Nelson Advisors referenced in The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

Nelson Advisors has been referenced in The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies article 'Wellness creep into music streaming platforms: From pure chill to aural slop.

Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565261467300

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.

Conclusions

It is also important to note that this article comes out at a time in which we simultaneously have increasing investments from private technology companies into well-being – with Spotify in particular being described as progressively ‘expanding into the healthcare industry’ (Price, 2023) – and the reliance of underfunded public welfare systems on these commercial platforms for providing care to citizens. Indeed, the UK’s National Health Service has recently crowdsourced a compilation of ‘uplifting resources’ for its employees by its employees (‘for the NHS from the NHS’) meant to ‘boost mood’ – which, of course, includes soundscapes for well-being, audio relaxation guides, and apps that promise to ‘overcome poor sleep using evidence-based cognitive and behavioral skills’ (NHS England, 2025). Before that, the UK’s former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock famously declared that doctors should recommend playlists as part of new ‘social prescribing’ plans to save public money and reduce over-prescription of drugs through ‘culture therapy’ (BBC, 2018). Playlists, in this context, were described as a ‘social cure’ – a complement to currently underfunded healthcare support. This testifies to the phenomenon we are describing as a wellness creep – the growing mobilization of individualized, neoliberal, biopolitical ‘well-being’ discourse that never explicitly addresses the source of the injuries it is attempting to mitigate.

Price L (2023) Spotify Health: Big Tech’s latest new entrant into Healthcare. Healthcare.Digital. Available at: https://www.healthcare.digital/single-post/spotify-health-big-tech-s-latest-new-entrant-into-healthcare