The Fog We Breathe: Spotify, Power, Data, and the Death of Authentic Culture
Introduction: A world covered in cultural fog
There is a fog settling quietly across the world. Not a weather event, but a cultural one. A fog made of algorithms, behavioural tracking and platform monopolies, hidden beneath the surface of something as apparently harmless as a music app. Like all fogs, it obscures what matters most: clarity, authenticity, artistic quality, and our ability to see the stars — the artists who once shone freely, not because they gamed a system but because they had something genuine to say.
That fog has a name: Spotify.
1. When art was art: before the fog
For many people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, music felt like discovery. The industry was never perfect, labels had power and there was plenty of injustice, but there was still a sense that talent meant something. A great band could break through. A great song could rise.
You didn't scroll; you listened. You didn't follow a brand; you followed a sound. Music magazines, radio hosts, record stores and small venues were imperfect gatekeepers, but at least they were human ones. They curated out of obsession, eccentric taste and community, not out of the needs of an opaque recommendation engine.
Today, culture is mediated by a single platform that markets itself as borderless and open, while operating as one of the most centralised cultural infrastructures ever built. Spotify has become the fog that lies between artists and listeners, silently deciding what is visible and what never cuts through.
2. How the fog machine was built
Spotify's rise was not a pure fairy tale of innovation. It was powered by a quiet pact between the world's biggest music corporations and a platform hungry for catalogues. Major labels — especially Sony Music — received highly favourable equity in Spotify in its early years, giving them a direct financial interest in the platform's domination. Sony later sold a substantial part of this stake for hundreds of millions of dollars, while publicly committing to share some proceeds with artists, and then moved to take control of EMI Music Publishing in a deal worth around $2.3 billion.
The result was unprecedented consolidation: Sony became the world's largest music publisher, combining Sony/ATV and EMI's catalogues and, in the words of one independent trade body analysis, controlling well over 70% of national charts in some major European markets when recordings and publishing were considered together. To many observers in the independent sector, this looked less like organic growth and more like a carefully executed, regulator-approved coup of global music infrastructure.
The people who did not structurally benefit from this alignment of interests were the very artists whose work powered both the catalogues and the platform. The early message of the fog machine was clear: reward the corporations, not the creators, and build a system where opacity is profitable.
The Guardian, "Sony Buys EMI Music Publishing for $2.3bn" (2018);
IMPALA, "Independent Music Companies Slam Decision to Green-Light the Sony–EMI Merger" (2018);
Music Business Worldwide, coverage of Sony's 5.7% stake and partial exit from Spotify.
3. Founder power and the question of economic narcissism
Spotify was founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, two Swedish entrepreneurs whose combined stakes in the company have been worth billions. Spotify's corporate and financial architecture runs through Sweden, Cyprus and Luxembourg. Its main corporate domicile is Luxembourg — a country whose tax regime, exposed in the LuxLeaks investigation, allowed some multinationals to pay effective tax rates far below headline levels, particularly through intellectual property regimes.
None of this is necessarily illegal. But legality is not the same as legitimacy. Both Ek and Lorentzon have publicly pressured Sweden to change its tax and labour rules to make conditions more favourable to Spotify, warning that the company would expand elsewhere if the country did not adjust. For many, this sounded less like constructive dialogue and more like a billionaire ultimatum to a democratic society.
That behaviour raises an uncomfortable possibility: economic narcissism – the belief that one's own financial convenience should shape the tax systems, labour laws and social contracts of entire nations. If you are willing to lean on a country this way in public, what are you willing to do quietly with data?
PwC, "Luxembourg – Corporate Tax Credits and Incentives"; Investopedia, "Why Is Luxembourg Considered a Tax Haven?".
4. Spotify knows your internal weather
Spotify presents itself as "just" a music service, but under the surface it is assembling one of the richest behavioural datasets on the planet. It tracks what you listen to, when you listen, where you are, how often you skip, who you share tracks with, which playlists you loop, and which songs you reach for when you are sad, anxious, heartbroken or ecstatic.
Your playlists form a psychological fingerprint. Spotify doesn't only know that you like ambient piano or 1990s hip-hop. Over time, it can infer your emotional cycles: the tracks you use to calm down, to dissociate, to work, to grieve, to psych yourself up. It can map your commute, your workout routines, your sleepless nights, your lonely weekends. It can see which friends' tastes you shadow, and who shadows you.
