And so, right around the time that Spotify realized it had 400,000 user-generated barbecue playlists, Brian Benedik, then Spotify’s North American Vice President of Advertising and Partnerships, noted in an Ad Age interview that the company would focus on moods as a way to grow its advertising mechanism: “This is not something that’s just randomly thrown out there,” Benedik said.

Studying these playlists allowed Spotify to more deeply analyze the contexts in which listening was happening on its platform. Together they began looking at the 1.5 billion user-generated playlists at Spotify’s disposal.

This was one year after Spotify acquired the “music intelligence” firm Echo Nest. In 2015, Spotify began selling advertisers on the idea of marketing to moods, moments, and activities instead of genres.

Further, since 2016, Spotify has shared this mood data directly with the world’s biggest marketing and advertising firms. Spotify is currently running a campaign centered on moods-the company’s Twitter tagline is currently “Music for every mood”-complete with its own influencer campaign.īut a more careful look into Spotify’s history shows that the decision to define audiences by their moods was part of a strategic push to grow Spotify’s advertising business in the years leading up to its IPO-and today, Spotify’s enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers, allowing them to target ads on Spotify by moods and emotions. It’s a powerful arm of the industry-crafted mythology of the so-called streaming revolution: platforms celebrating this grand recontextualization of music into mood playlists as an engine of discovery. Over the years, streaming services have pushed a narrative about these mood playlists, suggesting, through aggressive marketing, that the rise of listening by way of moods and activities was a service to listeners and artists alike-a way to help users navigate infinite choice, to find their way through a vast library of forty million songs. If you’re grieving, there’s even Coping with Loss, with the tagline: “When someone you love becomes a memory, find solace in these songs.” More If you’re feeling down, there’s Feeling Down, Sad Vibe, Down in the Dumps, Drifting Apart, Sad Beats, Sad Indie, and Devastating. If you need a lift in the morning, there’s Wake Up Happy, A Perfect Day, or Ready for the Day. All of these are examples of what can now be found on Spotify’s Browse page under the “mood” category, which currently contains eighty-five playlists. Where other platforms might need to invest more to piece together emotional user profiles, Spotify streamlines the process by providing boxes that users click on to indicate their moods: Happy Hits, Mood Booster, Rage Beats, Life Sucks. But, as it turns out, in a move that should not surprise anyone at this point, Spotify has been selling access to that listening data to multinational corporations.

Of course, that personalization process is Spotify’s way of selling users on its product. When a user chooses, for example, a “private listening” session on Spotify, the effect is to make them feel that it’s a one-way relation between person and machine. It’s a matter of unprecedented access to our interior lives, which is buffered by the flimsy illusion of privacy. Today, this means music streaming platforms are in a unique position within the greater platform economy: they have troves of data related to our emotional states, moods, and feelings. Music is emotional, and so our listening often signals something deeply personal and private.

Spotify music moods meaning