Wellness creep into music streaming platforms: From pure chill to aural slop

Abstract

This article addresses and unpacks the phenomenon of wellness creep – the increasing pervasiveness of ‘wellness culture’ in digital media and society – examining its proliferation into music streaming platforms. This conception of well-being as an individual responsibility that can be managed through consumption now dominates different sectors, becoming particularly prominent in contemporary digital platforms and social media environments. Through platform walkthrough and critical interface analysis of Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music, this article considers how industry discourse, user interfaces, and playlist products increasingly push pseudoscientific and individualistic ideas of health and self-care as tools for the pursuit of an aspirational good life through music consumption. Our analysis demonstrates how wellness creep operates on three increasingly normative levels. First, we focus on how platforms push ‘chill’ as a dominant aesthetic category and affective disposition, which in turn paves the way for more profound layers of wellness creep. Second, we demonstrate how platforms stage wellness atmospheres as ways of acting and feeling that reproduce normative conceptions of physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. In doing so, we show how the promise of wellness can be mobilized to promote conservative and even extremist regimes of subjectivity and governmentality. We conclude by arguing that the normalization of wellness creep sets the stage for the recommendation and consumption of ‘aural slop’, understood as the low-quality, commercially optimized musical products of generative artificial intelligence.

Introduction

This article addresses and unpacks the increasing pervasiveness of ‘wellness culture’ (Baker, 2022) in music streaming platforms (MSPs). By ‘wellness’ we mean a set of psychosocial tendencies emphasizing lifestyles, habits, and behaviors that center health and positivity as the obvious pathway towards happiness and success. This conception of well-being as an individual responsibility that can be managed through consumption (Davies, 2022; O’Neill, 2020, 2021) now dominates different sectors, becoming particularly prominent in contemporary digital platforms and social media environments (Docherty, 2021; Smith et al., 2024). We argue that this phenomenon constitutes a wellness creep.

Of course, wellness itself is not new – and, indeed, we position it as part of a much longer tradition stemming from New Age countercultural values (Baker, 2022). Still, we are witnessing a new stage marked by the proliferation of this neoliberal, biopolitical, and aspirational subjectivity that now involves using and consuming music media for the improvement of one’s well-being in different spheres: spiritual, emotional, physical. In that regard, the phrasing creep is used here very deliberately to highlight the gradual expansion of wellness cultures across industries and sectors – music streaming specifically – in ways that are unpredicted, somewhat fuzzy, and often non-linear. We follow Bishop’s (2023) notion of ‘influencer creep’ – which she describes as the movement in which practices originated within the context of aspiring and professional digital content creation come to animate and affect other spheres and industries, expanding beyond their original aims and scope, thus shaping experiences and culture in unanticipated ways. In a similar vein, Koops (2021) defines the widespread phrasing ‘function creep’ as the phenomenon in which a system’s activities are transformed in imperceptible and therefore contested ways – the contested character resulting precisely from the fact that the change happens under the radar, without opportunities for discussion or debate.

Rather than providing a strict definition for wellness culture when it creeps into music streaming, we are interested in foregrounding its conceptual vagueness and emptiness, and its unquestioned expansion and application into music contexts. In particular, we unpack this phenomenon through the examination of music distribution via streaming products such as playlists, critically exploring how three platforms – Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Spotify – reproduce and reinforce neoliberal, datafiable, and advertising-friendly (Drott, 2018a; Eriksson et al., 2019; Prey, 2018) conceptions of physical and emotional well-being. Although we understand that the use of music as mood-boosting, muzak or ambiance precedes and transcends streaming platforms (Allen Anderson, 2015; Sterne, 1997), our analysis highlights the specificities of the phenomenon we define as wellness creep in the current cultural and technological conjuncture. We use critical interface analysis and walkthrough methods to bring the creeping movement of wellness discourse to the fore, and show how seemingly innocuous music products can push a biopolitics of well-being that is inherently conservative. In so doing, we also provide a more thorough and empirically driven articulation for the ubiquitous emotional signifier ‘chill’ so often mobilized by platforms, examining what it means in practice and how it is inserted into broader discourses of wellness. In other words, this article tackles the origin, spread, and contemporary manifestations of wellness creep in music streaming.

More than focusing on algorithmic recommendation and personalization, we are interested in meaning and cultural power, scrutinizing how MSPs ‘stage’ wellness by prioritizing ways of acting and feeling that reproduce normative conceptions of physical and emotional well-being (Eriksson et al., 2019). We unpack wellness as a pervasive (even if extremely hazy) aesthetic vernacular that invokes and brings forth certain affective and cognitive dispositions (Ngai, 2012), simultaneously constructing and promising to fulfill fantasies of happiness and success (Drott, 2018a) through music consumption. In a similar vein, we also analyze how, as part of this wellness creep, music is supposed to unproblematically mitigate the effects of, and simultaneously prepare the user to keep thriving in, a reality of stress, acceleration, and unrest. Building on existing work that discusses how platforms keep collecting granular data about users’ behavioral patterns and contexts of consumption, which they use to sell advertising and optimize their content and products (Drott, 2018b; Prey, 2018), our contribution focuses on how wellness cultures are designed to help people ‘cope’ with the daily grind and the exigences of productive work under capitalism. However, our contention is precisely that this objective is never explicitly acknowledged in streaming products.

In addition, we argue that the alleged transformative power of wellness cultures in music streaming – their capacity for supposedly bringing happiness and success to individuals – is legitimized and validated by streaming platforms through the continuous mobilization of two further elements: pseudoscience discourse and artificial intelligence products. The use of fringe and quack science ranges from more neutral to openly extremist undertones, which we position as analogous to political trajectories previously described as the ‘wellness to alt-right pipeline’ (Baker, 2022; Gordon and Hobbes, 2021; Munn, 2019) whereby wellness cultures and ideas are gateways for the dissemination of conservative and extremist political ideologies of the self and society. Ultimately, our analysis demonstrates how wellness creep promotes (even if not fully dictates) particular regimes of subjectivity and governmentality, and how these are a fertile ground to the commercial optimization of data and generative AI. We conclude that, in the context of MSPs, wellness creep also provides the conditions for the rise of wellness crap: namely, a plethora of commercially-optimized bland, generic, mostly junk, but data-driven, AI-generated soundscapes that feed the well-being-focused streaming products – a phenomenon we define as ‘aural slop’.

