(Stream)lining change in music classification: Spotify as a cultural intermediary


Michelle Nadon Bélanger, University of Toronto

This paper describes how Spotify’s efforts to promote its services have afforded its position as a cultural intermediary in the digital music industry. It illustrates how specific functions and features of Spotify’s premium subscription—notably, its avenues for user engagement and its algorithm-driven approach to personalization and music discovery— alter users’ perception and consumption of music available on its platform by enabling the formulation of new classificatory categories for music. Specifically, Spotify has engendered a partial shift away from traditional music genre classification (e.g., country, pop, rock, 80s, Turkish, ‘world’, etc.) toward more colloquial ways of categorizing music that align with hallmark elements of the ‘mood market’ (Fernandez-Perez et al. 2021) that center on emphasizing cultural products’ relationship to consumers’ everyday life. Research also demonstrates that such developments in music classification ultimately effect growth in the diversity and valuation of artists and producers on the platform, which effectively illustrates the full gamut of Spotify’s intermediary role. Moreover, this paper suggests that Spotify’s role as a cultural intermediary in the digital music industry can also be specifically understood as democratizing in regards to practices of music classification and production. Through both platform/AI- and user-generated playlists, Spotify allows its users to be dynamically involved in both the consumption and the development of music categories that are based on given tracks’ relevance to everyday affect(s), context(s), and sensory experiences. For example, users frequently engage with tracks that are grouped together under exclusively colloquial descriptors (e.g., Sunday Morning, Badass, Chill Dinner, Yellow, Heartbreaker, etc.) or are categorized through traditional genre categories that are ‘colloquialized’ with the addition of such descriptors (e.g., Bedroom Pop, Feel Good Classical, Cooking with Swing, etc.). While some have described colloquial categorization as an ‘ultraniche’ expansion of existing musical genre classification, this paper draws on evidence from literature on music and timbral perception that posits that colloquial categorization is a different form of sonic classification (Rodgers 2020:202; Wallmark 2019). Considering that listeners with no formal musical training describe music in relation to the affective state(s) and context(s) it inspires rather than its technical characteristics and parameters (Kim and Belkin 2002), I suggest that the colloquial music classification enabled by Spotify can be distinguished from traditional genre classification on the basis that it is democratized. This also applies to music production, aligning with accounts of how Spotify’s genre-transcendent playlist and recommendation features also lend themselves to fostering a greater diversity of popular artists on the platform, further diversifying and broadening avenues for music production in addition to users’ listening habits (Mulligan 2020; Prey, Esteve Del Valle, and Zwerwer 2020). In exploring the nature and implications of Spotify’s position vis-à-vis the music and users on its platform, this paper compares and contrasts current definitions of cultural intermediaries to better situate the Spotify in relevant discourse about cultural intermediation. In doing so, it also frames the process of cultural intermediation in a manner that extends beyond its habitually emphasized implications at the level of taste, status, and distinction and considers its potential impacts within systems of knowledge. Moreover, this paper also provides grounds upon which we may establish a more systematic understanding of everyday music classification by considering insights from both sociology and music perception.

This paper will be presented at the following session: