Substrate

Indeed, what Spotify calls “streaming intelligence” should be understood as surveillance of its users to fuel its own growth and ability to sell mood-and-moment data to brands. ​ When a platform like Spotify sells advertisers on its mood-boosting, background experience, and then bakes these aims into what it recommends to listeners, a twisted form of behavior manipulation is at play. It’s connected to what Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, calls the “behavioral futures market”—where “many companies are eager to lay their bets on our future behavior.”