The next sections situate our conceptualization of wellness creep as interfacing with both a growing literature on wellness cultures across different industries and a vast tradition of scholarship on the mediation of atmospheres and music. The following section briefly outlines the methodology used to support our empirical analysis. The main body of the article is divided into three sections. First, we focus on ‘chill’ as a widespread signifier and examine its central role as a template of feeling in this broader wellness creep into music streaming. Second, we outline how these wellness atmospheres manifest in specific streaming products that address spiritual, emotional, and bodily well-being. Lastly, we analyze how wellness creep and the prevalence of these music products provide the conditions for AI-generated ‘aural slop’ to thrive in music platforms. We conclude by highlighting the impact of music streaming wellness creep on healthcare systems and the relationship of both these elements with questions of agency.

Well-being, gurus, and biohacking: Contextualizing wellness creep

Our conceptualization of wellness creep draws on an emergent body of critical scholarship examining the production, circulation, and contestation of psychic investments in the commodification of well-being (Baker, 2022; O’Neill, 2020, 2021, 2025; Smith et al., 2024). Indeed, although the precise relationship between the terms ‘wellness’ and ‘well-being’ can be disputed, we understand the former here as the broader ‘cultural field’ that encompasses simultaneously a growing movement and a flourishing market (O’Neill, 2021), and the latter as its operationalization by industries and platforms. We position wellness then as a psychic disposition and a mode of subjectivity in which individuals (especially, women) are encouraged and compelled to invest in themselves as a ‘project’ through self-care, self-optimization, and overall positivity, and where the understanding of health as a matter of personal responsibility makes the regulation of bodily and emotional states acquire the status of economic opportunity (Davies, 2022; O’Neill, 2020). Despite the focus on individualized commitment to (and cultivation of) well-being, the rise of wellness can also be linked to a generalized decline in public welfare (O’Neill, 2021, 2025), as part of the appeal is precisely to find alternative solutions to address unmet health needs (Baker, 2022).

As discussed by Baker (2022) many of these principles of wellness and well-being can be tracked back to the so-called Californian ideology – the countercultural movement prevalent in Silicon Valley which emerged from a combination of distrust in the existing institutions, bohemian lifestyle, a focus on self-fulfillment, entrepreneurial mindset, and a belief in the disruptive and revolutionary potential of technology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996; Benjamin, 2024; Marwick, 2017). As such, wellness discourses have an obvious New Age undertone present in wider areas of Californian culture, including the aim to heal and repair a broken world and the focus on self-experimentation through a range of alternative (and often non-clinical) practices (Baker, 2022). The New Age movement tends to focus on the self as a receptacle for spiritual experiences, centering individual awakening and consciousness expansion, which often involves a combination of loosely coherent practices such as meditation, manifestation, and psychic invocation (Cotter, 2022), which generally disjoints individual fulfillment from collective and political action (Rosa, 2023). The focus on wellness can also be linked to the popularization of ‘therapeutic culture’ (Illouz, 2007), in which self-awareness, auto-reflexivity, and emotional modulation become essential components of individual’s success in the personal and professional realms. Crucially, this shift towards an individualized managerial sensibility that emphasizes personal growth, self-investment, and optimization as the key for success has gained traction within a broader socio-political context of ‘generalized insecurity and vulnerability’, in which social problems are privatized and the inner self is framed as the only source of healing (Foster, 2016: 87). In contemporary digital cultures, this commodification of therapeutic discourse that involves a blend of biopolitical self-investment and commercial, mediated entertainment has been described as ‘theratainment’ (Stein, 2024). Overall, this apparently messy combination of multicultural and interdisciplinary beliefs and rituals that blends spiritual, emotional and physical healing, often presented as a ‘holistic approach’, is very typical of New Age discourse (English-Lueck, 1990; Sutton, 2020) and wellness culture (Baker, 2022).

Advancing the discussion, we argue that this wellness creep resonates with historical manifestations of the Californian ideology in yet another point – the hope that technology is or can be a solution to fix all sorts of problems. That is, whilst therapeutic culture has historically been associated with an increasing reliance on professional expertise for addressing individualized needs and ills (Foster, 2016), more recently this work has also been delegated to other forms of knowledge and authority. When it comes to contemporary well-being industries, one of the core premises is that the continuous collection of quantifiable information about one’s body, mental state, and mood, produces actionable results that are considered scientific, legitimate and authoritative (Neff and Nafus, 2016). In the literature, the phenomenon is often examined through a focus on ‘self-tracking cultures’ and the datafied self (Lupton et al., 2022), which comprise the regular gathering of personal information and the statistical analysis of patterns such as habits, behaviors, and feelings, often with the purpose of improving one’s health (Schull, 2019). This instrumentalization of technologies for personal amelioration has been described as evidencing the intertwinement of self-reflection, self-optimization, and self-commodification of neoliberal ideologies (Stark, 2020) – this, however, does not mean that users cannot feel empowered and meaningfully supported by these same artefacts (Lomborg and Frandsen, 2016), which highlights the complexities and ambivalences of everyday data cultures (Burgess et al., 2022). More recently, this fantasy of technosolutionism has manifested in the rise of AI evangelism (Benjamin, 2024), which posits this latest digital innovation as the ultimate holder of humanistic values.

As another manifestation of these historical developments, we also have now a growing industry of self-appointed health and lifestyle ‘gurus’ (Ajana, 2022) who use their personal experiences as evidence to offer guidance through social media platforms on topics such as spirituality, mindfulness, diet, and exercise – often spreading questionable and even misleading scientific advice (Baker, 2022). A concept often mobilized in relation to this lifestyle guidance is ‘biohacking’ (Grewe-Salfeld, 2021), through which these aspiring and professional influencers reproduce the DIY, entrepreneurial mindset of Silicon Valley and the rejection to standard medical practice, oftentimes evoking a kind of attainable-by-practice, more-than-human self. Crucially, these ‘lay’ wellness influencers share space, claims to expertise, and audiences’ attention with actual medical doctors who create well-being content (O’Neill, 2025), which demonstrates the varying levels of training and scientific rigor that pervade the health advice available on digital platforms. Conversely, we agree with O’Neill (2025) in avoiding clear-cut distinctions between the scientific basis (or lack thereof) of certain online content, as wellness influencer culture can also be disseminated by legitimate medical professionals. Wellness influencer cultures, then, simultaneously recourse to scientific authority whilst often presenting themselves as an alternative to the medical institutions. This demands us to think in more complex and nuanced ways about how exactly the discourse of wellness achieves authority and legitimacy (Baker and Rojek, 2019; O’Neill, 2025). In other words, from the scholarship above we see a connecting thread between individualized approaches to well-being, the self-entrepreneurial aspects of Californian culture, and the trust on ambivalent forms of scientific authority, business, and technology to improve and expand human life. In this paper, we examine how these wellness cultures specifically manifest on music streaming platforms.

