Abstract
In the fourth chapter we bring the reader inside the black box of the mechanisms that characterize music platforms. This chapter answers the question of who chooses music for us. We start with a description of these companies’ workspaces, where the playlists we listen to every day are produced by algorithms and human curators, the new gatekeepers of today’s music industry. The gatekee** process also involves mechanisms of datafication by algorithms and the role of music experts, who in turn rely on technological tools to create playlists targeting listeners. The music that reaches our ears is no longer just the result of our personal research or our friends’ suggestions but is increasingly selected automatically by algorithms developed by the platforms or recommended by music experts working for these digital companies.
We devote special attention to the analysis of personalized playlists, a format that is gradually replacing listening to individual artists’ albums, thus bringing the streaming listening experience increasingly closer to that of radio. Drawing on interviews conducted with professionals from music platforms as well, the chapter explores in-depth the complex intertwining between the role of algorithms and human intervention in the creation of playlists.
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Notes
- 1.
John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, known publicly as John Peel, was an English disc jockey, radio presenter, record producer, and journalist. He was the longest-running of BBC Radio 1’s original deejays, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004. He began his radio career as a pirate radio station deejay, only to be asked to work on the new channel the BBC was planning to respond to competition from pirate radio stations, BBC Radio 1. He was among the first deejays to broadcast psychedelic and progressive rock on British public radio. At the BBC, his “Peel sessions,” which began as a radio program in which he invited young, not-yet-established British bands to play live, became famous.
- 2.
Dwell time measures the length of individual user sessions (Seaver, 2022).
- 3.
Interview conducted in November 2018 with a former Universal worker who had held senior roles within the company, as part of research that one of the authors of this book conducted with Alessandro Gandini (Bonini & Gandini, 2019).
- 4.
Interview with a Google Play curator, conducted on November 18, 2017, in London, as part of the research completed by Bonini and Gandini (2019).
- 5.
Interview conducted on February 11, 2018, as part of the research that one of the authors of this book conducted with Alessandro Gandini (Bonini & Gandini, 2019).
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Bonini, T., Magaudda, P. (2024). Algorithms: Who Selects Music for Us. In: Platformed! How Streaming, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence are Sha** Music Cultures. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43965-0_4
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