Why does Spotify want to get you fit?

Today there are many gadgets and online services which claim to help us live healthier lives from exercise trackers like Fitbits and Apple Watches to calorie trackers like MyFitnessPal. But you might have noticed that even music streaming services like Spotify have been offering their own solutions. What are they offering? What is in it for them? How might their interventions affect our relationship with our health and bodies?

An article I recently published in the journal Big Data & Society tries to answer some of these questions.

Over the last few years Spotify have introduced more and more features intended to increase exercise and improve health and wellness. These have included personalised playlists for particular activities (e.g. running, weight lifting, meditation), guided workouts with exercise instructions accompanied by your favourite tracks and promotional partnerships with brands offering prizes for achieving fitness goals.

I became interested in why Spotify were moving into this area and what it might say about the relationship between our everyday health and fitness practices and streaming platforms. To investigate this I analysed Spotify’s patent applications (to see what innovations they have in the works), financial statements and industry interviews and press releases amongst other materials.

I found they are planning lots of new ways of harvesting user data such as capturing the cadence of users’ walking or running to automatically generate playlists with a matching tempo and analysing users’ voices to estimate their emotional state and recommend music to match (or challenge) this.

While their headline justification for these attempts to “datafy” their users is to provide them with a better, more personalised experience digging a little deeper we can see some other uses. Through assessing Spotify’s business strategy I discovered that they are keen to find new ways to target users with advertising. This is because they have struggled to maintain profitability despite being the market leader. Instead, they have focused on keeping investors happy through telling a story about growth and future profitability built on greater volumes of data on users, potential for advertising revenue and deeper integration with users’ lives.

Health, exercise and wellness practices of users are a particularly valuable source of data (due to how important these are to peoples lives and identities) and are useful to platforms like Spotify to meet the demands of today’s financialized capitalism built on the exploitation of digital data and market speculation.