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a bizarre parallel music world has taken root, beyond just the ghost artists and streambait.

When the recommendation systems are optimizing for extended listening sessions, when they are filled with made-up genres, when music that sounds like other music is what’s most data-blessed, the reality of what we’re hearing on the playlists and AI DJ streams isn’t music culture, it’s Spotify culture. It’s a weird data-refracted version of music culture. When I look at a Spotify bedroom pop playlist, it doesn’t feel like I’m learning about bedroom pop, it feels like I’m learning about the SEO-optimized version of bedroom pop that exists on the Spotify servers. The same goes for just about any micro-scene or musical tradition that Spotify has attempted to map. The creation of finer- and finer-grain data points to label artists and users with exists, in part, to make it easier to market to users by dividing them into advertising segments. It often has nothing to do with the artists or songs themselves, or the intentions of the artists or the scenes that they came from; instead, it’s music culture writ large recast as fodder to fuel streaming-friendly one-click buttons for different moods and lifestyles, a whole environment that meets music in the context of only data; captured, commodified, and managed.
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