Spotify’s astrology-like Daylists go viral, but its micro-genre mastermind was let go last month

Is it a “fearful vocaloid wednesday morning,” a “yearning cottagecore thursday afternoon,” or perhaps a “heartbroken karaoke friday evening”? That’s up to your

Now, searches for “daylist” on Spotify have spiked nearly 20,000%, the company told TechCrunch.

It may not be that interesting to know that someone from your high school that you follow on Instagram is having a “wild west cowboy night,” but the prompt to these posts is perhaps more interesting than the content itself. The Instagram template positions Daylists as a new, more specific form of astrology, which is apt, because astrology and Daylists have the same appeal. They teach us something about ourselves while giving us an easy shorthand to try to make ourselves known to those around us. You’re not an attention-seeker, you’re a Leo. You don’t listen to emo music, you listen to teen angst mallgoth.

what does everyone’s daylist look like on this fine thursday morning It makes sense that Spotify is cashing in on something that feels so parallel to astrology, or other forms of spiritual-adjacent meaning-making. Over the last decade or so, astrology has , and is estimated to be worth $22.8 billion by 2031. And Sensor Tower, a mobile app intelligence firm, found that the top 10 astrology and zodiac apps among young people in the U.S. has declined. If people aren’t asking big questions about life in church or synagogue, they’ll ask those questions somewhere else — and that might happen on social astrology apps like to Daylists — are capitalizing on this same impulse. Instead of helping people discover new music, people are using these features to find themselves, which is why Spotify has consistently added more and more features inspired by divination. Over the last few years, Spotify Wrapped has created to represent our year, and they even once hired a celebrity aura reader, based on the moods of the genres that a user listened to. This has become so central to Spotify’s branding that the company had an aura photography activation at VidCon in 2022, presumably as a way to impress and build relationships with content creators.

Where does Spotify get all of these hyper-specific musical genres and moods, anyway? As many people on social media have noted, the person who came up with these hyper-specific genres and moods about ten years ago. Since then, McDonald worked as a “data alchemist” at Spotify, where his unfathomably comprehensive musical databases have powered so many beloved features from Discover Weekly to Daylists.

This may be more of a guest book at the funeral than a feedback channel to anybody with decision power, but And then, because we must always be reminded of the harsh reality that corporations care about their bottom line above all else, McDonald was

Based on reporting by techcrunch.com.