Music streaming services encompass features that enable the organization of music into playlists. This article inquires how users describe and make sense of practices and experiences of creating, curating, maintaining, and using personal playlists. The analysis relies on a mixed-method study, including music-diary self-reports, online observations, and in-depth interviews with 12 heavy users of Spotify or/and WiMP Music. The findings suggest heterogeneous management of static and dynamic playlists based on structural and contextual schemes of aggregating music. User control motivates different playlist practices that demonstrate new ways of collecting music via streaming services but also derive from pre-digital collecting.

Music-streaming services embed social features that enable users to connect to one another and use music as social objects. This paper examines how these features are experienced within negotiations of music as personal and social through the acts of sharing music and of following others. The analysis relies on 23 focus-group interviews with 124 Spotify or/and Tidal users, and a mixed-method study including music-diary self-reports, online observation, and interviews with 12 heavy users. Our findings suggest that users incorporate social awareness in non-sharing, selective-sharing, and all-sharing approaches with strong, weak, and absent ties. These ties are characterized by different configurations of social and music homophily. Negotiations of music as personal and social shape how music-streaming services are experienced.

Music streaming enables the tracking of listening behavior in more detail than any previous music-distribution format. While it is well known that streaming services collect troves of data, little is known about how stakeholders, including managers or label executives, make metric-based decisions and how they understand the impact of algorithms. The article uses anonymized interviews with music industry professionals, exploring how they use metrics in streaming services and examining their decision-making processes. The analysis concludes that they rely on a growing volume of data when making decisions about what to promote, and how. Nevertheless, most of the stakeholders focused on fairly simple metrics, such as salient spikes that were noticeable "at a glance." When discussing these findings, we draw attention to the reinforcing feedback loops between metrics, databased decisions and algorithms, questioning whether datafication acts to intensify trending events and diffusion of new music.

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In Norway music-streaming services have become mainstream in everyday music listening. This paper examines how 12 heavy streaming users make sense of their experiences with Spotify and WiMP Music (now Tidal). The analysis relies on a mixed-method qualitative study, combining music-diary self-reports, online observation of streaming accounts, Facebook and last.fm scrobble-logs, and in-depth interviews. By drawing on existing metaphors of Internet experiences we demonstrate that music-streaming services can make sense as tools, places, and ways of being. Music streaming as lifeworld mediation is discussed as a fourth framework for understanding online music experiences, particularly those arising from mobile and ubiquitous characteristics of contemporary Internet technology.