Eurovision as ‘genre’: Spotify and the geography of European popular music

Spotify’s database currently features artists from 211 world countries, 51 of which are European (source: Everynoise.com). The platform tags almost each of these individual artists with one or more genre/mood markers, several of which feature geographical descriptors ranging from regional (e.g. ‘musica lombarda’, ‘rock sul-mato-grossense’), to urban (‘nottingham hip hop’, ‘bergamo indie’), national (‘psicodelia chilena’), supernational and continental specifications. ‘Eurovision’, ‘classic eurovision’ and ‘junior eurovision’ are three of the twelve tags featuring the ‘euro’ prefix in the whole Spotify database. The ‘eurovision’ marker is not automatically attached to every artist who took part in the contest: it seems being adopted when it prevails over lacking or less decisive genre identifications, and for artists from countries in which the tournament is ramified in the national music scene. Our ongoing research project SpotiGeM: Musical genres in the age of Spotify is showing that the mix of curatorial and algorithmic procedures underlying the platform’s taxonomy of genres and moods takes on diversified strategies, ultimately affecting users’ perception of genres through the means of playlists. Our paper aims to scrutinise the playlists featuring Eurovision-related content on Spotify and address how, by equating ‘eurovision’ to a genre and matching it to other markers, Spotify devises its own datified avatar of European popular music.