Chill vibes: Wellness creep into music streaming platforms

Abstract

This paper examines the increasing ‘wellness creep’ into the curation and recommendation of music by digital platforms. Through the platform walkthrough and critical interface analysis of Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music, it considers how industry discourse, user interfaces, and playlist products increasingly push pseudoscientific ideas of health and self-care as tools for the pursuit of an aspirational good life through music consumption. Our analysis demonstrates how platforms 'stage' these wellness-focused atmospheres, prioritizing ways of acting and feeling that reproduce normative conceptions of physical and emotional well-being. We especially focus on ‘chill vibes’ as a dominant aesthetic vernacular that invokes and brings forth certain affective and cognitive dispositions, simultaneously constructing and promising to fulfill fantasies of happiness and success. We posit that 'chill vibes' are supposed to unproblematically mitigate the effects of, and simultaneously prepare the user to keep thriving in, a reality of stress, acceleration, and unrest, and argue that streaming platforms appropriate and exploit common human responses to stress and unrest through the management of musical consumption and sonic environments. Ultimately, we show how the promise of wellness can be mobilized to promote regimes of subjectivity and governmentality, and how these are increasingly related to the commercial optimization of data and artificial intelligence.