Performative Media Consumption: The Shelf App

You may not have heard of a new trending app called Shelf. However, it is rapidly becoming a phenomenon on social media. Every month, the number of users grows by 40%, and we often see functionalities or “shelves” of different influencers displayed on Instagram.

The concept is simple and yet, very well thought out. Each user creates a shelf, a virtual summary of all the media they consume in a week: songs, albums, artists, books, movies, TV shows, games, and any link they want to add. The app offers the possibility to connect accounts from various platforms, such as Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, Goodreads, and Letterboxd, which the Shelf App then directly logs into your personal summary of everything you’ve listened to, watched, or read during the week. For those using different platforms, listening to vinyls or reading without using Goodreads, it is also possible to log any cultural items manually into the app. Put simply, your shelf belongs to you, and you choose what appears on it.

In that sense, Shelf is actually a great, fun way to share recommendations with your friends. The app allows users to follow friends or influencers and to see others’ shelves. Moreover, you can rate any material on Shelf and even react to others’ shelves with any emoji. On the whole, this makes for a very aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-use app. Undeniably, it is one of the best new apps created for Gen Z. It meets the idea that we want to define ourselves by “what we like and not what we look like,” as said by the Koodos team, which created the app. In a way, Shelf does promote culture.

However, we can also see this new app as a way to encourage overconsumption of one single medium. As a matter of fact, Shelf displays the statistics of your consumption of any content that appears on anyone’s shelf: the number of times the user has listened to a song, artist, or album; the episode they’re at in a TV show; the number of pages they’ve read of a book. There is, therefore, a vicious effect: when someone listens to a variety of songs, artists, and albums, it may appear as if that user hasn’t listened to anything. This is even more problematic when we add the fact that the app ranks users who have consumed the same material: the user who has listened to the same media the most is ranked first, and so on. For example, if you are the Shelf user who has listened to “Good Luck, Babe!” by Chappell Roan the most, you will be first for that song (and have a virtual gold medal). This placement also takes the appearance of a percentage when the user is not in the top 10: the app displays if you are in “top 1%,” “top 25%,” or, on the contrary, “bottom 10%,” etc.

For each rank, there is a symbolic reward, a comment: “In Too Deep,” “Certified Obsessed,” and “Casually Committed,” for the highest scores. When you are unfortunate enough to be in the bottom share of listeners, the comments become a bit more assertive: “Commitment? Don’t know her.” or even “I… like this?” Overall, this makes for a very fun app, but also a symbolic sanction. It implicitly encourages intensive listening of one single artist, song, or album. It doesn’t promote diversity in tastes and barely even allows for setting forth a certain variety. Yes, it is possible to put several albums on your shelf, but they won’t appear automatically. Once again, the designers guide users towards a certain use of the app: exhibiting a single music genre, album, favorite song of the week, singer, book, and movie. These are the elements that are automatically logged in your statistics.

Moreover, this incitement can lead to performative media consumption. Displaying the statistics and ranking users somewhat takes away the goal of culture consumption: it is not a performance; it should be an escape from reality. Showcasing and rewarding overuse of one cultural product could lead to a superficial view of music and culture: the fact that influencers make posts on other social media platforms displaying their shelves means that culture becomes yet another way to put forward a ‘legitimate’ way of consuming in our society.

Another way for Shelf to promote this ‘legitimate’ taste is through additional functionalities that we often see on social networks. This includes all the algorithms Shelf has created that analyze your music taste and give you back characteristics about your personality. One of these additional options gives you, for instance, the artist your soulmate should listen to the most. Other built-in systems generate a percentage of a certain personality trait: how popular you are, how toxic, how dateable. This promotes certain types of music, certain genres, and certain artists with an unknown algorithm. It is safe to assume that mainstream music is put forth by these features. The algorithms must be standardized to answer to any type of music taste; hence a certain number of well-known artists must be chosen by the Koodos team, each of them being recommended when a certain type of music habits is analyzed. That is why the same artists often come up when people display their “music soulmate” on instagram. Shelf leads the way to a new, performative way of listening to music. It becomes an aspect to display, and instead of personal tastes or originality, conformity is being encouraged.

Along with that idea, it is important to remember that social networks are a way to build identity for any user. Users of all platforms are careful to build an image that will respond to social norms and expectations. The ways Shelf triggers certain ways of consuming culture are important and build our habits.

In a nutshell, Shelf is a great concept and can actually open a new way to lay out our identities or to expose our personal tastes. However, many features of this new social media platform tend to favor excessive consumption and to limit diverse preferences in terms of music, movies, and so on. The idea of a performative way of appreciating culture, as a simple display of one’s public image, carries the risk of losing the individual aspect of it. Social norms make us want to conform and to look like others: it is important not to let our shelves look like everyone else’s.