The chapter explores theoretical and analytical frameworks for critically approaching media audiences and consumption in Europe. From the perspective of audience studies, as Europeans engage more with media, they become increasingly “active,” while from the perspective of political economy, their very activity renders them valuable commodities for data harvesters. There is, then, a tension between the perspective of audience-as-practice—where audiences interpret, relate, and create—and the perspective of audience-as-commodity—where audiences are exploited and unpaid laborers. To address this tension, the chapter employs Igor Kopytoff’s “social life of things” framework to conceptualize audience practices as dynamic entities that move through stages of commodification and decommodification. By acknowledging that audience practices inhabit multiple roles, the chapter highlights their irreducible complexity: they are simultaneously meaningful human interactions and data processed by algorithms. This approach reveals how European audiences operate within transnational, profit-driven media systems as well as local and national cultural and economic forces. The chapter also critiques existing frameworks that either fetishize agency as resistance or reduce audiences to commodities, proposing instead a focus on mundane, everyday interactions that sustain the platform economy. This chapter underscores the need to understand the interconnection between everyday patterns of media consumption and the larger political-economic implications of datafication in Europe, where identity, lifestyle, and global platform capitalism intersect.