EL CONTEXTO DE LA PARTICIPACIÓN DE LA SOCIEDAD CIVIL

The user side of “Wrapped” invites individuals to access the details of their listening data through a “micro site” and publish a personalized statement accounting their listening for the year, via their social media pages.

Figure 2.5: Anonymous user "Wrapped" data collected by the author December 2018.

Users are encouraged to publicize the statistical breakdowns of their minutes listened, top genre, top five artists, and top five songs for the year. The sharing of “Wrapped” data reflects what Alice Marwick and danah boyd describe as a process by which social media users “construct elaborate taste performances, primarily to convey prestige, uniqueness, or aesthetic preference.”53 _{In this case, they do so on Spotify’s} terms. Extolling the virtues of the campaign, Alexandra Jardine elaborates in Ad Age that “Wrapped:”

51. Gabriel J. Dance, Michael Laforgia, and Nicholas Confessore, “As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants,” The New York Times, December 19, 2018,

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html.

52. Weiss, “Why do people like.”

lets Spotify users learn more about the most streamed artists, albums, genres and more this year. Features include an interactive quiz testing users about their own listening habits...to see if they are truly in tune with what they listened to most.54

Including a quiz provides the opportunity for users to reconcile, or tune, their sense of music-identified self with the “truth” “Wrapped” data provides. Thus, Spotify’s power is rationalized as users continue to be tuned to believe in what their listening data says about them and perpetuates the notion that, as Walt Hickey writes in FiveThirtyEight, “Spotify knows me better than I know myself.”55

Spotify positions itself as a platform where users are free to express a version of who they are or who they want to be through music and through its music-derived data. Attali writes: “That is the trap. The trap of false liberation through the distribution to each individual of the instruments of his own alienation, tools for self-sacrifice, both

monitoring and being monitored.”56 _{With “Wrapped” Spotify’s promise of freedom} melds surveillance into a performance of self-actualization and habituates users to the notion that they are free to express themselves on its terms, using its data.

I conducted searches of public Twitter posts using the key words “Spotify” and “Wrapped,” limiting the date range between October 1 and December 31 of 2018 and 2019. In addition to many users participating in the campaign and posting their data,

54. Alexandra Jardine, “Spotify Announces the World's Most-Streamed Music on Its End-of-Year Microsite,” Ad Age, December 5, 2017, https://adage.com/creativity/work/2017-wrapped/53359. The quiz was specific to 2018’s iteration of “Wrapped.”

55. Walt Hickey, “Spotify Knows Me Better Than I Know Myself,” FiveThirtyEight, September 16, 2014, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/spotify-knows-me-better-than-i-know-myself/.

numerous parody posts, and some skepticism and hostility to the campaign, I noticed several other interesting attitudes. My analysis of users’ social media reactions to “Wrapped” suggests Spotify’s habituation has been so effective in some cases that not only are users willing participants, but they often explicitly adjust their behaviour to display a more desirable version of the self, using already normalized social media dynamics as explored by media scholars including David Lyon, Alice Marwick and dannah boyd. As Lyon writes: “A key aspect of today’s nascent surveillance culture is the imperative to share.”57 _{However, beyond simply sharing their data, Spotify users further} demonstrate the success of “Wrapped” and its habituation by practicing forms of what Brooke Duffy and Ngai Chan call “self-surveillance,” and adjusting their behaviour in order to alter their presentation of musical-identity.58 _{Some Spotify users suggest utilizing} “burner” accounts— “disposable” profiles separate from their main account—to prevent “Wrapped” from uncovering their “true” taste or “true” self. Duffy and Chan discuss various techniques in which social media users make “conscious efforts to sever the ties between one’s ‘real’ identity and their digital personae” through similar techniques, such as “Finsta” (F-ake Insta-gram) accounts.59 _{“Finsta” accounts, they find, are used “as a} way to project a more ‘realistic’ version of their [subjects’] daily lives,” offering a break from the pressure of self-surveillance on their “real accounts.”60 _{Spotify “burner”}

57. Lyon, “Surveillance Culture,” 830.

58. Duffy and Chan, “You Never Really Know,” 121.

59. Duffy and Chan, 132.

accounts are a different technique of “self-surveillance” that works to hide the users’ musical selections from the eavesdropping apparatus of “Wrapped” or guard against repercussions from what Marwick calls “social surveillance” by their online community. Marwick writes that social media technologies are “designed for users to continually investigate digital traces left by the people they are connected to through social media.”61 By using a “burner account,” any dalliance with less valued songs will not be attributed to their “real” Spotify profile and they can listen outside the surveillance of “Wrapped”

and that of their social media circle.62 _{In these instances, Spotify’s influence over users’} music consumption behavior becomes clear and warrants more methodical research and further investigation. However, in this work I continue to illustrate Spotify’s process of habituation through deeper analysis of the producer side of “Wrapped.”