engaged in other tasks and less likely to skip tracks. PFC tracks have more favourable royalty structures for Spotify, which raises their takeaway revenue. The journalist Liz Pelley, in her book The Mood Machine, reports in interviews with former Spotify staff that playlist editors who expressed concerns about PFC – replacing human musicians and misleading listeners – were gradually replaced by those focused more solely on the bottom line.
Several psychedelic playlists created by users and companies – albeit not Spotify, whose playlists can be golden tickets for artists – host PFC tracks. A playlist designed to soundtrack a ketamine “healing session”, assembled by an at-home ketamine provider known as BetterU, posts a 29 per cent PFC rate. Four of the tracks were released by Firefly Entertainment under aliases like Arya Shae, delo cloonz and Cha Se-Eun, who boast more than 20 million streams on the platform.
Why does this matter? Though some creators benefit from PFC production work, a general concern remains around the replacement of authentic creators. The ethical stakes of false personas are also raised in the case of psychedelic therapy. Music has been called the “hidden therapist”, exerting profound influence on the inner journeys taken by patients. As one study found:
“Analyses of the interviews revealed that the music had both “welcome” and “unwelcome” influences on patients’ subjective experiences. Welcome influences included the evocation of personally meaningful and therapeutically useful emotion and mental imagery, a sense of guidance, openness, and the promotion of calm and a sense of safety. Conversely, unwelcome influences included the evocation of unpleasant emotion and imagery, a sense of being misguided and resistance. Correlation analyses showed that patients’ experience of the music was associated with the occurrence of “mystical experiences” and “insightfulness.” Crucially, the nature of the music experience was significantly predictive of reductions in depression 1 week after psilocybin, whereas general drug intensity was not.”
Because of these powerful effects, patients may form powerful parasocial bonds, for instance, with a particular creator, only to learn that ‘Arya Shae’ does not exist. The purity of their experience may be retrospectively polluted if they learn of its musical artifice.
As we’ve seen, it would be more concerning if headline psychedelic playlists made by Spotify hosted PFC tracks. ‘Neo-Psychedelic Rock’, ‘Modern Psychedelia’, ‘planet rave’ and ‘Acid House’ all contain authentic artists. These playlists remain significant, however, for another reason: their outsized role in breaking artists. The dominance of playlists is historically dissonant with psychedelic recordings, whose standard-bearer has been the long-playing record, or album. Sgt. Pepper’s (1967) by The Beatles and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966) conceived the album as a self-contained ‘journey’ for listeners, a trip into a complete world. The first ten seconds are crucial for preventing listener skips, which truncates the psychedelic preference for longer and more atmospheric sounds. Consider a song like ‘Time’ by Pink Floyd, which opens with the infamous clanging of clock chimes. Over a third of the song’s near-seven-minute length will pass before the singing starts. This is unthinkable with a commercial release today, notwithstanding the enormous chart success of Dark Side of the Moon (1973) at the time.
The other issue with playlist culture is its economic unfairness. Major labels trade a portion of their standard royalty cuts to gain algorithmic boosts for their roster. The three major labels, Universal, Warner, and Sony Music, own 70 per cent of the music market and hold nearly a fifth of Spotify’s shares. What they lose in immediate royalties they gain, therefore, in appreciating the equity value of the company. Indeed, Mark Fisher believed that the slowdown in music was basically material. Various options enabled artists and creatives to exist within the “critical distance” from market pressures that stirred creativity and gave the runway for trial-and-error. Squatting, the dole, student grants, zero tuition fees, cheap housing, and even Margaret Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme – a government investment programme – subsidised dozens of innovative bands. The same cannot be said for today, not least with housing in creative centres like London and New York.
All the rot at Spotify led the world’s most prolific and innovative modern psychedelic band, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, to leave the platform in 2025, spurring headlines in major newspapers. The immediate trigger was Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s investment in an AI and military drone company known as Helsing. Soon after King Gizzard left, closely copied AI covers of their songs appeared in playlists that once featured the band.
Spotify catalogues its songs based on a series of indices assigned by machine learning algorithms. Songs are assigned moods on a 287-item palette; Natural Language Processing (NLP) describes songs as “chill”, “somber”, or “motivation”, to create the perfect frictionless playlist. To place the user in a dreamlike or oneirogenic state is a desired effect of psychedelic drugs.
The Real and the Fictional
One AI band with some success on Spotify is The Fossils from 1969, whose creator does not disclose the role of the technology in its conceit on Spotify and Apple Music but does on YouTube. The music is insipid and bears no discernible trace of the vintage it claims. Many commenters who lived through the 1960s claim the album is a masterwork.
Users are invited to select a ‘Spotify Radio’ playlist composed of similar songs to The Fossils. How Suno produced The Fossils becomes rather clear, since the songs border on the extremely similar, being made by humans who were never asked or recompensed for their work. We are not dealing with real evocations of history. Instead, the psychedelia of the Fossilsphere is a sludgy atmosphere of retro-ness, whose nature the AI programme had only traced to its terminal point: a “psychedelic” so reinforced that it lacks a real original. A paranoia descends, coupled with a kind of giddiness, that we have not merely killed God, but killed the human being: that species to whom we profess a certain abstracted essence and value, albeit one readily demoted when the bottom line demands it.
In the 1980s, a group called The Dukes of Stratosphear appeared. They were reportedly from two decades before, the ‘60s psychedelic heyday, and record collectors had somehow failed to excavate them. Really, the Dukes were the brainchild of Andy Partridge from the post-punk band XTC, who was reared on psychedelic records. Since the past was known only by names and images, and great and magical stories, discerning fact from fiction had become something more magical: what Marshall McLuhan called “the nihilism of the photograph”.
Groups like The Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band all portrayed an imaginary and romanticised past. Consider the cover of Sgt. Pepper: the pop art design has mere images of Carl Jung, Bob Dylan, Aleister Crowley, Stuart Sutcliffe, all equivalent and sharing one display, together with waxworks of The Beatles themselves before a funereal flower arrangement for the band. A logic has therefore long been afoot, of contraposing the real and the artificial, and seeing their interrelation, in the context of Western psychedelia: it is part and parcel of the postmodern zeitgeist in which we live. One cannot deny that a machine-generated band is rather psychedelic. And when its sound condenses the mean average of the ‘psychedelic’, what remains of the genre? Was it ever the transcendent quality we hoped it was?
The marketplace has always been a postmodern phenomenon. If people do not like artifice, and prefer not to stream The Fossils, the market will adapt, yet not for reasons of artifice or reality. Instead, it will concern the bottom line to which both are subdued. There is no truth or fiction in commodity culture except the extent to which they earn profit.
The streaming figures appear like tokens of the “cloud”, both heavenly and computerised. But all they stake are payouts from the stock of rents the platform charges, much like a feudal landowner. This relationship is concealed behind the friendly face of Spotify’s user interface. But the artifice may be traced more fundamentally to the market mechanism. The form of money, these ones and zeros recorded in royalty cheques and dividends for Spotify’s stockholders, is a virtual phenomenon. Money is a mental hologram akin to an AI. And much like an AI system gnawing on its own productions for training data, the money system chases itself about without considering the real usefulness for which its goods are made. Indeed, the more that the market favours cost-cutting technology over human time in making music, the more devalued it becomes, despite assuming more and more of what we encounter: a condition we would assume implies maximal value, much like the air we breathe and are surrounded by.
In fact, it might be the opposite.
Under a Marxist account, then, the boundaries of the real and fictional are always blurred under the profit system. Yet the human lurks underneath, devalued and with their work appropriated without ever asking for permission.