In One Ear: how content platforms are pushing music and art to the background

Some of my earliest writing came in the form of song fragments clumsily scratched out in spiral-bound notebooks. No one knew, but even if they did, I doubt they could decipher what the strange hieroglyphics of my elementary school handwriting meant. Eventually, I stopped writing songs, but my love of music persisted. I’ve written about some of this before, kicking off this blog more than two years ago with a post about music’s impact during challenging times. Later, I covered my days of hunting for mixtapes and my passion for music when looking at the meaning of different pop culture moments. Even in pieces not explicitly about music, you can find intentional and unintentional references to lyrics peppered throughout them. All of this is to say that music is and has been a huge part of my life. Lately, I’ve been reflecting on how my relationship with music and art has changed. As a teenager, I would pick an album and just sit with it. The act of listening was the whole experience. Something has changed in the past 5 years; despite racking up tens of thousands of minutes listening each year, music is rarely the main experience anymore. Unless I’m at a concert, music, like so many other things in modern life, is just more noise in the background. 

Mood Machine by Liz Pelly, which details Spotify’s transformation of the music industry, offers one of the best explanations for how we got here. In the book, Pelly tells the classic story of late-stage capitalism where the commodification of art (music) by platforms (Spotify) turns art into content meant to be consumed and discarded. Like every company built off the attention economy, the goal of Spotify and other streamers isn’t sharing music, the goal is selling advertising, subscriptions, and our data. To accomplish those goals, “engagement,” or really just time spent using the app, has to be as high as possible. Spotify needed a model that was more aligned to passive consumption, so they made listening about the pursuit of passive “vibes” or “moods”, hence the book’s title. Rather than looking for specific music, now we open the app, pick a mood, and let the app do the rest. Moods like chilling, driving, working out, or the 100s of other weirdly specific genres we see like “cuddly slow battle rap world monday afternoon” became how we think about music. 

To most people, this probably doesn’t seem like a huge deal, which I get. It’s nice to have the ability to choose a mood and hear a playlist made for you. One of the best things about music is the way it complements life. Hearing your favorite song at the bar can make your night, and the right playlist makes leg day bearable. Not everything is made for a deep listening experience. Few of us are pulling out the record player and noise-cancelling headphones, then queuing up “Get It Sexxy”. Yet, reducing music to moods and playlists has a real impact on how we interact with the world. Artists become interchangeable because they’re no longer the main destination for us. As long as these playlists have “content “that satisfies our mood cravings and sounds halfway decent, we’ll keep coming back. Pelly makes some excellent arguments about how people cease to learn about genres and artists when music becomes content. If the only time we see songs is when they’re algorithmically sorted into these mood playlists, then we have no idea about the context in which they were made. The songs just become another random bit of information meant to harvest attention. Over time, we learn to stop actively participating in our music choices and start losing our connection to the music.

I thought I was still connected past the algorithm because I try to read music blogs and check out new music. That was naive because being up-to-date on a superficial level doesn’t mean you're experiencing music. Even if we claim to be invested in it, the way we’re passively consuming music creates much weaker ties to it. I was reminded of this while listening to one of my favorite albums from high school, “good kid, m.a.d.d City” (GKMC) by Kendrick Lamar. Kendrick’s latest album, “GNX”, has been in constant rotation since it came out a few months ago, so if you asked me which album I knew better, I would’ve said “GNX”. I hadn’t listened to anything from GKMC for a couple of years, but the second it came on, it became apparent how much more connected I am to that album. Nostalgia has a role to play here, but when I hear songs from GKMC, there’s a visceral sense of closeness. Every lyric and beat is something that I deeply know and feel. When I listened to music in high school, I only had a few albums to choose from at a time, so I got to know the music on a fundamental level. That doesn’t happen in a world where there are a hundred different versions of nighttime chill playlists filled with random songs competing for our ever-shrinking attention span. 

