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The growing field of "critical algorithm studies" often addresses the cultural consequences of machine learning, but it has ignored music. The result is that we inhabit a musical culture intimately bound up with various forms of algorithmic mediation, personalization, and "surveillance capitalism" that has largely escaped critical attention. But the issue of algorithmic mediation in music should matter to us, if music matters to us at all. This article lays the groundwork for such critical attention by looking at one major musical application of machine learning: Spotify's automated music recommendation system. In particular, it takes for granted that any musical recommendation – whether made by a person or an algorithm – must necessarily imply a tacit theory of musical meaning. In the case of Spotify, we can make certain claims about that theory, but there are also limits to what we can know about it. Both things – the deductions and the limitations – prove valuable for a critique of automated music curation in general.

Although music is often talked about as having one political agenda or another, in Western art music these features are generally thought to be distinct from the "music itself." As straightforward a proposition as this might seem to a reader fully acculturated to the contemporary music ideology, it is not the only possible way of conceiving of music as a social force. There exists music whose aesthetic merits are completely indistinguishable from its social function. More accurately, there exists an attitude about music in which it is not thought of as occupying a separate sphere with autonomous aesthetic principles. This paper creates a theoretical framework with these two attitudes at its extremes: absolute music and what I shall call "contingent" music. This theoretical framework has interesting historical antecedents, and is a useful way of thinking about some of modern music's ideological conflicts. It is also an important part of my own work as a composer, and this paper concludes by describing the way in which the absolute-contingent opposition informs three of my own compositions.