Euan Stamper

Streaming Platforms, Perfect Fit Content, and the Institutional Degradation of Cultural Democracy

‘Slopify Music’ is a satirical exploration of the adoption of AI technologies by entertainment streaming platforms. Taking the form of an audio advert for a fictional music streaming platform, ‘Slopify,’ on which human-made music is accessible only through a premium paid tier, the project explores the value of human creativity alongside the ways in which commercial interests drive streaming organisations’ use of AI.

The entanglement of music streaming platforms with AI, like Spotify’s use of algorithmically generated playlists and inclusion of AI-generated music on the platform, is well documented. Liz Pelly observes 2025 as ‘a year in which the biggest music streaming company has made headlines’ due to ‘its deals with major labels to build generative AI products,’ illustrating Spotify’s movement towards ‘perfect fit content’ (PFC) (‘Spotify Wrapped,’ Mood Machine 58). She defines PFC as ‘low-budget filler tracks; stock music from background music studios to fit certain moods and genres, licensed by Spotify under… cheaper deal terms.’ She observes that ‘search result overrides’ are used to prioritise pushing cheaper content when users go looking for certain moods (Mood Machine 58, 59). Even listeners not explicitly searching for AI sounds are invisibly directed towards them. In privileging algorithmic functionality and AI-generated content over human creativity, streaming platforms are degrading their role as cultural institutions and threatening democratic engagement with art. ‘Slopify Music’ presents a satirical look at what forms cultural engagement and mediation might take in the future if organisations like Spotify continue to use AI. 

With a user base of over 750 million and a share of almost half the UK streaming market in 2024, the power Spotify wields over cultural engagement and aesthetic values produces understandable anxieties about cultural monopolisation (Paine). Researchers Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica M. Silbey define institutions as ‘the commonly circulating norms and values covering a recognisable field of human action’ (4). They propose that institutions shape ‘stable, predictable patterns of behaviour,’ thereby reducing chaos and friction. These ‘rules’ solve collective action problems by creating familiar and expected ways of interacting (5). Though musical engagement takes many forms, the centrality of streaming platforms within media ecosystems affords corporations like Spotify the power to shape these societal patterns. As the primary mechanism through which an increasing number of people engage with music, the functionalities of streaming platforms are central in shaping the ‘familiar and expected’ patterns of contemporary music ecologies.

Hartzog and Silbey propose that ‘AI systems afford offloading human tasks that demand wisdom and skill onto machines, which undermines and downgrades institutionally aggregated expertise’ (3). At its inception, highly knowledgeable human experts compiled Spotify’s playlists. However, Liz Pelly observes that Spotify has increasingly ‘prided itself on its machine-learning systems, which power many of its recommendations’ (‘The Ghosts in the Machine’). As user engagement is maintained through AI functionality, the cognitive skills refined by humans as they perform tasks are lost. Expert knowledge of musical history has been systematically replaced by cost-saving AI operations. 

Furthermore, Hartzog and Silbey propose that as ‘AI systems afford the automation and streamlining of important decisions, short-circuiting institutional decision-making,’ choices that have ethical and moral implications are not undertaken by humans (3). AI bypasses the systems designed to prioritize human perspectives over institutional demands for efficiency or profit. Outsourcing musical curation and creation not only homogenises content, but also threatens the musical ecosystem’s potential to be responsive to the complexities of human interaction. Algorithmic predictability across streaming platforms evades spontaneity and limits the transformational potential of shared culture.

