Music, Phones and Bank Loans

Abstract

This article explores the making of two branded Spotify playlists to critique the concept of ‘affective labor.’ Over the last few decades, scholars have argued that social media users and creative industries workers alike are engaged in a new type of labor, affective labor, which generates economic value for companies. The article challenges this framing. Drawing on Marxist concepts of productive and unproductive labor, in addition to feminist social reproduction theory, it details playlists made for Motorola phones and Itaú bank by paid contractors. The article situates the role of these playlists, as part of advertising campaigns, within the broader circuits of capital, showing how both paid and unpaid playlisting are unproductive labor, and therefore do not produce surplus value. The playlists do, however, assist in the overall reproduction of capitalism, particularly through the commodification of labor power for the paid lists. The article argues that characterizing musical production involving affect, especially online, as ‘affective labor’ hampers our ability to understand affect within the production and reproduction of capitalist social relations. It contends that a key political question of affect is not only the production of subjectivities, but the conversion of affectively dense, social values into commodified labor controlled by capital. Affective politics is when affects are literally put to work.