Institut für Musikwissenschaft, Spitalgasse 2, Hof 9, 1090 Wien, Hörsaal 1

Herzliche Einladung zum Gastvortrag von Raquel Campos, University of Leeds.

Despite recent efforts to understand streaming classification and recommendation (Maasø & Spilker 2022; Hesmondhalgh et al. 2023) it is still unclear which musical taxonomies are used by music streaming platforms to populate their audiovisual libraries. Previous research shows how the corporate culture of each platform and the understandings of music and genre of their employees influence streaming design (Seaver 2022). Streaming platforms have also not adopted established notions of common good used by public service media (Ferraro et al. 2022). However, research on music genre that dealt with issues of commercialisation of so-called ‘world music’ (Kassabian 2004), does not have continuity after the streaming boom. This paper analyses the ways in which music streaming taxonomies favour Western imaginings of popular music. It explores the ideologies behind musical taxonomies as digital infrastructures, and their role in prescribing and reproducing ways of thinking about music. It outlines initial research results on music classification, to understand how streaming platforms organise musical experience, including structures of recommendation, and dynamics of discovery and exploration. It does so through data collected via discourse analysis of marketing materials about curation, platform and interface analysis of genre representation and organisation, and fieldwork at music industry conferences, including interviews with industry stakeholders and workers. I conclude by providing an anthropological reading of digital infrastructure where human discourse and material structures are intertwined in the production of musical values, arguing that music streaming taxonomies are better understood as ruinous infrastructures (Appel, Anand and Gupta 2018). These infrastructures promise to advance normative notions of common good, access, inclusion, equality, and democratisation but instead fail to deliver these potentials.