These concerns are echoed by Jonathan Gingerich in his analysis of the threat that AI in streaming poses to democracy (Gingerich). He observes that algorithmically generated playlists allow ‘existing cultural preferences to become further ingrained rather than discovering new artworks that they did not seek out and perhaps did not expect to enjoy’ (235). Slopify Music’s satirical perspective acknowledges the contemporary realities of surveillance capitalism (accumulating data in order to predict user behaviour) by juxtaposing the corporate value of data with the democratic value of human creativity. Karen Hao situates AI within historical patterns of technological development in which ‘those who successfully rally for a technology’s creation are those who have the power and resources to do the rallying’ (Hao). Observing AI’s entanglement with commercial interests, she notes that ‘the vision they impose’ of ‘what the technology is and whom it can benefit’ is thus ‘the vision of a narrow elite, imbued with all their blind spots and self-serving philosophies’ (Hao). ‘Slopify Music’ applies this logic to contemporary cultural ecologies, encouraging listeners to question what value they place upon music, rather than what value commercial organisations assign to it. 

Understood through its value to institutional democracy and equity, human creativity is invaluable. As AI development rapidly intensifies, it threatens not just creative engagement with art and culture but also the cultural institutions central to societal structure. ‘Slopify Music’ satirically exposes this ongoing cultural and institutional degradation, imagining an increasingly atomised and unequal future. 

In creating ‘Slopify Music,’ striking a balance between creativity and engagement as well as rigorous scholarship was crucial. The feedback from user testing emphasised the inclusion of scholarly resources within the project itself to ground its critical perspective. Initially, the project was purely audio; following this feedback, I included a visual element. Taking cues from the design of Spotify’s current AI DJ feature (pictured below), I designed a polished visualiser as the project’s visual foundation. This allowed me to visually integrate critical screenshots while keeping the DJ voice consistent. The test audiences enjoyed the satirical tone, so I tried to maintain this visually. I hope the simplicity of the rudimentary screenshots alongside the slick AI visualisation deliberately juxtaposes the ostensibly frictionless innovations of new technology against the forms of cultural engagement it seeks to make redundant. 

(Spotify’s AI DJ visualisation which inspired the design of Slopify Music’s DJ voiceover)

Bibliography

Doctorow, Cory. Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. Verso Books, 2025. 

Eede, Christian. ‘Spotify’s Daniel Ek leads €600 million investment in AI military defence company’. DJ Mag. 20 Jun. 2025, https://djmag.com/news/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-eu600-million-investment-ai-military-defence-company.

Forde, Eamonn. ‘Spotify is trumpeting big paydays for artists – but only a tiny fraction of them are actually thriving.’ The Guardian. 12 Mar. 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/mar/12/spotify-is-trumpeting-big-paydays-for-artists-but-only-a-tiny-fraction-of-them-are-actually-thriving-loud-and-clear-report.

Gould, Lauren. ‘Ditch Spotify: how to actually support the bands and artists you love.’ The Guardian. 7 Mar. 2026,  https://www.theguardian.com/thefilter-us/2026/mar/06/best-ideas-for-supporting-bands-and-artists-you-love.

Hao, Karen. Empire of AI : Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination. Penguin Books, 2025.

Hartzog, Woodrow, and Jessica M. Silbey. ‘How AI Destroys Institutions’. Social Science Research Network, 5 Dec. 2025. papers.ssrn.com, https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=5870623.

Paine, Andre. ‘MIDiA: Spotify Secures Almost Half of UK Streaming Market – but Overall Subscriber Growth Slows.’ Music Week. 28 Mar. 2025, https://www.musicweek.com/digital/read/midia-spotify-secures-almost-half-of-uk-streaming-market-but-overall-subscriber-growth-slows/091682 .

Pelly, Liz. Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. One Signal Publishers/Atria, 2025.

—. ‘This Spotify Wrapped Season, Don’t Outsource Your Love of Music to AI.’ The Guardian, 3 Dec. 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/dec/03/spotify-wrapped-ai-create-your-own-playlists .

—. ‘The Ghosts in the Machine: The Story of an Occupation.’ Harper’s Magazine, Jan 2025. https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/ .

Cite this page: 
Stamper, Euan. 'Slopify Music'. Cream of the Slop. version 1.0, Digital Humanities for Literary Studies 2025-26, University of Edinburgh, 10 Apr. 2026, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dh2025-26/.

Mar 18, 2026