Robin James: "As Liz Pelly explains in her book on Spotify, from about 2017 until very recently, the platform’s main aim was to keep users constantly tuned in so they were continually harvesting data from them. To do that, they had to reduce any friction that might cause someone to press pause, close the app, and stop listening. This quest for frictionless UX led Spotify to something quite different than immediacy, however. As Pelly puts it, 'the quest for a frictionless user experience resulted in a deluge of frictionless music' (40). She interviews many workers in the music industry who all note that Spotify actively promoted (e.g., by putting on popular playlists) 'chill inoffensive' music that sounded like 'emotional wallpaper' (83). This was music for 'soundtracking' one’s day, on in the background as one does other things. Far from immersive immediacy, this so-called 'lean-back listening' is more of a void than a plenum. This is most evident in Pelly’s reporting on the platform’s understanding of what constituted 'chill': “Anything can be chilled and repurposed in the economy of passive listening…Another source told me that no one internally could agree on what ‘chill’ meant–that it was so ambiguous, it had ‘no definition that is meaningful’' (53). As I explain in Good Vibes Only, 'chill' is a profile that can be applied to any style of music; it has no definitive features, just a signature alignment among whatever set of features one may be working with in a given song. Put differently, chill has no essential determinate properties. Chill’s void of clear and distinct meaning echoes Spotify’s approach to frictionless listening: empty music out and reduce it to more or less nothing."