“The perfect guide in a crowded musical landscape:” Online music platforms and curatorship

Abstract

Curatorship or curation has become a widely used term in music industry and popular music discourse recently, used not only in a museum or exhibition context, but also in connection with music festivals, and increasingly, playlists and other functions related to online music platforms. Through a case study of 22tracks, an online, playlist-based music discovery service currently based in four European cities, I look at the role and position of the music curator, and provide a critical analysis of the dominant discourses around music curation. I place the discourse of music curation into a context of dominant narratives accompanying music as well as digital and online technology, including that of the “long tail” and the “tyranny of choice.” I then proceed to explore the relationship of curation to place, scenes and genres, and conceptualise curatorship as an increasingly professionalised tastemaking and promoting function.

Conceptualizing curation in the age of abundance: The case of recorded music

“…Because of their scale, capital and vertically integrated systems, the labels also strongly influenced what music was produced, promoted and sold to consumers (Lange and Bu¨rkner, 2013;Hracs, 2012). As the supply of recorded music increased music journalists, radio DJs, and record store clerks also emerged as influential sources of information and advice for consumers (Barna, 2017;Lange, 2016).…”

“…On Spotify, for example, users, who have been enrolled into the curation process, have created over 1.5b playlists (Bhaskar, 2016). Yet, many consumers are also seeking advice from a range of curators including music writers, algorithms and radio DJs (Barna, 2017;Lange, 2016;Hracs and Jansson, 2017). Whilst selling recorded music used to generate the most value, curating recorded music has become a key source of distinction, value and loyalty for competing distribution channels including record shops and music streaming services.…”

“…As Sonnichsen (2017) notes, specific record shops, recording studios and music venues can achieve legendary status and symbolic value within music communities which encourage forms of music-related tourism and consumption. Yet, historical and contemporary music scenes embedded within specific neighborhoods or entire cities can also act as quality stamps (Barna, 2017). Like farmer's markets where some consumers assume products to be of quality because they are sold within the physical confines of the market, record shops, radio stations and music publications operating within certain scenes benefit from spatially entangled brand affiliations (Joosse and Hracs, 2015;Jansson and Power, 2010;Jansson and Waxell, 2011;Pike, 2011).…”

From selling songs to engineering experiences: exploring the competitive strategies of music streaming platforms

“…More recently, and through the creation of editorially-curated playlists and individual tracks, album and artist recommendations, music streaming platforms have extended this practice to their digital platforms to help users overcome choice overload. All of the leading music streaming firms provide some forms of curation, including editorially-curated and personalised playlists and recommendations, such as Spotify's 'New Music Friday' playlist and Apple Music's 'New Music Mix' (Barna 2017, Eriksson et al 2019, Eriksson 2020. Despite the long history of curation in the music marketplace, Drott (2018a) highlights that music streaming platforms have successfully recast abundance as a problem and fabricated a need for assistance for which they claim to be uniquely positioned to resolve.…”

“…The platform studies literature has identified the practice of curationthe strategic selection, presentation and arrangement of information, goods, services, and peopleas central to how digital platforms generate value for themselves and their multiple users (Van Dijck 2013, Morris and Powers 2015, Barna 2017, Srnicek 2017, Jansson and Hracs 2018, Prey 2018, Drott 2018a, Webster 2019b, Eriksson 2020. By deciding what is valuable or relevant to a given situation and what is not, Bhaskar (2016) asserts that curation is reducing complexity, saving time, reducing cognitive burdens, filtering for quality and overcoming 'choice overload,' a bi-product of having abundant access to goods and services in the platform economy.…”