Mood Playlists and the Functional Turn

Source: Nedim Karakayalı and Barış Alpertan, “Mood Playlists, Biopower, and the ‘Functional Turn’ in Online Media: What Happens When a Pre-Digital Social Control Technology Is Transferred to the Internet?,” The Information Society 37, no. 1 (2021), 20–34. Full article

Claim

Streaming changes functional music by making it mobile, continuous and data-rich, while listeners choose, assemble, label and discuss music for work or emotional control. Muzak organised sound for workers from above. Online listening extends that control into self-management, yet listeners also use it for pleasure, reflection and experiments that do not serve productivity.

Evidence and method

Karakayalı and Alpertan compare pre-digital Muzak with mood playlists through a qualitative analysis of public forum comments and user-written playlist descriptions. Their material shows how some listeners describe these uses, though it cannot establish how common or effective they are.

Muzak’s experts selected and scheduled music for workers. Online users instead make or choose playlists to manage their work and emotional state. The authors describe a double effect: functional music extends social control into self-management, yet people also use it for reflection, pleasure and aims beyond productivity (pp. 20–21).

Streaming makes functional sound portable across work, travel, domestic life and leisure. Because users select and describe the music, power no longer flows only from an institution to a passive listener (pp. 22–24).

The authors connect mood playlists to the aestheticization of ordinary life. Music can make work or commuting more tolerable and give listeners a limited form of “aesthetic agency,” so function and play can occur in the same listening act (pp. 27–29).

They call some uses “self-moodification”: listeners observe, test and alter their own state through music. The practice can serve productivity norms or curiosity and experiment, and it takes shape through users, platforms, labels and cultural ideas (pp. 29–30).

Concepts

• Functional turn: The growing organization of listening around activities, moods and desired effects.
• Biopower: The management of bodies, attention and conduct through norms and techniques of self-regulation.
• Self-moodification: Deliberate use of media to notice and alter one’s own mood.
• Aesthetic agency: The listener’s capacity to shape the feel and meaning of ordinary activity through music.
• Distributed participation and control: Users sort, name and circulate functional music while platforms and cultural norms steer behaviour.

Limits

The study concerns user-made and platform playlists rather than real-time generative apps, body sensors or Endel’s subscription interface. Forum comments and playlist descriptions cannot show how common a practice is or whether the music achieves its claimed function. The paper uses biopower to interpret social relations and finds no coordinated plan by platforms or listeners.

Link to generative apps

The functional turn links Muzak, streaming playlists and generative apps through a change in who selects the function. The listener moves from receiving an employer’s programme to selecting a mood playlist, then to choosing a target state that an app manages.

The question is who defines the function, who chooses it and how much musical choice remains. Self-regulation may serve productivity, pleasure, care or several aims at once. Endel sharpens the functional turn because its interface makes the target state the main object of choice.