The editorial playlist as container technology: on Spotify and the logistical role of digital music packages

Maria Eriksson

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2020, vol. 13, issue 4, 415-427

Abstract: This article explores the role of editorial playlists in Spotify’s streaming economy. In particular, it approaches Spotify’s playlists as container technologies – i.e. technical solutions that assemble, preserve, and transport music objects and thereby uphold logistical operations within the music industry. Such an approach seeks to complement previous research concerning playlists, which has often analyzed their emotional and affective dimensions but paid less attention to how playlists enhance calculative, mathematical, and logistical retail flows within the online music economy. On the one hand, the article considers how playlists – like containers in general – materialize principles of modularization and automation in ways that enhance control and remote oversight. On the other hand, it discusses how the playlist is far from a perfected means of measurement and control, and sometimes acts as an unruly transport device. Ultimately, the article shows how the playlist format occupies an uneasy position between order and disorder within the digital music economy which has not yet been fully accounted for in the context of music-oriented media studies.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2019.1708780

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