Making personalization ✨delightful✨: staging power for data indulgence on Spotify

Resumen

This paper offers a critical technography of ‘audio-first’ digital platform Spotify, scrutinizing the ways in which the company’s institutional discourse and promotional materials frame the practices of datafication and personalization. Engaging with the growing literature on platform studies, critical algorithm studies, and everyday data cultures, I argue that the case of Spotify represents a paradigmatic example of a broader discursive shift in which data practices are justified by platforms based on their capacity to evoke ‘delight’. On Spotify, I identify that this phenomenon is manifested through the mobilization of a contradictory ‘computational mojo’ that combines the science of numbers with miraculous, magical powers, as well as a focus on the timeliness and beauty of its algorithmic-driven contextual harmony. In so doing, Spotify’s designed experiences attempt to convince users that they should revel in acts of ‘data indulgence’ – the craving, appetite for, and enjoyment of data-driven experiences. Rather than accepting that these data-craving and advertising-friendly modalities of subjectivity are naturally or automatically occurring, I argue that the phenomenon illustrates the complex dynamics of ‘staging power’. Dialoguing with recent debates on the role of affect, emotion, and desire in mediating datafication, I aim to contribute to, and expand on, existing theorizations on the symbolic and aesthetic power of digital platforms.