Streambait
March 16, 2025
As culture became fixated on niche aesthetics, [Spotify] absorbed these ideas into its broader understanding of mood, vibe, and genre. These are all different ways of understanding music, but on Spotify, these types of distinctions blurred into each other. Ultimately, mood, vibe, and genre had all just become different ways of tagging music with descriptive data, different ways of sorting music into buckets that served the necessary functions of streaming curation, which is to say, the function that genre has always played: marketing. They were all just ways to narrow audience segments and influence the pipelines of programming, in hopes something might make someone click "play."
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist - Liz Pelly
"Never play to the gallery. Never work for other people. Always remember that the reason you initially started working is that there was something inside yourself that you felt if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society. I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people's expectations. I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that."