Organizing music, organizing gender: algorithmic culture and Spotify recommendations

Abstract

Spotify is self-reporting to have 232 million monthly active users in July 2019, including 108 million paying subscribers. Often naturalized by listeners as a mere window into great collections of music, Spotify is an intricate network of music recommendations governed by algorithms, displayed as a visual interface of photos, text, clickable links, and graphics. With the aim to analyze how three Spotify functions, related artists, discover, and browse, organize and represent gender while organizing and representing music Spotify is here investigated through empirical material collected in qualitative online ethnographic studies during 2013–2015. The article problematizes how music is organized in algorithmic culture and uncovers gendering that can ensue as a result of the service’s recommendation algorithms: creating closer circles for music consumption, and organizing music by similarities in genre and gender.

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