Spotify selves
"The persistence of such gaps [between an individual and their data profile] has driven two important trends in the market for consumer attention and information, particularly as these related to music and music streaming. One concerns efforts undertaken by marketers, data brokers, and commercial media outlets to disaggregate users, transforming them into what Deleuzians would refer to as a collection of dividuals: the various sub- or pre-individual elements out of which individuals are assembled (affects, behaviors, drives, habits, physiological responses, and so on).
Such an understanding of the self as a multiple informs much work in music recommendation systems. For instance, a common approach to the problem of how to automatically curate playlists sensitive to changes in listenersâ context is to subdivide a single user profile into a number of discrete profiles, differentiated according to situational factors such as time of day, ambient temperature, social setting, or geographic location. In the words of one Spotify employee: 'We believe that itâs important to recognize that a single listener is usually many listeners, and a personâs preference will vary by the type of music, by their current activity, by the time of day, and so on.' "
From Eric Drott's "Music as a Technology of Surveillance" (2018), bold added. (The whole paper is very much worth reading.)
An example of how media consumption both fragments and consolidates the self: It breaks apart one unity (the self that contains different moods and variegated tastes and experiences but sustains a continuity of identity through it all) but constitutes another (the self that is wholly identical with what it consumes, or whatever that product is supposed to represent).
That version of the self can know authenticity as the experience of the right song at the right time, but it comes at the expense of the self's richness and its temporal continuity. The individual "authentic" moments never add up to an authentic-feeling life.
Ultimately Spotify wants to turn the environmental factors into behavioral triggers â a certain time of day will require certain streamed content to feel "real" or feel right â to make you feel like "yourself."
That is to say, the incentives Spotify has to make listeners into attractive targets for advertisers also makes Spotify work hard to eradicate listeners' tastes as they might have manifested before (as a disposition, as curiosity, as a kind of flexibility that can adapt to what it hears, etc.) and replace that with a listeners' desire to know themselves.
There is no "desire for music" (or anything else) that pre-exists and waits for an opportunity to be fulfilled (no ontology of taste, only emergent affect); the desire has to be constructed around what becomes available to you. When we are always having media directed at us, the efforts to construct our desires become more strenuous and contradictory. Amid these competing claims, we may want music to reign supreme, be able to dictate our true being, but in the realm of streaming (in the realm of surveilled consumption), all it can do is suggest more correlations, more momentary selves; the effectiveness of music is then in how it makes us want to hear another song, another chance at building up our being into a specific somebody.
Much as TikTok's algorithm, through the content it selects, begins to posit a self for user to become and relate to or consume as a fantasy about who they seem to be, so would Spotify's recommendation system. In other words, recommendation systems in general don't "recommend" so much as try to reformat the self so that it can power the underlying algorithms and produce structured data for ad-targeting.
The recommendation systems can't be used as mode of identity play or of structuring the self as exploratory or fluid or provisional, or "life as a journey" or anything open-ended. They reductively make every action purely functional â every listening experience is fed back into future experiences as being more of the same, so that one's listening experience is always already nostalgic â always just a repetition of an experience you already had that has already been permanently classified as making you more or less likely to listen to some ad or other.
@electra-regia get off that shit