Musicologists and researchers have begun to map the consequences of this new listening regime. Algorithmic curation doesn't just respond to taste; it shapes it, creating what some scholars call "calculated publics" – groups whose cultural consumption is actively engineered by recommendation systems.
Karlijn Dinnissen & Christine Bauer, "A Stakeholder-Centered View on Fairness in Music Recommender Systems" (Frontiers in Big Data, 2022).
5. Brand over art: the fog thickens
In this environment, Spotify does not primarily reward musical depth or risk. It rewards behaviour that plays well with the machine. The artists who rise fastest are not always those with the most original voices, but those who treat themselves as products and their listeners as data points. They learn to release tracks that are short, playlist-friendly and instantly legible to the algorithm. They collaborate strategically to cross-pollinate metrics. They optimise intros, outros and song structures to avoid skips.
In other words, Spotify pushes culture toward a world in which brand is more important than art. It naturally elevates those with highly developed self-promotion instincts, who are comfortable treating their persona, their audience and even their emotions as assets to be leveraged. The system quietly favours narcissistic traits – people who are willing and able to game attention, hijack mood and live inside the metrics.
The more this dynamic spreads, the thicker the fog becomes. It gets harder, especially for younger listeners, to distinguish between work that is designed to be true and work that is designed to be clicked. The signal is buried in the noise; the stars are hidden by the glow of a billion optimised street-lights.
David Hesmondhalgh, "Streaming's Effects on Music Culture: Old Anxieties and New Simplifications".
6. A world where everything can be manipulated
The danger here is not limited to music. Once a platform has this level of insight into when and how people are emotionally open, its data can, in principle, be used for anything: marketing, political persuasion, behavioural nudging, even fine-grained psychological profiling. Imagine a campaign that knows exactly when hundreds of thousands of supporters will be driving home after a rally, and what platform they will open in the car.
The question is not far-fetched; it is structural. When a company sits on this kind of behavioural goldmine, and its founders are comfortable trying to bend national policy around their own interests, should we trust that the emotional dashboard of whole populations will only ever be used gently?
Spotify is no longer just a jukebox. It is part of the infrastructure of mood, attention and belief. It is cultural weather – and whoever controls the weather has enormous power.
7. The cultural climate crisis
Fog rarely arrives as a sudden shock. It thickens gradually. Spotify's dominance has grown the same way. At first it appeared as a harmless convenience: cheap, infinite music in your pocket. Then it hollowed out other forms of discovery: internet radio, local record stores, small blogs, human-curated niche scenes. The economic precarity created by streaming pushed artists further into the arms of the platform they depended on.
Like climate change, this transformation can feel abstract until you pay close attention to the symptoms: shrinking artistic diversity, homogenised sound, shorter attention spans, a culture of background "vibes" rather than deep listening. We wake up one day and realise we have been breathing this air for years.
Spotify has become a kind of cultural climate crisis: a slow re-engineering of how we taste, feel and relate to music, driven not by collective deliberation but by opaque optimisation.
Conclusion: do we keep breathing the fog?
The question here is not whether Daniel Ek or Martin Lorentzon are good or bad people, nor whether streaming should exist at all. The question is whether it is wise to place so much cultural and emotional power in the hands of a company whose incentives reward economic narcissism and whose systems amplify narcissistic behaviour across an entire industry.
Spotify is more than a platform. It is a fog: a layer of invisible logic between artists and listeners, between moods and choices, between human beings and the stars they might otherwise see. We can keep breathing it and calling it normal. Or we can name it for what it is, and begin to imagine ways of listening that clear the air.
Spotify is the fog preventing us from seeing the stars — and the fog is getting thicker.
– David Hesmondhalgh, Streaming's Effects on Music Culture: Old Anxieties and New Simplifications.
– Marta Ezquerra Fernández, Effects of Algorithmic Curation in Users' Music Taste on Spotify.
– Karlijn Dinnissen & Christine Bauer, A Stakeholder-Centered View on Fairness in Music Recommender Systems.
– Thomas Hodgson, Spotify and the Democratisation of Music.
– John Harris, Spotify's Biggest Sin? Its Algorithms Have Pushed Artists to Make Joyless, Toothless Music.
– IMPALA, Independent Music Companies Slam Decision to Green-Light the Sony–EMI Merger.
