If Spotify recommends Taylor Swift to me one more time, I might start believing it knows something about me that I don’t. It’s strange how a platform can make you question your own musical identity, even if you, like me, have never listened to T. Swizzle. Perhaps she and Westside Gunn have more in common than I thought, or perhaps there are assumptions even my own listening choices cannot defy.

Genre as Culture on Spotify

Spotify may be a useful site for finding music and creating playlists, but it is also important for examining how genre and identity are produced today. In looking at how Spotify organizes genre and distributes listening statistics, as discussed in Muchitsch & Werner’s paper, we can understand genre not simply as a descriptive category but as a system of representation that shapes how listeners come to understand themselves. Genre formation has long been recognized as unstable — “fleeting processes whose boundaries are permeable and fluctuating, yet nevertheless culturally and socially safeguarded” (Brackett, 2016 qtd. in Muchitsch & Werner, 2024, p. 306). Genres constantly shift and divide, giving rise to newer sub-genres like indie pop or bubble grunge. But genre is also representational; it defines a type of music and, by extension, a type of listener.

Metadata and Identity

Spotify’s use of genre as metadata allows us to better see how they construct identities — genre becomes an identity category embedded into algorithmic logic, a technical shorthand for grouping users and predicting their future behavior. Besides recommendations, the advent of personalized playlists — like the well-known (and awful) “Just For You”s — are examples of how technology actively dictates the media we encounter. The algorithm assumes an identity about the listener and continually supplies content that reinforces that assumption. Although it appears that our listening habits inform the algorithm, the relationship is indeed reciprocal. Technology also shapes our perceptions of our own identities by offering back a curated and often reductive portrait of who we “are” as listeners.

Bollmer and Performativity

This feedback loop often goes unnoticed because of the widespread belief that technologies are neutral. Bollmer’s work on representation, identity, and performativity challenges this assumption, reminding us that representational identities—such as those produced in digital platforms—affect our capacity to act and perform within society. Especially as branding culture dominates the media landscape, individuals frequently become the “faces” of genres, embodying particular aesthetics or attitudes. These stylized identities influence how other listeners understand themselves and how the algorithm categorizes them in return. And, as we know but will not explore fully here, these categorizations are far from unbiased.

For Bollmer, identity is something both enacted and mediated. We cannot fully control how we are represented, nor can we detach ourselves from the biases and conditions that shape how we perform in the world. At the same time, we are constantly surrounded by stimuli that instruct us in the ways we should construct our identities. Playlists and music taste are only slim examples of the performative acts through which we present and negotiate a sense of self. Spotify, by mediating genre, participates in this process, co-producing musical identity through representational systems that determine what counts as meaningful performance.

What does this mean for users?

Rather than stable categories, genres have become interfaces for identity. Users construct self-image through listening habits, while platforms translate those habits into data profiles that feed back into the listening experience. Mood playlists—“chill,” “in love,” “rainy day,” “main character”—make this even clearer. They frame music not only as sound, but as a tool for managing and performing the self. In this way, Spotify exemplifies how contemporary media systems blur the lines between what we choose and what is chosen for us, shaping identity through the very categories that claim to represent it.

Identity as “Self Work”

Tia DeNora’s idea of music as a “technology of the self” deepens this understanding of genre and identity. For DeNora, people use music to regulate emotion, construct moods, and shape situations—music is a tool for self-presentation and self-maintenance. But when platforms pre-organize music into specific categories, they intervene in this process, prescribing what kinds of selves the listener might want to inhabit. What once felt like personal, intuitive self-work becomes filtered through Spotify’s mood-based playlists, quietly guiding the identities we perform and the emotions we deem appropriate.

Implications

The implications of this are subtle but significant; If identity is enacted through musical choice—as Bollmer and DeNora both suggest—then algorithmic curation narrows the range of performative possibilities. The listener performs the self through their music, but the platform anticipates, predicts, and nudges that performance, creating a closed loop where identity is both expressed and engineered. Genre, once a loose cultural concept, becomes a data-driven identity label that platforms use to categorize and influence behavior. And because these systems appear neutral, the shaping of identity through recommendations often feels natural rather than infrastructural.

In the end, the relationship between genre, identity, and streaming platforms reveals far more than how music is organized—it shows how contemporary technologies dictate who we are allowed to become. Spotify doesn’t just categorize sound; it categorizes people, returning our listening habits to us as ready-made portraits of taste and selfhood. Between Bollmer’s emphasis on mediated identity and DeNora’s conception of music as self-shaping, it becomes clear that our musical preferences are never solely our own. They emerge from an ongoing negotiation between personal expression and platform governance. And if my “rap-only” listening history can still make Spotify insist I’m a Taylor Swift fan, it’s worth asking: are we using these systems to express ourselves, or are they teaching us who we ought to be?

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2019.—Introduction.

DeNora, Tia. “Music as a Technology of the Self.” Poetics, vol. 27, no. 1, 1999, pp. 31–56.

Muchitsch, Veronika, and Ann Werner. “The Mediation of Genre, Identity, and Difference in Contemporary (Popular) Music Streaming.” Popular Music and Society, 2024, pp. 302-328.

Written by Allie Demetrick 

Photo from Spotify