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Abstract
In this article, we explore the transfer of functional music as a social control technology from pre-digital to digital media. Muzak, the closest ancestor of online functional music, was expert-designed to improve worker productivity. Ironically, today users themselves are creating mood playlists to enhance their work performance and to manage their emotional states in everyday life contexts. We examine the motivations and practices of users by analyzing their comments on online forums and the descriptions they attach to the mood playlists they create. Our findings indicate that functional music goes through a significant transformation in online media, which brings forth both an expansion of its social control effects and the emergence of novel uses that have a rather ambiguous relationship with social control. We propose that this double mechanism can be used as a basic model for analyzing the interactions between biopower and new media.
Notes
Acknowledgements
Baris Alpertan’s contribution to this article is based on his doctoral research at Bilkent University. The authors wish to thank Michelle Adams, Daniel Just, Cagatay Topal, Burc Kostem, the anonymous reviewers, and the journal editor for their helpful comments.
Notes
1 As of May 2019, mood playlists constitute roughly one third of all playlists on Spotify and have over 64 million followers.
2 This tendency is also attested by the addition of the categories of Moods and Themes to the search interface of the largest online music database AllMusic in 2011, which until then allowed searches only through the classic category of Genres. AllMusic characterizes Themes as “activities or events particularly suited for a song” and Moods as “adjectives that describe the sound and feel of a song” (https://www.allmusic.com/faq/topic/moods). In effect, unlike Genres, Moods and Themes are primarily based on usage-related characteristics (see Mount 2013). These two new categories, furthermore, are not marginal features of AllMusic search engine; together they have 471 sub-categories, while Genres has only 21 sub-categories.
3 See Kjus (2018).
4 Playlists created by Spotify editors and “verified users” show a blue tick, denoting that this is an official page. Unless otherwise noted, all the playlists we refer to in this study are user-generated.
6 Data regarding user comments and user-created playlists were gathered between November 2017 and May 2019. We surveyed over 300 user posts from 7 different websites (Reddit, Quora, and Spotify forums being the most important sources). User-created playlists were reached either from the links provided by users themselves or through the Spotify interface.
7 We do not, of course, claim that our data is representative of online music media users. Indeed, for the most part, it is impossible to identify the age, gender, and ethnicity of the 37 users we cite in this study with certainty, since in most cases, the user identities are not disclosed. However, by inspecting the user-names, the content of the comments and playlists, and sometimes the users’ Facebook accounts, we conjecture that the users we cite are predominantly young-adult, white males. This is largely in accordance with Leijonhufvud’s (2018, 186-187) observations about Spotify’s user population.
8 For example, for a lively discussion on whether music without vocals suits “online work” or not, see: https://www.seoclerk.com/faq/23207/What-is-your-playlist-while-you-are-working-online
10 https://open.spotify.com/user/122749549/playlist/2zW7VqT6LPXj9cFDYyIbDy?si=bYiTwcFRRvSdSS5QlmuRQg
12 https://open.spotify.com/user/1298599689/playlist/0sxnBm8SUp4ReRaDkmXlFH?si=ekwi01rgTcyXF9zE-mAeVg
13 There are also a vast number of playlists on Spotify, which specifically target consumption-related activities. Business owners use these playlists very much like Muzak was employed in commercial settings to “manage” consumption in the post-war era (Jones and Schumacher Citation1992; Lanza Citation2004, 159-166; Sterne 1997). No individual user, however, seems to employ these playlists to make himself/herself consume more!
21 https://open.spotify.com/user/12151115887/playlist/7ozpSJoH6WRXzXG1eP14Oq?si=J2ENqX-dRfGPUqksWPQt5Q
22 https://open.spotify.com/user/1167460967/playlist/4xxwsMXSPPkTrOLYs542rT?si=gGvy_O_ySqSm4ucvSDQ5bQ
23 https://open.spotify.com/user/123409734/playlist/37EwTM1r33Bdz9n2Mw4Qiq?si=xYQXOYGSR-KLc209hWEH6A
See also: https://open.spotify.com/user/1167460967/playlist/4xxwsMXSPPkTrOLYs542rT?si=gGvy_O_ySqSm4ucvSDQ5bQ
26 https://open.spotify.com/user/1140267330/playlist/1nSmLKqr6ubGNiBD77D7Zp?si=YNvohDUQROCthKA_0xdzvg
28 https://open.spotify.com/user/1111991616/playlist/5Mifcw4pYe7mVq3iA7EUlF?si=dBITTgBcQrK4W6tyUDILBQ
34 https://open.spotify.com/user/1268461069/playlist/5rPmTcITXsY8BtNyt4Mca5?si=3QA0NkS1SWeazNbtXM44tg
46 https://open.spotify.com/user/116774146/playlist/2Wwj5BWwcWa9x2K5BIj7hG?si=vJBU_aJaQxquxg7yTAI77Q
47 John Cage’s Muzak-Plus – the “listeners” of which are also its “performers” – is perhaps the ultimate synthesis of such attempts (see Vanel 2008).