Voidgaze and Phantom Genres: Functions and Dysfunctions of Music Genres on Streaming Platforms

Voidgaze is a “phantom genre”: people often listen to this kind of music without even knowing what it is. If you google it, you will find more pages asking for a definition than providing one. Being located at the crossroads between blackgaze, post-black metal, atmospheric black metal, doom metal and neofolk, this genre seems to lack an actual community and is most likely the product of genre classifications operated by streaming services to guide the algorithm’s recommendation work. In this paper I investigate the origins and family tree of this genre by crossing the results of research done using several online tools for the analysis of Spotify playlists metadata – Organize Your Music, All Noise at Once and SpotiGeM. Thus, I use voidgaze as a case study to describe new ways in which genres are born in the age of streaming, highlighting analogies and differences with “old style” genres and their respective functions. The real absence described in this paper, then, is not that implied in the name of voidgaze; it is that of a hypothetical loss of centrality of the concept of “genre” on streaming platforms. But are genres really bound to become just tags and labels in an all-fluid listening experience, or should we broad the old definition of “music genre” to accommodate new “phantom” forms of classification? You can find the book containing the chapter on the publisher's website.