A fractured music ecosystem where we never get close to music means that most music serves as temporary background noise for a few days or weeks, if we’re lucky. I’m guilty of this as anyone. Random songs from albums I save may pop up in daily mixes and other curated playlists, but I never develop a true feel for most albums. This is why I can’t create end-of-year lists anymore. Creating these lists used to be something I looked forward to; now, it feels impossible. There are too many options, and I can’t say that I really know any of them well enough to form an opinion past a gut feeling. Picking the top few albums is easy, but the rest blur together. No artist wants an armchair expert critiquing their shit, but this transient listening experience can’t be what any of them want for their music. They pour their life into making art, and now that doesn’t mean anything. All that effort leads to maybe one song competing against hundreds of others in mood playlists. Some artists are lucky enough to break through the noise, but most have to churn out music at an unsustainable rate, hoping to find traction with the algorithm. That paints a grim future for art, where these platforms dictate what art gets made. 

We’re already seeing the impact across different industries. A term for background content used by the platforms is “lean-back content”, and it’s the driving force in content strategy today. Streamers will still point to prestige movies and event albums to create buzz, but that’s not what makes up the bulk of their programming. To them, it doesn’t matter what’s on your screen or in your headphones as long as something is playing. Pelly has this great quote in the book where a Spotify exec says their main competitor isn’t other streamers, it’s silence. To compete for that share of silence, songs have largely been reduced to hooks and slightly complex chorus loops. They’re meant to grab your attention and distract you for two minutes but not much more. The same is happening with video streaming. Every time you open Netflix, there’s something that resembles a movie but is really just a video to play while doomscrolling and be forgotten the second the credits roll. We still have musicians and filmmakers who care about art, but they’re becoming increasingly rare as they’re forced to fight for our attention. We’re stuck in a race to the bottom where the art is becoming less interesting for the sake of engagement and KPIs.

Our transition to a lean-back world is painfully obvious when I can’t help but reach for my phone while watching a movie at home or listening to a new album. I feel a sense of shame when this happens, but it’s the pull of passive consumption we all feel. All of the things we care about can become just another distraction at any moment. Many of my pieces lately have been going back to this theme of finding agency in a world where we have fewer choices than ever. This doesn’t just go for major life decisions, it also applies to something as small as choosing an album to listen to. Most of us don’t have time to get high in our bedrooms and listen to albums in the dark for hours on end like we did in high school, but we can be more intentional in how we relate to the music we do play. One small thing I’ve done is choosing to play full albums at the gym or in the car. Sometimes, you need a playlist, but listening to songs in their original context goes a long way. Even mindfully choosing to queue songs from different mixes helps bring the music to the front since you’re actively playing a part in what you’re listening to. We can do the same for movies or any of the other forms of art we care about. The point is attempting to be present and connecting with the world. 

I’ve said before that I don’t just want to write pure explainer pieces when there are actual journalists like Liz Pelly writing full-length books about these subjects. If any of this interests you, I’d highly recommend checking out “Mood Machine”. I still wanted to write this because that book touched a nerve, and you may relate to being tired of losing pieces of yourself to algorithms and platforms. Music is one of my biggest passions, and I can feel my grasp on it slipping away. The gift of consciousness is that we can direct attention to the things we care about. That’s what art is; it’s a pure act of consciousness, not only in its creation but in its perception. Right now, I don’t feel very conscious of any of the art I claim to care so much about. We have to find a way back to listening, watching, and reading, rather than just “consuming content”.

Music is an intrinsic part of the human experience, and it’s being lost to the endless feed that’s become our lives. I mean, that’s one of the reasons why I write this blog. We’re losing so much to these platforms. On some days, it’s hard to notice, but it’s happening all around us. At this point, it’s starting to feel like we’re all just part of the feed. 50 years from now, there’s going to be nothing we can hold onto because we were scrolling, listening to generic mood mixes, and watching some pretty mid-Netflix movies. I can’t imagine telling my grandchildren about a random song from an AI-generated “frolic situationship passenger princess” playlist that played once while I was driving. I want to tell them about an album I found organically that changed the way I look at the world. That’s the power of art when we play an active part in it, it’s not just background noise; it becomes a part of us and our story.