Visualizing mood

Spotify for Brands claims: “At Spotify we have a personal relationship with...people who show us their true colours with zero filter.”34 _{In making this claim,} Spotify neglects to acknowledge that by labeling, describing, and annotating each mood with a cover image it provides essentialized categorical filters that, in fact, prompt the desired response. Instead the company highlights the “personal relationship” established through a user’s supposed expression of self through musical taste, revealing their “true colors,” through the filters of Spotify’s prefabricated categories.

Spotify’s visual presentation of mood-based playlists reprises many features of a landmark in essentialist emotion research. Barrett criticizes the work of psychologists

31. “Mood Booster, a Playlist by Spotify,” Spotify, accessed March 8, 2020,

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX3rxVfibe1L0?si=msDQsgkZQ0esa1wv_D-Ibg.

32. “Down in the Dumps, a Playlist by Spotify,” Spotify, accessed March 8, 2020, https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWSqBruwoIXkA?si=9P5zNeeCTB2k1v1gFZThNw.

33. Barrett, How Emotions Are Made, ix.

Silvan S. Tomkins, Carroll E. Izard, and Paul Ekman who, in the 1960s, devised a set of “meticulously posed photographs” (fig. 3.3) that were designed to depict the essential features of six universal emotions: “anger, fear, disgust, surprise, sadness and happiness.”35 _{These photographs were} used extensively in experiments around the world

and the data collected seemed to support the cross-cultural identification of universal emotion categories. However, in Barrett’s critique of the classical view of emotions, she finds that test subjects are only able to consistently identify the emotions expressed on a set of faces when framed in the researchers’ “choice architecture” and given the prompt of a small set of options. The realization of the importance of “Western-centric”

scholarship plays a major role in furthering Barrett’s own theory. She argues that researchers implicitly taught non-Westerners to succeed on the test in order to support theories of universal emotion concepts. Barrett’s reconstruction of these old experiments with new controls concludes that emotions “appear to be universal under certain

conditions—when you give people a tiny bit of information about Western emotion

concepts, intentionally or not.”36 _{When territorialized by Western-centric scholarship, the} test becomes, as Deleuze and Guattari write, “a task to fulfill or a deed to do.”37

35. Barrett, How Emotions Are Made, 5.

36. Barrett, 54.

37. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 311.

Figure 3.3: "Meticulously posed

photographs" used by researchers to depict essentialist emotion concepts. From Barrett, How Emotions Are Made, page 5.

Spotify’s mood-based playlists provide similar conditions to perpetuate essentialization, using titles and images as prompts to help users easily identify the function of category. The “Mood” page of Spotify playlists is filled with ready-made music collections for ready-made emotional concepts (see fig. 3.4). Like Tomkins, Izard, and Eckman’s “meticulously posed photographs” of emotional expressions, the playlist cover images are carefully composed in order to solidify this aspect of the choice architecture. Cover images are important to

Spotify’s territorialization of mood-based spaces of consumption and their prompts work to influence the subjective nature of users’ affective response to music. They guide the user’s conception of the emotion they are matching and congeal the collection of

individual songs into a unified depiction of the mood.

Unlike the playlist covers in Spotify’s traditional genre playlists, which change regularly and are offered as rewards for artists, mood-based playlist covers feature

anonymous models and have rarely changed over the course of my two years of research. They are an integral part of the territorialization, the brand, the mood, and the

representation of an essentialized, Spotified emotion. For example, the playlist cover image for “Life Sucks” (approximately 2.5 million followers) consists of a blurry photograph of a white, millennial woman, drinking a steaming beverage while gazing through a rain-speckled

Figure 3.4: A selection of Spotify's

essentialized mood-based categories. Retrieved by the author December 2018.

Figure 3.5: Playlist cover

for "Life Sucks." Retrieved by the author December 2018.

window.38 _{Its dark colour palette reinforces the dreary mood it wishes to convey. No} clothing is visible, but the model’s eyes match her mug and her nail polish corresponds to the font of the word “sucks.” Spotify’s description of the playlist reads: “Feeling like everything just plain sucks? We’ve all been there. These songs will probably make you feel worse, but at least they’ll let you know you’re not alone.”39 _{In December 2018 the} playlist contained song titles like “God I Hope This Year Is Better Than The Last,” “Only You,” “Homesick,” and “Blood and Bones.” The playlist’s title, cover image, description, and the song titles elicit pangs of generic Western, “sadness” before the user hears what the music for the mood sounds like, offering “priming effects” similar to those of Tomkins et al. and appealing to Spotify’s essentialized concept of an emotion.

Exploiting users’ predisposition to essentialized emotion categories, Spotify’s mood-based playlists, like “Life Sucks” invite them to “forget” their more complex, contextual emotions, their social subjection, and “feel” music (and the world around them) through the frames of Spotify’s dividualized categories. A user can click on any essentialized mood category and initiate the soundtrack to that emotion or alternatively, as Anderson suggests, the soundtrack can initiate the emotion itself.40 _{Spotify provides} prompts to guide users’ to “[make] sure that the mood, the moment and the music are all

38. “Life Sucks, a Playlist by Spotify,” Spotify, accessed March 8, 2020,

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX3YSRoSdA634?si=ppIk9sPKSoGErTTOBGYpVg. Though outside of the scope of this research, it is noteworthy that all the mood-based playlist covers I discuss in this work have pictures of women on their covers. Eriksson et al. provide an analysis of gendering of playlists and of other gender-related issues on the platform in Spotify Teardown (126-7).

39. Eriksson et al., Spotify Teardown, 125.

in sync,”41 _{so it can simplify the rendering of their inputs into data within what Anderson} calls a “sonic architecture of expertly calibrated and monetized moods.”42 _{But like the} “meticulously posed photos” of essentialist emotion researchers, Spotify’s carefully calibrated emotional boxes do not read emotion, they attempt to teach it.