Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 5-11-2020 1:00 PM "Dance like nobody's paying": Spotify and Surveillance as the Soundtrack of Our Lives T. Andrew Braun, The University of Western Ontario Supervisor: Stahl, Matt, The University of Western Ontario A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the Master of Arts degree in Popular Music and Culture © T. Andrew Braun 2020 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Communication Technology and New Media Commons, and the Other Music Commons Recommended Citation Braun, T. Andrew, ""Dance like nobody's paying": Spotify and Surveillance as the Soundtrack of Our Lives" (2020). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 7001. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7001 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Abstract This thesis examines Spotify, the world’s most popular music streaming service, and its usage of music as a data extraction tool. I position Spotify as a surveillance capitalist firm that puts music at the centre of an enclosed environment designed to condition users’ affective responses and behaviors and reorient production of music. I analyze three features of the platform: a campaign in which Spotify invites users and producers to share the data it collects about them, the arrangement of the platform’s architecture into mood-based playlists, and its penchant for music that is “Chill.” I show how each serves the surveillance machine’s goals of collecting and contextualizing data from music and music consumption that it claims can quantify, predict, and condition behaviour.