Moods and vibes: MSPs and the mediation of atmospheres

Complementing our theorization of wellness culture, our examination of wellness creep also draws on scholarship that conceptualizes and historicizes the rise of (music) media for self-management and emotional calibration – continuing the thread of trusting on technologies for the organization of everyday life. In that regard, we approach MSPs as ‘atmospheric architectures’ (Böhme, 2018) and commercial mediators of atmospheres – or, infrastructures for the production, circulation, and commodification of both human feelings and ambient energies (Highmore, 2017; Roquet, 2021; Salazar, 2023). This, in turn, is also in line with an increasing interest in ‘ambient media’ (Roquet, 2016), which are meant to facilitate the management of the relationship ‘between the self and the surrounding air’ (p.5). This means that atmospheres are always maintained through labor that is at once ‘ours’ but also often delegated to particular objects (Highmore, 2017) – which matters because these objects help to invoke, orient, or prioritize normative ways of feeling and acting (Ngai, 2012).

Related to this work of managing energies and atmospheres, our analysis is also in dialogue with scholarship on popular music and capitalism, especially the history of programmed music in commercial environments (Sterne, 1997). Our approach concurs with certain aspects of recent critiques of music streaming platforms as contemporary distributors of Muzak (Allen Anderson, 2015), in ways that disconnect music tracks from their creative context to turn them into ‘emotional wallpaper’ (Pelly, 2017, 2025). This decontextualized muzak-like music would also provide a set of tools for consumer management and the implementation of regimes of self-governance and control (Eriksson et al., 2019). Indeed, the scholarship on popular music has for decades discussed its functional applications, with substantial accounts of (and critiques to) the use of music and listening devices for individual emotional regulation (Bull, 2000; Campos Valverde and Hesmondhalgh, 2025; DeNora, 2000; Hesmondhalgh and Campos Valverde, 2025; Nowak, 2016) in ways that favor coping strategies, integration of daily routines, and workplace productivity. However, in comparison to some of the literature on streaming above, here we focus less on the ‘streambait’ (Pelly 2018) character of these wellness-oriented musical products to foreground the cultural and political implications of wellness creep, and how the development of these musical markets brings about specific ideologies.

Similarly, we understand these management strategies for emotional and commercial optimization as predecessors to contemporary analyses of the rise of ‘mood’ as genre in music distribution and commercialization (Krogh, 2020, 2022; Pelly, 2025), which in turn we see as an essential facilitator of the rise of specific atmospheric categories such as ‘chill’, which we unpack below. The increasingly blurry boundaries of musical genre and mood curation are also the result of the emphasis that streaming platforms have recently put on ‘genre-less’ (Leight, 2019) playlist products and hyper-personalized niche genres (Spotify, 2023). We further position both this hazy understanding of genre and the growing framing of music for mood management as rooted in previous commercial strategies popularized before the advent of streaming. As such, we treat the analyzed streaming products below as continuing – not disrupting – the commercial tactics used for the marketing and distribution of ‘world music’ and its relation to the self-management of subjectivities (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000; Kassabian, 2004).

We similarly note the connection between the rise of AI-generated aural slop and the established tendency of the music industry to use repackaged back catalogue into compilations and remixes to boost revenue, particularly during periods of technological turmoil and lower profit margins (Reynolds, 2011). In this context, we see the literature on streaming and advertising (Drott, 2018a; Prey, 2018) as shedding light on the continuation of these emotional management and revenue-seeking practices. The organization of audio into moments, contexts, and moods is often foregrounded by the platforms themselves as an opportunity to map, cluster, and segment audiences and lure in the brands and investors that are foundational to their highly financialized and sometimes advertising-based business models (Prey, 2016, 2018; Till, 2023). In other words, our examination of wellness creep addresses the intersection between the literature on music, media, and capitalism precisely because it illuminates the historical construction of the neoliberal management of subjectivity and the biopolitics of emotion, which precedes the rise of digital platforms.

Research design

Deliberately responding to a current ‘Spotify-centrism’ (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2024) in music streaming research, our study combines the platform walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018) and critical interface analysis (Stanfill, 2015) of Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. First, we conducted the walkthrough phase through the systematic usage of these three platforms in April 2025 from two different desktop access points. This involved sustained and iterative engagement with the three platforms, which was documented in the form of field notes, diagrams, and multiple screenshots that allowed us to identify and interpret both the cultural references mobilized by the software and the technological mechanisms mediating our experiences as users. Although the method itself is not prescriptive (Duguay and Gold-Apel, 2023), in practice we paid special attention to affordances, functions, invitations for action, and symbolic representations. Lupinacci created new accounts, on either freemium (Spotify) or premium (Amazon Music and Apple Music) tiers. This allowed her to select various seed artists and topics at sign up stage, capturing platform recommendations with a certain degree of personalization and less affected by cold-start issues, but uninfluenced by personal recommendation history in her pre-existing accounts. Campos accessed the public versions of these three platform interfaces without creating an account, as a way of exploring the most public version of the interface, presumably uninfluenced by personalization. Second, we completed the critical interface analysis through the subsequent classification and examination of over 570 screenshots collected. We paid special attention to the way the recommendations were displayed, and the marketing copy used to advertise the different recommender products such as playlists or third-party collaborations. In addition, we also collected around 50 PR sources about wellness, health, influencers, neuroscience, AI partnerships and other related topics from the corporate blogs and websites of these streaming companies. Worthy of note is the context of this interface analysis during a significant moment of market expansion of AI-generated products. Lastly, we organized the themes and theoretical insights that arose from these two methods through the joint creation of mindmaps and diagrams stemming from our interpretations of the data. In reference to this methodology, we would like to highlight that we see our scholarly collaboration as a collective effort, where both of us should be understood as equal authors.

