A song on the bus radio. A track someone saved on a USB stick. A tune heard at a party, without knowing who sings it. For a long time, discovering music happened through encounters like these, sometimes by pure chance.
Today much of our listening runs through platforms that log every play, pause and skip, and use that data to decide what comes next. The recommendation arrives ready-made, made for you.
How does Spotify build, technically and discursively, the equivalence between personalization and music discovery, and what conditions does that construction set for listening?
To think through this question, the research turns to an old word, coined to name the encounter with what you were not looking for.
