Feeling ourselves? Sound, affect and female subjectivity in music streaming

With 299 million active users, the Swedish company Spotify is one of the biggest music streaming services today.

A decennial report released in 2019 revealed a salient gender gap in Spotify’s most streamed artists, with only one female pop star ranking in the top five.

The data discounts earlier notions of music streaming as a democratizing force in the music industry and demands critical examination of how Spotify’s operational logics configure gender. The purpose of this project is to intervene within this field at the level of sound.

It investigates how Spotify utilizes music as a functional affective device, shaping, in the process, ideas about female subjectivity.

The study conducts music and textual analysis of playlists categorized around the mood-based descriptors happiness, sadness, and chill, which hold a central position in Spotify’s current interface.

It elucidates in particular how affect and algorithms work as organizing devices that configure female subjectivity through sonic-affective contours.

These results are subsequently juxtaposed with broader aesthetic developments in postmillennial pop music through music and discourse analysis to theorize the co-formations and disparities between sonic formations of gender promoted on Spotify and in pop music at large.

The project contributes a crucial critical analysis of one of today’s most powerful digital media companies by intervening at its as of yet undertheorized intersections of sound, affect, and gender.