Chill Vibes: Wellness Creep into Music Streaming Platforms

Source: Raquel Campos Valverde and Ludmila Lupinacci, “Chill Vibes: Wellness Creep into Music Streaming Platforms,” paper presented at AoIR 2025. Full paper

Claim

Music platforms increasingly frame listening through wellness, self-care, productivity and self-management. Labels such as sleep, focus, relax, healing and mindfulness describe music while also proposing desirable states and suitable ways to use it.

Evidence and method

The authors use platform walkthroughs and critical interface analysis across Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. They examine the words, images, playlists and routes through which each service presents wellness-related listening.

The paper treats interface language as more than description. A category such as Focus implies an ideal user who manages attention, stress and productivity through a media product (pp. 1–2).

Endel appears in the paper through its Amazon Music partnership and the Sleep Science playlist. The authors argue that its scientific language presents the promised benefit with more certainty than the available evidence supports (pp. 2–3).

Limits

This is a short conference paper. It does not study Endel users, test the app’s effects, inspect its runtime, or establish how common the identified interface pattern is. Its wider claims about wellness culture should remain a critical frame rather than a measured causal result.

Presentation use

Use the paper to ask who defines what focus, sleep and relaxation should sound like. The function label works as an interface affordance, a production brief and a claim about a desirable state.