Developing an individual musical taste in the streaming era on platforms like Spotify is difficult, especially examined through the lens of essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In the Digital era, the standardization of music production and distribution is palpable. With a click, you have access to scores of artists, genres and personalized playlists.
As the culture industry promotes homogeneity and capitalistic principles, consumers are preselected into types. With Spotify, users are profiled by the types of music they listen to using an algorithm which then suggests similar music. It is questionable whether your listening habits are shaped solely by your listening patterns or by the interests of the labels behind the songs on the streaming platform.
User data is collected and sold to advertising agencies who make targeted ads. Listening habits are used to create a consumer profile and products according to these will be marketed to users. This leads you down a pipeline of your lifestyle being wholly designed by the culture industry’s interests, which according to Adorno and Horkheimer are mostly profit.
The theories espoused by Adorno and Horkheimer, are relevant to defining the value of “free” access to music. As music becomes commodified through these platforms, the Artists are affected financially, and our tastes are becoming narrower due to algorithms doing the work of preselecting music for us. We become “passive” consumers, letting ourselves be guided by the interests of the industry in our listening habits, which bleeds into the lifestyle we lead and the products we buy. The music loses its ephemeral aura, being available to be reproduced countless times. The listeners become less appreciative of it, using it as a background distraction to their material realities, rather than a phenomenon to be savored.
Nevertheless, the essay’s point of view and emphasis on consumers being passive is also one of its limits. Often, Spotify platform users are engaging in “free” digital labor, by curating playlists according to their tastes, sharing them, boosting the platforms of Artists and this work is largely unrecognized. Without the users actively engaging with the platform, the algorithm would not be able to suggest music accurately and engage users for a longer period on Spotify, which shows that the consumers are key players in furthering the success of the Spotify business model. Fans have even “hacked” the Spotify algorithm to push the release of their favorite Artists new song and increase their revenue.
Finally, we can ask ourselves who benefits from the commodification and standardization of music. As the catalogue of readily available music expands so does oversaturation, and it is difficult for emerging Artists to get noticed. As consumers this streamlined access to music for “free” is unprecedented, we are also being molded to a consumer profile, often in ways we are not even aware of. It is the advertising companies which gain access to our data that gain from this. This confirms Adorno and Horkheimer’s stance on the lack of genuineness in the Culture’s Industry’s interests and how it serves to distract us from material reality to seduce us to adhering to capitalist principles.
Bibliography
Adorno, Th. & Horkheimer, M. (2006). ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. iIn: Durham, M.G. & D. Kellner (2006), Media and Cultural Studies:Key Work, Malden, MA: Blackwell, [pp.41-72]
Eriksson, M. et al. (2019) ‘What Is the Value of Free?’, Spotify teardown : inside the black box of streaming music. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, pp. 149-152.
Full Stack Creative, (2022) The Spotify Ad Method That’s BLOWING UP My Music Fan Base. May 24 2022. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eI6NeLpJHw (Accessed: 23 October 2023).
Kasap (no date) ‘Commodification 2.0: How Does Spotify Provide Its Services for Free?’, The review of radical political economics., 53(1), pp. 157–172. Available at: https://doi.org/info:doi/.
Marasciulo, M. (2022) ‘How Anitta Megafans gamed Spotify to help create Brazil’s first global chart-topper’ Rest of World. 8 April. Available at: https://restofworld.org/2022/anitta-fans-spotify-brazil-global-chart/
Marshall, L. (2015) ‘“Let”s keep music special. F-Spotify’: on-demand streaming and the controversy over artist royalties’, Creative industries journal, 8(2), pp. 177–189. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17510694.2015.1096618.
This interesting study delves into digital music consumption, focusing on Spotify’s algorithmic effects. It deftly calls into question autonomy, acknowledges user agents, and prompts critical reflection on industry processes.
Great read Sara! Being that the music industry and streaming is so relevant to today’s society, you picked an incredibly interesting niche I hadn’t thought about before. In what ways do you think the culture industry contributes to the homogeneity and preselection of consumers based on their music preferences? To what extent are listeners’ music habits on streaming platforms like Spotify shaped by their own choices versus the influence of record labels and the industry’s interests, as suggested in your article?