These days the economy is not being run by traditional dollars and cents, but instead by a new commodity, the commodity of attention (Crogan & Kinsley, 2012). This new era commodity is “the competition for ‘eyeballs’” (Crogan & Kinsley, 2012, p.1), or in the case of Spotify the competition for not only your ears, but your dollars too. This competition has led streaming services to build a service that allows listeners access to an infinite library, while still having a business model that allows them to grow and expand the business for the future. This commodification of our attention is also known as the Attention Economy.

 

Our attention is a valuable commodity to business’, therefore we have seen a big focus on the use of personal data to mass customise user experience through the internet; this is what Spotify does well through their intelligent algorithm. This algorithm can analyse your listening patterns to recommend artists, playlists and songs, and recommend you new tracks to help expand your library. Spotify offers you daily mixes, filled with your current and new music according to genre, as well as Discover Weekly, where they give you new tracks they think you’ll enjoy. These recommendations can be liked or disliked by the user to inform the algorithm (Spotify, 2018) of your preferences, so it can fine tune your personal algorithm. This feature, of liking and disliking songs makes the user to stop what they are currently doing to complete the action, giving their full attention to the app and forcing “you to stand still and pay attention to the” (Boyd, 2014, p.1) song that the algorithm gave you. These features help keep the user’s attention within the app, giving the company more streaming time and therefore more money.

 

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