In the discussion that follows, we focus on the meanings embedded in these platforms’ user interfaces, as they make ‘normative claim[s] about [their] purposes and appropriate use that both demonstrates an understanding of users and builds a set of possibilities into the object’ (Stanfill, 2015:1060). In doing so, we also draw attention to the visual and textual semiotic content of MSPs. Although we do not examine user interpretations of such built-in possibilities, we use walkthrough methods (Duguay and Gold-Apel, 2023; Light et al., 2018) to understand how these interfaces are shown to users and how they prescribe certain forms of navigation and interaction, particularly for new users. Here, we focus specifically on the everyday interaction with these interfaces to document ‘screens, features and flows of activity’ to establish what are the ‘intended purpose, embedded cultural meanings and implied ideal users and uses’ (Light et al., 2018: 881). We foreground how streaming interfaces shape understandings of music and wellness, and how particular elements of these platforms (e.g., playlists, recommended content) are instrumentalized to advance neoliberal understandings of culture and well-being. However, we are aware of the limitations of our analysis due to the focus on Western-centric platforms. It is possible that the choice of platforms in our study accentuates the prevalence of the neoliberal understandings of well-being that we discuss below, and future scholarship could test the resilience and replicability of these findings for platforms such as Boomplay, Anghami or QQ Music. We are also aware of the limitations of a study without user feedback, where questions of agency or personal experience are not discussed – a matter we come back to in the concluding section.

In search of pure chill: The emergence of wellness creep

‘Chill’ is often highlighted in the reviewed literature as one of the core categories of MSPs, especially Spotify (Eriksson et al., 2019; Pelly, 2025) – and, indeed, according to Spotify’s internal data, ‘chill’ constitutes the service’s ‘top listening moment’ (Prey, 2020). Our contention is that the prevalence given to ‘chill’ by MSPs makes it a gateway for wellness products and ideas to creep into music streaming. ‘Chill’ as a category inherits and continues the functions and characteristics of muzak or airport/elevator/mall music in streaming contexts, and contributes to the same kind of spatial, human and financial governance mechanisms associated with muzak (Sterne, 1997). However, in this section we demonstrate how chill also fulfills more complex ideological functions thanks to its conceptual vagueness. ‘Chill’ is a pervasive signifier presented by the different platforms as a moment in the daily routine, a musical subgenre, a function, a music aesthetic, and a template of feeling.

Chill has been framed as a moment (Prey, 2020) integrated into the broader daily routines constructed by streaming platforms. Streaming recommendations fluctuate with the daily schedule (Graph 1), and summon users at specific times of the day – ranging from energy and focus-oriented products in the morning or (platform-assumed) working hours, to relaxing, chill or even sleep-inducing recommendations in the evening.

Graph 1.

Chill as part of the daily schedule.

In this setting marked by chrononormativity (Eriksson et al., 2019), we see a form of ritual domestication (Siles, 2023) as the intended outcome: the integration of chill as a specific energy level in users’ late afternoon or evening routines. Chill often appears in the platforms’ interfaces and products associated with terms such as ‘unwinding’, ‘sit back’, ‘relax’, and ‘loosen up’ (Figure 1). This is presumably preceded by ‘focused’ work or study, its platform-dictated counterpart.

Figure 1.

Chill as energy level.

In other words, the chill/focus binary is part and parcel of the platforms’ co-option of everyday self-management tactics for coping with demands for productivity. However, this is just as much about dictating a schedule as it is about suggesting energy levels that users should have at each time of the day. It also assumes an imagined audience that does not include stay-at-home parents, carers, or retirees. Crucially, though, in mobilizing ‘chill’ in this sense, MSPs equate individuals’ opportunities for well-being as dependent on their capacity to self-regulate.

MSPs also deploy ‘chill’ within a functional-to-aesthetic spectrum of music consumption (Graph 2). In its more functional understanding, ‘chill’ is a resource that contributes to preparing the body to complete certain tasks, such as work, sleep, or exercising. In this sense, it is closely related to the energy management functions that we outline above. In its most aesthetic reading, chill is very much a music subgenre (of EDM or rap for instance), and it is characterized by specific musical elements such as bpm, instrumentation or rhythm (Figure 2).

Graph 2.

Functional-to-aesthetic spectrum of ‘chill'.

Figure 2.

Chill as music subgenre.

In the language that streaming interfaces use, chill (and other adjacent terms such as ‘mellow’ or ‘stress free’ music) is also a context-specific subgenre or sound aesthetic linked both to urban environments, such as cafes, lounges, or libraries, and to private spaces such as bedrooms (Figure 3). In this sense, ‘chill’ evokes quietness and calmness, allegedly helping listeners to decompress regardless of how busy and hectic their actual physical location might be. This kind of aesthetic subgenre is presented by MSPs as appropriate for the completion of specific functions within those spaces, such as reading, and very much oriented to a specific kind of urban dweller.

Figure 3.

Chill as context.

This aesthetic/function spectrum also shows how streaming genre classifications prescribe a certain organization of the urban space, the music market and its audiences, extending Sterne’s (1997) arguments on shopping malls to other urban areas. It also resonates with previous accounts of how Spotify attempts to programme users’ ordinary and intimate activities (Burgess et al., 2022). In this context, ‘chill’ is mobilized by the music platforms as an umbrella term to refer to the staging of comforting, calm, ‘cozy atmospheres’ (Salazar, 2023). In doing so, MSPs promote the idea that atmospheres can be manipulated through consumption (Roquet, 2016), and that once the ‘ambiance’ is changed (such as, for instance, when the user presses play on a ‘chill’ playlist), then their emotional states change with it in somewhat predictable ways.

Indeed, for streaming platforms, ‘chill’ also exists within a spectrum of human emotions. Whilst the three analyzed platforms also offered products focused on other emotional states – including sadness, anger, and happiness – we posit that ‘chill’ is more than a term used to evoke energy levels, functions, or genres: it has come to represent a desirable middle-ground of the broader range of templates of feeling offered by MSPs (Figure 4). We mobilize the notion of templates of feeling (borrowing from DeNora, 2000; Highmore, 2017) to highlight the fact that music streaming platforms offer pre-formatted emotional patterns that individuals can incorporate and appropriate in their own lives to self-regulate.

Figure 4.

Chill as template of feeling.

This desirable middle-ground represented by chill is an idealized construction of a stabilized, equilibrated emotional subject, who consumes music that is often displayed by MSPs as ‘laid back’, ‘low-key’, and ‘mellow’. In other words, MSPs suggest templates of feeling that are based on the principle of emotionally calibrating oneself as a pathway to well-being, but also to fulfill the expectations of the desirable self-regulated subject (Illouz, 2007).

In all of the spectra presented above, the promised effects of consuming ‘chill’ products (relaxing, focusing, calming down, managing energy levels) are based on allegedly common-sense ideas – meant to be taken for granted. However, we identified that sometimes the deployment of ‘chill’ and its assumed subcategories is done within varied degrees of reliance on scientific backing (Graph 3).

Graph 3.

Degrees of scientificity.

