Yoseba Peña

Spotify has evolved from a music-distribution service into a normative infrastructure that reorganises how cultural knowledge is produced, how listeners are formed as subjects, and how identity is enacted. This article examines that transformation through three concepts: algorithmic epistemology, digital subjectivation, and algorithmic performativity. In doing so, it extends Foucault's regimes of truth and governmentality, Gramsci's hegemony, and Butler's performativity to digital platforms. Against this background, my contribution is threefold. First, digital subjectivation identifies a modality of power not fully captured by hegemony or governmentality, because automated profiling and recommendation can operate without explicit consent or continuous reflective self-conduct. Second, Spotify can capture behavioural patterns at the population level without fully capturing individual listeners. Agency persists in the gap between the profile, which is built from past behaviour, and the person, who can still resist, overflow, or redirect it. Third, algorithmic classifications do not simply describe listeners: they make some identities more recognisable and desirable than others. Yet these identities remain unstable because the profile never fully coincides with the person it seeks to represent. My analysis is grounded in documented cases, including the Perfect Fit Content programme, sleep playlists, and Spotify Wrapped. What emerges is a regime of cultural automation in which prediction becomes a mode of knowing the listener and circulation becomes a proxy for cultural value. Critique must therefore also attend to interfaces, defaults, and metrics. Spotify does not simply play music: it plays the listener.