Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

by Liz Pelly

The new paradigms of being a fan online—the niche vibes, the meme playlists, the infinite descriptors—started feeling more attuned to this broader project of data processing and corporate exploitation than, say, musical understanding and appreciation. It was the datafication of not just music, but fandom. If microvibes are a form of metadata, and metadata works to make artificial intelligence systems operate more efficiently, it’s worth following that logic a bit further and remembering the broader ramifications of AI systems. In his introduction to Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music, the philosopher Fredric Jameson describes the concept of “autosurveillance,” under which “capital and the state no longer have to do anything to you, because you have learned to do it to yourself.” This was fan culture reshaped by algorithmic ubiquitousness, which is to say, by tools of surveillance.3