Sometimes, the platforms position ‘chill’ as a mental or bodily state that can be induced through pseudoscientific practices of music consumption. For example, in suggesting that listening to music with a specific measurable element such as an Hz frequency would enhance one’s ‘state of consciousness’ (Figure 5). In other instances, MSPs mobilize ‘chill’ more closely to scientific claims, but without presenting such evidence. This is the case of the use of ‘chill’ understood as a state of relaxation that precedes sleep. Whilst the necessity of being relaxed as a precursor to sleep may seem logical or plausible, we could not find any scientific evidence to back this in MSPs websites, let alone evidence that such playlists indeed induce the announced mental states. Our analysis thus concurs with O’Neill’s (2025), in that these streaming products often exist within a broader context of ambivalence fostered by wellness cultures, where some claims to scientific evidence and authority may be made without technical precision.

Figure 5.

Chill as (pseudo)scientific marker.

Our contention is that the widespread use of ‘chill’ and other language referring to self-soothing by MSPs is based on this conceptual openness identified above and relies on the apparent common sense understanding of what ‘chill’ is. For example, in a playlist product such as Spotify’s Daylist, the use of music categories such as ‘chill’ is at once a reference to daily routines, an aesthetic and music genre, and a template of feeling. Crucially, we believe that existing literature on ‘chill’ products misses a critical point. This seemingly harmless signifier becomes a gateway to mobilize, normalize, and promote the spread of, a certain biopolitical order: a broader view of well-being as a matter of individual responsibility and fit into emotional normativity that can be managed through cultural consumption – a process we have been conceptualizing as wellness creep. In the same way as mall music (Sterne, 1997), chill music establishes a daily emotional template for listeners to self-regulate and comply with capitalist organization of daily life. In other words, we argue that through the widespread mobilization of ‘chill’, platforms prefigure and encourage the instrumentalization of music for self-regulation and self-optimization, which paves the way for other, more profound, levels of wellness creep that we conceptualize as wellness atmospheres.

Staging wellness atmospheres: Normative well-being in streaming platforms

In this section, we explore in more detail what wellness creep looks like on these platforms – being often operationalized and repackaged by MSPs within broader wellness atmospheres, and targeting physical, emotional and even spiritual well-being. Our analysis demonstrates how the promise of wellness is mobilized to promote (even if not fully dictating) normative regimes of subjectivity and governmentality, including ideas about self-interpretation and self-improvement. This exemplifies the continuous mobilization of wellness discourse – its ‘creep’ effectively – into music streaming, which is often legitimized using pseudoscience ideas.

Music for physical well-being

Music streaming platforms offer a wider range of products and recommendations that promise to help the user to improve their physical well-being. Not surprisingly, this is frequently manifested through a focus on providing motivation for exercise and movement – a pattern previously described as an example of the use of music as a ‘technology of the self’ (DeNora, 2000). For instance, the workout playlists in varied MSPs offer different intensities of exercise that explicitly target various audiences – from the bohemian ‘Beats & Breath’ (Apple Music), which teaches users how to keep grounded and stabilize their pulse through breathwork, to ‘Beast Mode Christian’ on Spotify (‘Let the weights go up and the blessings come down!’). Whilst most of these workout products might seem inoffensive, it is noticeable that they all seem to assume an imagined user who is only physically unfit due to a lack of commitment or motivation (rather than a chronic condition or disability) – which will then be unlocked and fixed by audio consumption.

Another prominent focus of music streaming platforms when it comes to physical well-being is the improvement of sleep (Figure 6). This ranges from ‘Ambient Sleep’ playlists to soundscapes permeated by tracks in specific frequencies (e.g., solfeggio) that are supposed to encourage deep relaxation, or curated by self-claimed ‘music experts’. Indeed, in the copy describing the sleep-focused products we found several mentions to neuroscience and ‘cutting-edge research’ that allegedly supports the offering of music as a solution for chronic sleep troubles – though we could not find such research sources anywhere on the corporate websites of these platforms. These wellness music products once again exist in this ambivalence (O’Neill, 2025) where scientific authority is mobilized and referred to, although such backing may not exist in practice.

Figure 6.

Sleep.

We see the platforms’ obsession with sleep (and its impact on individuals’ quality of life, happiness, and productivity) as a recent manifestation of what Mulvin (2018) conceptualized as ‘media prophylaxis’ – which describes how technologies are developed to avoid, prevent or mitigate human-made bodily harms and suffering. Certain music genres and frequencies of audio are presented by the MSPs as soothing, comforting, and therefore inherently sleep-inducing. We see the prevalence of this content as implying the existence of a widespread injury that must be remedied through cultural consumption – the source of this prevalent wound and hardship (presumably, structural elements of capitalism such as overwork), however, is never explicitly mentioned by the platforms themselves.

And yet, when it comes to promises of physical well-being, workout and sleep playlists are just the tip of the iceberg, particularly for recommended products outside platform-curated playlists. Scrolling through the recommendations quickly leads to more dubious (and highly problematic) suggestions about bodily fitness, including normative ideas of weight and fertility. Nutrition, calories, and dieting are prominent topics featured by the analyzed platforms. In many cases, the focus is less on an inclusive abstract vision of fitness and more on a normative conception of slimness as health, particularly for women. On Amazon Music, for instance, we encountered a range of offerings: ‘How to Lose 20lbs or More’, ‘Weight Loss for Women’, and ‘Subliminal Weight Loss’ – the latter, produced by the self-claimed ‘Weight Loss Institute’, and containing tracks such as ‘Think Yourself Thin’, ‘Envision a Thinner You’ and ‘Weight Loss Hypnosis’ (Figure 7). It is important to note that those are not personalized exercise sessions – they are generic ‘albums’ made available in the MSP for anyone to consume. We concur that this seems aligned with a broader tendency called ‘wellness washing’ (Wellman and Prins, forthcoming) – in which problematic and harmful investments in diet cultures are ‘rebranded’ as a matter of well-being. Moreover, these examples confirm how wellness creep is a gateway for the spread of a specific biopolitical order that responds to normative regimes of subjectivity (Baker, 2022).

Figure 7.

Weight loss.

An even more troubling type of physical well-being content is the one targeting fertility optimization. This subgenre presents fertility issues as something that too can be fixed through audio consumption, manifestation, and the listening of the right songs (Figure 8). On Spotify, for instance, a given fertility playlist includes tracks entitled ‘Invite Baby to Womb’, ‘Healing Ovaries Meditation’ and ‘Increase Fertility & Pregnancy’ – all of which are accompanied by the image of a growing fetus. On Amazon Music, recommended tracks included ‘Sperm Donor’ and ‘Egg Donation’, by artist ‘Fertility Redefined’. Other recommended playlists include ‘Manifesting Baby’ and ‘Fertility Frequency 246 Hz’ – showing the range of pseudoscientific approaches to platform-facilitated conception.

