Personalized playlists in new music media: Deezer case study in the concept of false individualization

The new media not only has provided convenience and affordability to the audience, but also affected the production, distribution and consumption processes of music and the functioning of the commercial music industry. The culture industry approach, which emphasizes the loss of use values due to the commercial change values in cultural products, is based on the argument that the buyers of cultural products are confused during the process of exposure to a large number of products and therefore open to directions. The present study seeks answers to questions including "why the listeners who can reach millions of songs all over the world with new music media listen to certain songs and resemble in terms of these preferences?", "why the lists with emphasis on personalization include some songs and musicians whereas they do not include some other musicians and their music in the same genre", and questions whether these lists, which are supposedly offer genre-based suggestions facilitate new song discoveries. The basic question is "To what extent the listeners who make discoveries on new music media make these discoveries by themselves?". The present study focuses on the new media - music relationship that emerges as a result of technological advances and aims to reveal the characteristics of the tools expressed as new or digital music media. Accordingly, Deezer will be analyzed with new media elements such as digitality, hypertextility, multimedia, interactivity and massification, and the processes regarding the music that has been changing with the new music media will be discussed. The playlists of Deezer, with the emphasis on personalization, called Flow and its working principles will be discussed over the concepts of individuality, listener's freedom, new music discovery focuses, and false individualization.