Genre tags and ‘genre’ playlists: Tracking Spotify’s agency on musical genres

Spotify currently draws on almost 6,000 different genre tags associated with individual artists. In spite of this impressive taxonomy, the only way for users to navigate genres on the platform is by browsing playlists characterised by a combination of curatorial, users-created and algorithmic-based content. These playlists variously promise insights into genre and subgenre strands of music production and encourage listening paths for exploring them. This raises the question of how deeply playlists can commodify the perception of musical genres and to what extent their agency may be affected by the over- or under-codification of specific genres in Spotify’s mediated topography. Inasmuch as genres are discursive constructs negotiated by social actors drawing on musical and cultural codes, conventions and patterns of consumption, platforms participate in these relational networks both as actors and as media, informing and shaping the agency of the other existing entities. Drawing on the software SpotiGeM Hub, which was specifically conceived by the authors for querying the Spotify API to collect playlist features and metadata according to digital methods principles, our paper aims to disentangle the relation between genre metadata and 'genre playlists', in order to examine Spotify’s role as a modeler and gatekeeper of genre notions in the current musical scenario. To this end, we will discuss our findings regarding the analysis of two contrasting sets of playlists, one clustered around historicised genre tags (e.g. ‘alternative rock’, ‘new wave’), and the other referred to neologisms introduced or boosted by Spotify itself (e.g. ‘bedroom pop’, ‘escape room’).