Figure 8.

Fertility.

Besides noting the ambivalence towards medical rigor in these products, we argue that this focus on fertility is not apolitical – pronatalism (specifically, white supremacist and eugenicist) is one of the pet obsessions of some of the most prominent tech CEOs and influential gurus of the far-right, such as Elon Musk. Whilst the entanglement of technologies and assisted reproduction is not in itself a novel topic for academic scrutiny (Thompson, 2005), we highlight the ideological orientation of its absorption by mainstream digital platforms. Finally, the rabbit hole of algorithmic recommendation easily leads us to audiobooks and podcast series focused on longevity (‘Feel Better, Live More’, ‘DNA Repair’, or ‘Outlive – the science & art of longevity”), which then connects to episodes by self-claimed ‘World No.1 Biohacking Expert’, ‘Biohacking like a woman’ and ‘3 Biohacks Every Parent Must Know’. (Figure 9).

Figure 9.

Biohacking.

Our finding is that these music and audio streaming products configure wellness atmospheres that resemble ‘lifestyle fascism’ (Vinokour, 2024), and visibly resonate with the alt-health influencer cultures examined by Baker (2022) and Grewe-Salfeld (2021). We also note how following algorithmic recommendations for physical health very much led us to what has been called the ‘wellness to alt-right pipeline’ (Gordon and Hobbes, 2021). MSPs’ wellness atmospheres for physical well-being are very much defined by a push of right-wing ideology and individualistic biopolitics, more than to a particularly anti-science discourse. We return to this issue at the end of this section.

Music for emotional well-being

We found that physical health is frequently combined by MSPs with an emphasis on emotional intelligence and awareness, particularly when it comes to relaxation and sleep. Once again, music streaming platforms stage these kinds of wellness by reproducing and reinforcing normative well-being, whilst simultaneously posing that it is through personal effort and self-work that one can thrive in an overtly chaotic and broken world. This is noticeable looking at how the three analyzed platforms make abundant use of medicalized jargon and pop-psychology terms – resonating with the rise of therapeutic culture (Illouz, 2007) previously identified in other spheres. For example, the playlist ‘Menty B Relief’, on Apple Music, offers guided walking for supposedly dealing with mental breakdowns (Figure 10). The interfaces then construct a notably self-reflexive subject – a user who is fully aware (or is happy for the platform to provide the awareness) of its emotional needs.

Figure 10.

Medicalized self-care.

In a sociotechnical environment dominated (and to a large extent sustained) by claims that data-driven algorithmic platforms can really know our individual preferences and needs, the fact that music recommendation and playlist products so often make references to psychiatric diagnoses should not be taken lightly. While collecting this empirical data, we were presented with phrases that suggested that we were ‘overthinking again’, and audio products focusing on ‘burnout’, ‘ADHD’, ‘trauma’, ‘grief’, and ‘stress & time management’ (Figure 10). Yet, even if we were to accept that the platforms can indeed identify when a user is struggling with anxiety, the solution for this prevalent malaise would require more than simply pressing play to ‘calm your mind with gentle piano and ambient music’ (as offered by Spotify’s Stress Relief playlist).

MSPs also seem to be trying solutions to help users regulate their emotions and stage their everyday life through the mobilization of hormonal and neurotransmissional terms. For instance, Spotify’s Dopamine and Serotonin playlists promise, respectively, ‘your daily dose of dopamine’ and ‘100% good vibes’ (Figure 11). Despite the appropriation of endocrinological language, we highlight that absolutely no scientific foundation is presented by the platforms to support their promised effects on mental and chemical regulation. Rather, we see the platforms’ mobilization of scientific language and the push for positive feelings as a strategy to attract advertising revenue (Amplified, 2024).

Figure 11.

Hormonal self-care.

Again, this emphasis on psychic and therapeutic self-investment that is so prominent in music streaming platforms resonates with a broader vision of mental health as something that can be managed (and conquered) through consumption – and which encourages a mode of subjectivity that centers resilience, optimism, and individualism (Davies, 2022; Illouz, 2007). In so doing, MSPs reproduce patterns common in the pharmaceutical industries, which often present well-being as necessary for success and economic productivity, and which ends up ‘penalizing deviation from what it defines as the right set of attitudes and behaviors’ (Davies, 2022:153). As it is the case for physical health, the rise of these wellness atmospheres can then be positioned as part of a broader cultural shift in individuals are burdened with the task of continuously having to mitigate their emotional disfunctions without consideration of the deep-seated structural inequalities that produced these problems in the first place (Orgad and Gill, 2022; Rosa, 2023; Stein, 2024). In other words, self-care is once again mobilized by music streaming platforms as an individual imperative that is by no means apolitical, and that promotes normative regimes of subjectivity and governmentality.

Music for spiritual well-being

We previously clarified how contemporary wellness cultures have their roots in countercultural movements – especially, the discontent with existing institutional structures, the hope that technology can provide a quick-fix to the problems of the world, and the turn to a New Age approach to well-being (Baker, 2022). Resonating with these ideas, our analysis of the three MSPs evidences a proliferation of products that mobilize spiritual well-being in this politically charged, individualistic way.

Much in the same way we analyzed the deployment of ‘chill’ as a gateway to wellness creep, here we posit that mindfulness is often the gateway to other, pseudoscientific, approaches to wellness that evoke self-regulation as a path to spiritual and religious normativity. Mindfulness and adjacent terms such as guided meditation, are often displayed in music streaming platforms as promising soothing, unwinding, manifesting, refreshing and recharging the spirit (Figure 12).

Figure 12.

Mindfulness and meditation.

These playlists invite users to look inwards to reclaim their self-focus, find their center, feel aligned and bring rejuvenation, but also to connect with the forces of the universe. The promise is that audio can directly improve one’s intimate state of being through ‘Holistic Sound Therapy’ or via listening an ‘Earth Healer’ audiobook on Spotify (Figure 13), claiming to contain ‘neuroacoustic sound technologies [that] stimulate a holistic activation of the brain’, ‘connecting you to the universe’s healing powers’. We insist, however, that these discourses are at once appealing to scientific terminology and authority and yet appear unsustained: no scientific evidence is presented by MSPs to support the claim that certain frequencies or other sound measures can indeed promote soothing and healing (or connect users to cosmic energies).

