There’s been a rapid explosion in the number of apps claiming to show user data in the name of taste-sharing. Letterboxd and Last.fm are early examples, releasing in the early 2010s and becoming digital diaries for users to log their media consumption. In the world of music, Last.fm dominates data-sharing. Airbuds has become a recent hit because of its social elements, such as emoji reactions and direct messaging, but Last.fm remains the most popular. As someone interested in music trends and online spaces, I’m curious about why there has been such a push for apps whose sole purpose appears to be data collection rather than actually giving users the media they’re tracking.
Sharing listening or film-watching data becomes a way of stating one’s tastes and even one’s identities. What does it say culturally when data, a profitable resource extracted from people like us, has become a way in which friendships and identities are legitimized? Even with the veneer of connection through the availability of sharing features on these apps, what makes users want to share this much so freely?
It might seem dramatic to call your favorite movie or most repeated song “personal data.” After all, sharing one’s Spotify Wrapped has become a yearly ritual for many, even on the blog this is published on. Yet, even then, at least you can listen to music on Spotify. There are apps, like Pokemon Sleep or Water With Friends, that turn basic necessities into a data-collection game. The primary product for an app like Letterboxd or Lastfm is statistical information about your tastes and activities, not the content you enjoy itself. These apps offer nothing but a periodic regurgitation of your own tastes on a tastefully formatted page. I have to wonder what these apps gain or make profitable from this information.
In many ways, sites like Airbuds or Letterboxd feel like an escape from the exceptional toxicity of Instagram or the-app-formerly-known-as-Twitter. The lack of infinite scrolling and public comment sections make them feel less draining than the others. However, these apps are still social media. These apps contain the same flaws and the same surveillance, and more so, the surveillance is the explicit point. They do not generate the content that a typical app would have. On these apps, you and your friends are the primary content being consumed.
In the current cultural context, big data has become one of the most profitable sectors of the world economy, currently estimated to be worth about $348 billion. This growth has occurred in the backdrop alongside the decades-long rise of platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Instagram, and more. These platforms are one way in which big data corporations (think OpenAI, Palantir, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, etc.) obtain user information or preferences. The highly profitable data they store, sell and buy is scraped from our social media and online consumption habits.
With the normalization of data scraping as an economic sector, it’s worth noting the ways in which our data is presented to us. It’s innocuous enough to see our favorite movies on our personalized profile or our most-listened to albums put on a fun collage at the end of each year, but these displays have become a medium for social connection. Having someone’s last.fm feels like having a look into their innermost moments at times because of how personal music can be. Is having 24/7 access to your friends music library (and thusly, a 24/7 pass to make assumptions about what they could be going through) something that we want to automatically accept?
While access to one’s data can strengthen your friendship and allow for conversations about what favorite songs or films you have in common, do we really need a money-hungry app to collect this data for us? Is data collection now a necessity in order for our friendships to be legitimized? It’s not harmful to post a Spotify Wrapped each year, but the popularity of this shows that we have normalized the collection of our innermost moments as a corporate commodity through #relatable story highlights.
I don’t mean to call Letterboxd or Last.fm or Airbuds necessarily harmful. They’re not. I have used all three at different points in my life, so even if they are, I am guilty too. My curiosity arose from the role of data in solidifying online relationships. There’s an element of intimacy in being able to see what your friends like, but, there’s an element of surveillance, too. Especially if an app with unknown developers is doing the data collection for you.
We already give so much information about ourselves to companies that gladly sell our data to Oracle or Palantir or whatever big data company is willing to buy it. Before you download the new app to keep track of your friends’ music listening or movie watching or sleep habits, think about everyone else who gets that information, and how much they can sell it for.