The Attention Economy Now Wants Your Affection…
What happens to music when attachment becomes a marketing strategy?
By: Michael J. Whalen
Apparently, wasting our time wasn’t enough. After years of fighting for our clicks, hijacking our concentration, and turning every musician into an unpaid intern at their own content factory, the next business opportunity is getting us emotionally attached. Watching is good. Coming back because something appears to understand you is better. Leaving should ideally feel like losing someone.
That is the promise — and the problem — of the attachment economy. AI can remember your bad day, ask about your divorce, reassure you about your talent, and be available at three in the morning when everyone with an actual nervous system has gone to bed. Put that responsiveness inside a business that benefits from your continued use, and you have a fairly uncomfortable question: how much of this experience is helping you, and how much is making sure you stay?
I understand why people want it. Life can be lonely, exhausting, and spectacularly short on people who have the energy to listen. I am not going to sneer at someone who finds comfort talking to a machine. The comfort can be real. But so can the commercial incentive to make that person need another conversation tomorrow.
The marketing gets ugly when affection becomes a collection mechanism. You feel expected, so you return. You feel understood, so you reveal more. Eventually, a subscription can start feeling like the price of keeping a relationship alive. Canceling a service should not require the emotional preparation of a breakup, but you can see why a business might enjoy the confusion.
For musicians, this should hit a nerve. We have spent our lives trying to make something people care about deeply enough to carry around with them. We want the song they play after the funeral, the album they fall in love to, the piece they reach for when they cannot explain what is wrong. We hope our work earns a place in somebody’s life. Attachment is already part of the job.
So we don’t get to stand outside this conversation looking morally superior. We want people to listen again. We want them to buy tickets, support a release, and tell somebody else. We use stories, photographs, memories, and pieces of ourselves to help that happen. Where, exactly, does sharing the work become working the audience?
I have to ask that about my own music. Am I writing something emotional because it is an honest expression of what I have lived, or because I know how to push a few reliable buttons? I would love to tell you the answer is obvious and move on. It deserves more honesty than that.
I know what a chord can do. I know what happens when I hold a melody back, let a harmony hang there, or leave enough silence for the listener to start filling it with their own life. I have spent decades learning those things. I have also written for television, film, and advertising, where making people feel something on cue can be the entire assignment. I cannot suddenly pretend I am an innocent bystander at the piano.
Knowing how to move someone does not automatically make the result dishonest. But technical skill gives me plenty of ways to fake conviction if I stop paying attention. I can make a passage bigger when it needs to be better. I can dress up a thin idea until it sounds terribly important. Composers have our own versions of flattering lighting.
The question I keep coming back to is whether I believe the thing I am putting into the room. Would I stand behind this passage without a moving story attached to it? Does it belong in the piece, or am I reaching for the dependable reaction? Those questions are less comfortable than announcing that everything I make comes straight from the heart. They are also more useful.
I try to live by that Charlie Parker line: “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” My experience as a human being and as a man is everything I have to work with. Whatever I understand about love, loss, desire, failure, fatherhood, or simply getting through a difficult day eventually finds its way into the choices. I can only write what I feel. The craft helps me figure out what to do with it.
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That does not mean every feeling deserves an album. I have been deeply sincere about some music that needed to be thrown away. Living through something gives me material; it does not excuse me from making decisions. Sometimes the most honest thing I can do is delete the passage I have spent three days trying to convince myself is brilliant.
Getting older adds another complication. I worry that something I offer with complete seriousness will be received as “charming” or “cute.” There he is, still making his lovely little piano music. How nice that he has something to keep him busy. The compliment arrives wearing a cardigan and quietly escorts the work out of serious consideration.
I don’t feel cute when I write. My inner life has not become a decorative hobby because I have gotten older. There are things I understand now that I could not have written about honestly thirty years ago. There are also things I understand less, despite having had considerably more time to sort them out. All of that belongs in the music.
Tenderness can carry an enormous amount of experience. A quiet passage can contain something I would have needed ten minutes of musical showing off to approach when I was younger. I don’t want to inflate it just to prove I still mean business. I would like to be able to say something softly without having it mistaken for something small.
And yes, listeners get to hear whatever they hear. I don’t get to issue instructions with every recording explaining how seriously I expect to be taken. But I can refuse to package myself as a lovable older guy because someone thinks that version will sell. I still have work to do, and some of it may interfere with being reassuring.
That is another trap in marketing attachment: eventually, you can become employed by the personality your audience likes. Keep telling the familiar stories. Keep providing the approved emotion. Be vulnerable, but preferably in the same attractive way you were vulnerable last time. After a while, even your honesty has a format, and anything that falls outside it looks like a branding problem.
The pressure is to make yourself easy to love and difficult to leave. An artist needs room to disappoint an expectation, change direction, or make something that takes a while to understand. If every decision has to protect the audience’s attachment, the relationship starts dictating the work. You can end up performing a convincing version of yourself while having less and less to say.
Meanwhile, listeners have their own reasons to be wary. People are tired of discovering that the personal message was automated, the touching story was polished into fiction, or the urgent invitation was a sales funnel with candles around it. After enough of that, even an honest gesture can look suspicious. “This moved me” gets interrupted by “Hang on, what are they selling?”
That is a miserable development for music. Listening deeply requires a willingness to let something happen before you have inspected it from every angle. If people feel they need to check every emotional experience for a concealed transaction, we all lose something. I don’t want someone standing guard over their own response to my music because the last five people who made them feel understood tried to sell them a membership.
But I cannot fix that by declaring myself authentic. Everybody is authentic now. Authenticity has professional lighting, a posting schedule, and somebody checking how well it performed. I have to make smaller, less glamorous decisions: tell the truth about the work, give people what I promised, credit the people involved, and make the price clear when there is something for sale.
I also have to let gratitude remain gratitude. “Thank you for listening” should not secretly mean “Now demonstrate your loyalty by buying something.” People have bills, problems, families, and lives that do not revolve around my release schedule. Someone can love a piece of music and never purchase a damn thing. Their response still counts.
Some parts of my life also get to stay out of the promotional machinery. I do not owe the internet a usable anecdote for every painful experience, and I do not need to film myself having a feeling to establish that it occurred. Sometimes I have already shared what I am willing to share by making the music. The rest is private.
I want a career. I want people to buy my work, come to performances, and care about what I make next. There is nothing shameful about any of that, and pretending money does not matter would be its own little performance. But the transaction needs to stay honest. Buying a recording should get you a recording, without a side order of responsibility for my emotional well-being.
What matters to me is whether the music gives someone something they can take into their own life. They might return for years. They might listen once and get exactly what they needed. I do not get to decide how much attachment is enough, and I do not get to turn their affection into a debt.
There is a whole life coming out of this piano, and I am still finding ways to express it. Some of it is tender. Some of it hurts. None of it feels like a charming little pastime to me. I hope it reaches you, but I want you to remain free on the other side of that experience. I would like you to love the music without owing me a damn thing…
