Playing Spotify’s game: artists’ approaches to playlisting in Latin America

ABSTRACT

This paper examines recent transformations in music industries associated with platformization by privileging the perspectives, experiences, and voices of artists. We draw on in-depth interviews with 41 musicians based in two Latin American countries: Costa Rica and Mexico. We analyze how artists perceive the “power” and limitations of playlists, how they think playlists are transforming music industries, and how they associate various forms of pressure with this process. We then show that artists’ perceptions about these issues are not uniform but rather variable by discussing three logics that shape the meaning they attribute to Spotify and playlists: dominant, oppositional, and negotiated. Finally, the paper explains the factors that account for why musicians in these countries espouse these logics in different ways. The conclusion argues for considering platformization as more than a purely technological process that needs to be situated within the wider national histories and cultural configurations of the music industries.

KEYWORDS:

• Algorithms
• Latin America
• music industries
• platforms
• spotify
• streaming

Acknowledgements

We thank Julián Arjona, Eduardo Lara, Ariana Meléndez-Moran, and María Fernanda Solano for their assistance in transcribing the interviews. Tiziano Bonini, Robert Prey, and Andrés Segura-Castillo read an earlier version of this paper and offered us invaluable feedback. We also thank our “trusted brokers” in helping us contact interviewees.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vicerrectoría de Investigación, Universidad de Costa Rica [Project no. C0451].

Notes on contributors

Ignacio Siles

Ignacio Siles (PhD, Northwestern University) is a professor of media and technology studies in the School of Communication and researcher in the Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM) at Universidad de Costa Rica.

Amy Ross Arguedas

Amy Ross Arguedas (PhD, Northwestern University) is postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.

Mónica Sancho

Mónica Sancho is a Public Relations Student in the School of Communication at Universidad de Costa Rica.

Ricardo Solís-Quesada

Ricardo Solís-Quesada is an Audiovisual Communication Student in the School of Communication at Universidad de Costa Rica.