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

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.