Figure 13.

Holistic Sound Therapy.

While we were not necessarily expecting to find scientific ‘proof’, we believe that this lack of evidence is relevant to the argument insofar as it resonates with trajectories previously identified in other industries (Baker, 2022), and demonstrates the ambivalent claims of authority (O’Neill, 2025) made by platforms to legitimize their portfolio of wellness atmospheres. We also highlight that in promoting the appropriation of music as an instrument for ‘inward journeys’, MSPs ultimately encourage individualistic self-care as a personal project. Users are invited to ‘use hardship as a springboard towards discovery and self-improvement’ (Apple Music’s playlist ‘Healing Meditation’), understanding meditation as ‘at heart, a solitary endeavour. After all, nobody can go deeper into yourself than you’ (Apple’s Guided Meditation playlist). Once again, MSPs make the individual user responsible for managing, regulating, and co-staging with the platforms their possibilities for spiritual restoration through personal music consumption choices, promoting a view of human flourishing that is detached from collective support (Rosa, 2023).

Conversely, the term ‘wellness’ often appears associated with middle-class spaces of self-care – especially, the spa and the home bath (Figure 14). This suggests that wellness is presented in a spectrum that varies from the therapeutic to the cosmetic – and we argue that although the language of MSP emphasizes the former, in practice the products are often offering the latter. Again, we see the mobilization of these apparently incoherent symbols of positive thinking, beauty rituals, and self-care as a clear transformation of audio streaming into a tool for the pursuit of an aspirational good life through cultural consumption – conforming with neoliberal, biopolitical, datafiable, and advertising-friendly tendencies previously identified in other industries.

Figure 14.

Wellness as spa.

More problematic copy and music streaming products appear around mindfulness, meditation and references to spiritual or cosmic forces when these are linked to specific cultural traditions. Frequent mentions to non-Western practices (sometimes labeled by the platforms as ‘ethnic’), including reiki, mantras, zen gardens, chakras, ayurveda, and vinyasa yoga, are decontextualised from their origins and repackaged as part of these music streaming wellness products (Figure 15). Not unlike the historical marketing practices of world music industries (Kassabian, 2004), the language and imagery used in these playlists center the experience of the listener within Western geographies and capitalist structures, as someone seeking to alleviate the ills of contemporary life through the consumption of other cultures and the refashioning of subjectivity. Here, the user is imagined as someone who is open to self-experimentation, exploring world cultures of well-being through streaming consumption to reach their ‘full potential’ (Baker, 2022).

Figure 15.

Wellness world-cultures.

Overall, through the deployment of these music streaming products within the promotion of physical, emotional and spiritual wellness atmospheres, platforms mobilize and combine New Age discourse, therapeutic jargon, and the rhetoric of conservative lifestyles to promise users a quick-fix to heal, restore, and reset – without ever fully acknowledging the source of this alleged widespread grievance, nor scientifically backing their supposed effectiveness. Whilst playlists products for sleep, mindfulness, relaxation, yoga, and working out might seem at first innocuous, we have shown how they eventually lead to more ideologically charged content disguised as ‘self-care’. This content centers conservative understandings of resilience, self-improvement and particular bodily regimes as an individual imperative.

These three identified ‘domains’ of wellness – physical, emotional, spiritual – often overlap in the interfaces and flows of action of each platform (with the same playlist products not rarely being offered across the three categories). We found the distinction useful, however, to highlight how wellness descriptors and symbols are repackaged to target different imagined users, or to resonate with the same user in different moments and contexts. Our contention is that rather than becoming ‘emotional wallpaper’ (Pelly, 2025), wellness atmospheres act as templates of feeling: more malleable forms of aesthetic and affective orientation and guidance that reproduce and reinforce normative dispositions and ideologies. MSPs – through their playlist products, user interfaces, algorithmic recommendations, and claims of personalization – provide scripts for individual’s spiritual, emotional, and physical success (or, ‘well-being’). Not surprisingly, these same scripts are also sold to brands and advertisers as a commercial opportunity to reach audiences when they are experiencing ‘positive moods’ and ‘feeling good’ (Amplified, 2024). Whilst many of the initiatives identified above (such as the use of music for fitness, motivation, meditation) and the problematic pseudoscientific and orientalist marketing copy precede and surpass digital platforms and streaming cultures, here we have demonstrated how they get appropriated, incorporated, and repackaged by the platforms under the promise of promoting users’ well-being.

From wellness creep to wellness crap: MSPs and aural slop

The increasing presence and penetration of these pseudoscientific, individualistic wellness cultures that promote music streaming consumption oriented to self-development within normative – at times racist and fascist – understandings of a good life, create the conditions for AI-generated content to thrive. The lack of rigorous editorial work behind wellness content, the normalization of mood- and atmospheric-based curation, and the careless push of pseudoscientific content and its underlying claims about the effects of music in the mind and body, make increasingly difficult to distinguish human-generated audio from AI products. In this section, we connect wellness creep with the rise of aural slop, understood as the low-quality, commercially optimized musical products of generative artificial intelligence. Based on our analysis of ‘well-being’ products, we distinguish three categories of aural slop: merged, curated, and assimilated.

By ‘merged’ aural slop we mean the AI-generated music products that co-exist alongside human productions but are difficult to distinguish in the platform interface. These are AI-generated albums and tracks that the interface presents as human-generated productions, whether that is an intentional objective of the platform or a user-generated upload to profit from the remuneration system. For example, Apple’s ASMR playlist (Figure 16) contains a considerable amount of tracks by an artist named StacyAster, which mirrors the content of creator Ana Aster on YouTube, showing what appears to be human-produced ASMR content. However, that same playlist contains a number of tracks by artists that do not seem to exist, more likely to be AI-generated. Yet it is impossible to distinguish which tracks on the playlist are AI generated as these two types of music productions are merged within the same streaming product.

Figure 16.

Merged aural slop.

This merging effect is even more evident considering that the interface recommends the ASMR playlist alongside a ‘Jazzzzzzzzzzzzzzz’ playlist (again in reference to the chill and sleep categories above), which contains music from (human) Jazz artists such as Alice Coltrane and Pat Metheny (Figure 16). In other words, there is a significant amount of content in the platform that is not clearly flagged as AI-generated but seems to be so, and which appears alongside human-generated content in recommendations and flows of action.

