You’re Not the User, You’re the Product: The Hidden Cost of Free Music and Social Media.

Written by Dhyana Rao-Middleton

When traditional and modern music comes together @ Korean Rave September 2024

Written by Dhyana Rao-Middleton

Sharing a song with someone you love is one of the most human things there is. A mixtape slipped into a bag and a playlist that quietly says I thought of you. It's a small act of trust, and it feels like it belongs only to you and the person on the other end. But somewhere between pressing play and pressing share, someone else is listening in.

In our last post, we saw how biased algorithms took the social out of social media. This time, we're following what powers them. Every recommendation, every perfectly timed advert, every song that seems to read your mood runs on one thing: your data. And as they say, if you're not paying for the product, you're not the customer; you are the product.

Following the money

Last year, Meta made $196 billion (£146 billion) from advertising. That's nearly 98 cents of every dollar it earned. Strip away the holiday photos, the birthday messages and the group chats, and what's left isn't a social network at all. It's the most powerful advertising machine ever built, and we are what it sells. Spread across the 3.58 billion people who use its apps every day, each of us earned Meta around $57 (£43) last year. You never saw a penny of it. You paid in scrolls, likes, shares and every video you lingered on a second too long.

The better Meta knows you, the more you're worth. What it knows doesn't stop at what you post: a 2024 Consumer Reports study found that, on average, 2,230 companies had sent information about each person to Facebook. Since December 2025, even people's chats with Meta's AI assistant have been used to target ads everywhere outside the UK, EU and South Korea, with no way to opt out. Your privacy isn't a side effect of the business. It is the business.

Even the law barely leaves a dent. In 2023, Meta was fined a record $1.4 billion (£1 billion) under GDPR for unlawfully moving Europeans' data to the US, and it now earns that much in under three days. When a penalty costs less than a long weekend's takings, it isn't a punishment; it's a business expense. As long as our data is worth more than the fines for misusing it, the machine will keep running. Real change has to come from companies choosing to treat people differently from the very start.

Your playlists are data too

If social media knows who we are, streaming knows how we feel. Music is the most emotional thing many of us share with a machine, and the industry figured out long ago that our moods are worth money. It's the same pattern we see across social media. When Meta showed people more posts from their friends and family, they spent less time on the app, while research on X found that every extra moral or emotional word in a post made it around 20% more likely to be shared, with outrage among the feelings that travel furthest. So our feelings, especially the difficult ones, have become a resource to be mined.

As far back as 2015, Spotify launched Playlist Targeting, letting brands reach listeners by the playlists and genres they play, the time of day and the device they're on. Its pitch to advertisers soon moved beyond genres to moods, moments and activities. Journalist Liz Pelly later reported that since 2016, Spotify had been sharing this mood data directly with some of the world's biggest advertising firms, and quoted an ad deck boasting that its users "show us their true colors with zero filter". Think about what that means in practice. The heartbreak playlist you play on repeat, the calm music you lean on when you can't sleep, the anthems that carry you through a hard week: all of it can be read as a signal of what you might buy and when you might be most open to buying it.

The ambition goes further still. In 2021, Spotify was granted a patent for technology that would use speech recognition to work out a listener's "emotional state, gender, age, or accent", even analysing background noise to tell whether they were alone or with others, and then recommend content to match. Spotify said that not every patent becomes a product, but the fact it was designed at all says a great deal about how the industry sees us.

And when people ask what's being done with their information, the answers aren't always clear. In 2023, Sweden's data protection authority fined Spotify $5.7 million (£4.3 million) for not telling users clearly enough how their personal data was being used. Spotify called the issues minor and said it would appeal. But if you can't easily find out how your own listening is being used, how can you ever truly say yes to it?

Great for business, bad for people

Let's be honest: selling people's attention and data is extraordinarily good business, and Meta's numbers prove it. But a business model being profitable has never made it right, and the evidence increasingly shows it isn't the only way, or even the safest way, to build something that lasts.

Even Spotify gives the game away. For all its mood targeting and advertising ambitions, 89% of its 2025 revenue came from Premium subscriptions: people paying for the music itself. Advertising made up just 11%, and it actually shrank over the year. So here's the question: if the money comes from people who love the product enough to pay for it, why is their listening still being packaged up for brands? The data was never what kept Spotify alive. It's an extra squeeze on top, taken simply because it can be. And that tells us something important. A product people truly value doesn't need to sell them out to survive, and when one does it anyway, it's usually down to greed. Spotify's advertising business, powered by what it knows about its listeners, still brought in $2.1 billion (£1.6 billion) in 2025, a tidy extra on top of the billions people already pay to listen.

Music has never needed to sell its listeners to survive. Long before anyone was harvesting listening data, record shops, labels, venues and radio stations thrived by giving people something worth having, and that instinct hasn't gone anywhere. Vinyl sales grew for the 19th year in a row in 2025, according to Luminate, with 48 million records sold. When a product is more than its users, people pay for it, stay with it and tell their friends about it. When the users are the product, the business only works for as long as people don't notice.

Trust is the better investment

People are noticing. In Cisco's 2024 Consumer Privacy Survey of 2,600 people across 12 countries, 75% said they won't buy from companies they don't trust with their data, and almost half of 25 to 34 year olds (49%) had already switched companies or providers over how their data was handled. That's the generation at the heart of music culture, and they're voting with their feet.

The law is moving in the same direction. Sweden passed the world's first national data protection law in 1973. By March 2025, 172 countries had data privacy laws, with an average of more than five new countries joining every year since 2020. In Europe, regulators have gone after the heart of the surveillance model itself, with the European Commission ruling in April 2025 that Meta's "pay or consent" approach to personalised ads broke EU rules. Every new law is a society saying the same thing: people deserve better than to be sold out.

For anyone building a business, that isn't a threat; it's a signal. Models that depend on harvesting personal data carry growing legal, financial and reputational risk, and that risk only rises as the rules tighten. Models built on trust, on a product people genuinely value and choose to support, are the ones that grow stronger as the world catches up. Caring for your customers isn't just the right thing to do, it's the smartest long term bet there is.

Music shared, not sold

This is where it all comes together. The data feeds the algorithm, the algorithm keeps us scrolling, and the scrolling produces more data to sell. It's a loop designed to serve advertisers and shareholders, and the listeners and artists inside it are simply the raw material. Our attention is harvested, our moods are packaged, and our friendships become targeting signals.

We don't believe it has to be this way. Think back to that mixtape, that track sent at 2am, that playlist that said I thought of you. That moment should belong to you and the person you share it with, not to a broker, a brand or a profile you'll never see. Sharing music was always meant to bring people closer, not to turn them into a product.

That's what Harmonize stands by. We're building a place to make music listening social and real, where you share playlists as digital mixtapes, discover music through the people you trust and connect with friends across streaming services. We'll earn our place the way great music businesses always have: by making something people genuinely love and choose to support. And we will never sell your data, because we care too much about the people who use our app to ever sell them out.

You're not a data point. You're a listener, a fan, a friend, an artist. And your music is yours to share.

Sources

Dhyana Rao-Middleton
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How Biased Algorithms Took the Social Out of Social Media