“This is NOT rap” : tastes and reception practices of Italian music listeners on YouTube

Musical taste is a complex thing, being both subjective and collective, intellectual and emotionally-driven, relatively static as well as related to the contexts and activities of the everyday life. This complex picture has become even more fragmented with the diffusion of digital platforms and streaming services, which allow users to browse enormous digital music catalogues at low or no cost, to share their tastes and comment others’, as well as to partly delegate their music choices and discovery to recommender algorithms. YouTube undoubtedly represents one of the main sources for contemporary music lovers. The recent introduction of the “autoplay feature” on the platform, which automatically plays related videos one after the other, makes YouTube users’ experience further algorithmically constructed and it raises new questions about the interplay between music reception and technology. Starting from these premises, this article aims to explore Italian YouTube users’ music taste and reception practices through a mixed methods investigation. More specifically, this study will focus both on the individual use of YouTube as a tool for listening and exploring music and on the social representations of “good” and “bad”, “authentic” and “inauthentic” music emerging from YouTube comments. What is the impact of YouTube, and in particular of its recommendation system, on users’ musical repertoires and reception habits? How does the social construction of musical taste on YouTube comments discursively work? The methods employed for addressing these research questions are, respectively, in-depth qualitative interviews with a theoretical sample of Italian YouTube users and text analysis, conducted on a large corpus of almost 100k comments regarding around 10k Italian popular music videos. The main theoretical goal of this article is not to conceive musical taste simply as an individual feature but as a process, now involving technology as an active and significant component. The main methodological goal relies in the possibility of triangulating the YouTube users’ accounts collected through the interviews with the digital traces of their behaviour on the platform, thus mixing micro and macro, on and offline analyses.