AI-powered companies such as Endel provide what we define as curated aural slop: AI-generated musical products that are presented as created or mixed by a specific DJ, artist, or curator (Figure 17). Although Endel is present in all three analyzed platforms as a generative AI audio company, their curatorial strand is particularly prevalent on Apple Music. In these instances, it is still unclear whether the tracks are AI-generated by Endel and then mixed or curated by a specific person or band, or whether the artist in question has used Endel’s generative tools to create the tracks, and then arranged them in album or playlist format. Notably, this curated aural slop is still organized according to the categories we mention above such as relax, sleep or focus.

Figure 17.

Curated aural slop.

Worthy of note is that curated aural slop is rarely presented or recommended alongside pseudoscientific content, even if Endel offers both types of products. When human intervention is considered an important part of the creative or curatorial process, appeal to pseudoscientific or neurological backing seems less crucial to market these products. Instead, curated slop shows a clearer relationship to established genre aesthetics, using the reputation of, for instance, ambient sound or certain strands of electronica as capable of producing the desired states of mind. This contrasts with how other Endel products are presented to streaming users, which, in the absence of human intervention and aesthetic genre credentials, claim scientific effectiveness (Figure 18).

Figure 18.

Description of Endel on Spotify.

From these two categories it follows that assimilated aural slop would be the AI-generated music that is more openly presented as such, or visibly displayed as machine-generated. Such is the case of many of Endel’s products, as well as the wellness playlists mentioned in the previous section, particularly on Spotify (Figure 19). Many playlists with specific beats or frequencies claiming to target relaxation, weight loss, or fertility are indeed aural slop playlists, and although they are not clearly flagged by Spotify or Amazon as such, they are more clearly displayed as derivative copies to the user.

Figure 19.

Assimilated aural slop.

In comparison with what we call here merged and curated aural slop, our argument is that a more pseudoscientific orientation of playlist products also brings a greater deal of visibly AI-generated content. That is, that further the discourse of wellness creeps into MSPs, the more prominent and obvious is the presence of aural slop. It is in this sense that we argue that the increasing wellness creep brings about more wellness ‘crap’.

These three categories are helpful to highlight the continuity between pseudoscientific wellness content and aural slop. We note, however, that what we now call ‘slop’ is not new as a product; its innovation stems from the form of production (generative AI), not from its quality, function, or use in the interface, which is similar to much of the pre-existing wellness ‘crap’ content we examined in the previous section. Indeed, aural slop appears as a logical consequence of the wellness creep we describe: bad wellness content would be a prime target for automatization, as it does not rely on human creativity nor scientific rigor (only on claims to scientific authority). It is also for this reason that we think it is unproductive to focus discussions about aural slop on authenticity. As we have shown here, the pre-existing wellness music was already inauthentic before; AI technologies simply automate it, making it possible to generate and distribute it at an increasing speed. Instead of seeing aural slop as a brand new product of music technologies, we understand it as a further step of sonic and infrastructural optimization of music (Morris, 2020).

Conclusions

As we demonstrated through the platform walkthrough and critical interface analysis of Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Spotify, the creep of wellness discourse into music streaming platforms touches upon a range of sociotechnical debates, and brings about urgent political concerns. We began our analysis by tracing how ‘chill’ is a category that is repeatedly mobilized by the platforms as part of their appeal to facilitate the management of ambient energies and the optimization of users’ emotional states. The ideal subject, then, is able to ‘chill’ despite the pressures of the everyday – and MSPs claim to be the perfect vehicle for achieving such desirable state. This, we argue, has helped to pave the way for a broader understanding of MSPs as legitimate providers of templates of feeling – pre-formatted emotional and behavioral patterns that individuals can incorporate into their own daily routines in order to self-regulate and thrive. Following this, we identified three key domains of platform-mediated wellness atmospheres – audio products and experiences promising to help the user to achieve physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. We highlighted the complex and oftentimes contradictory mobilization of a range of practices and symbols (including New Age values, therapeutic ethos, and data-driven self-optimization) made by the platforms in promising users a pathway to happiness and success. We then demonstrated that the wellness creep into music streaming further orients cultural consumption towards political conservatism and ideological extremism. In so doing, we showed how this entire process is legitimized by the platforms through the continuous use of pseudoscience rhetoric yet with explicit claims to scientific authority. Finally, we identified that wellness creep seems associated with the proliferation of ‘aural slop’ – the low-quality, commercially optimized output of generative artificial intelligence for audio creation. This aural slop (which we also describe as a continuity of other historical types of wellness ‘crap’) appears with varying degrees of concealment, not always being displayed as synthetically generated. Ultimately, the phenomenon we conceptualize as wellness creep brings forth the intersection and interaction of specific aesthetic, (bio)political, and technological forces that are often ideologically conservative.

Although capturing the complexity of the phenomenon from an audience and everyday life perspective was beyond the scope of this paper, research with users should be able to flesh out how exactly those templates are incorporated (and potentially ignored, rejected, or adapted) into users’ everyday routines and rituals (Campos Valverde and Hesmondhalgh, 2025; Hesmondhalgh and Campos Valverde, 2025). Still, we uphold our position that whilst these templates do not demand or dictate certain modes of subjectivity, they provide scripts of experience that invoke particular affective dispositions (Ngai, 2012) and largely prioritize ways of feeling and acting (Eriksson et al., 2019) that conform with platforms’ commercial, political, and business interests. They also call forth specific ways of relating to music and culture, namely in their instrumentalization as a coping mechanism. More than serving individual success, however, we argue that the creep of wellness discourse into music streaming ultimately advances conservative and capitalist goals.

It is also important to note that this article comes out at a time in which we simultaneously have increasing investments from private technology companies into well-being – with Spotify in particular being described as progressively ‘expanding into the healthcare industry’ (Price, 2023) – and the reliance of underfunded public welfare systems on these commercial platforms for providing care to citizens. Indeed, the UK’s National Health Service has recently crowdsourced a compilation of ‘uplifting resources’ for its employees by its employees (‘for the NHS from the NHS’) meant to ‘boost mood’ – which, of course, includes soundscapes for well-being, audio relaxation guides, and apps that promise to ‘overcome poor sleep using evidence-based cognitive and behavioral skills’ (NHS England, 2025). Before that, the UK’s former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock famously declared that doctors should recommend playlists as part of new ‘social prescribing’ plans to save public money and reduce over-prescription of drugs through ‘culture therapy’ (BBC, 2018). Playlists, in this context, were described as a ‘social cure’ – a complement to currently underfunded healthcare support. This testifies to the phenomenon we are describing as a wellness creep – the growing mobilization of individualized, neoliberal, biopolitical ‘well-being’ discourse that never explicitly addresses the source of the injuries it is attempting to mitigate.