Spotification of Popular Culture in the Field of Popular Communication

Patrick Burkart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000089257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection considers various meanings of the "Spotification" of music and other media. Specifically, it replies to the editor's call to address the changes in media cultures and industries accompanying the transition to streaming media and media services. Streaming media services have become part of daily life all over the world, with Spotify, in particular, inheriting and reconfiguring characteristics of older ways of publishing, distributing, and consuming media.

The contributors look to the broader community of music, media, and cultural researchers to spell out some of the implications of the Spotification of music and popular culture. These include changes in personal media consumption and production, educational processes, and the work of media industries. Interdisciplinary scholarship on commercial digital distribution is needed more than ever to illuminate the qualitative changes to production, distribution, and consumption accompanying streaming music and television.

This book represents the latest research and theory on the conversion of mass markets for recorded music to streaming services.

Lost in spotify: folksonomy and wayfinding functions in spotify’s interface and companion apps

Amelia Besseny iD

ABSTRACT
Music streaming sites are growing rapidly and the novel ways in which site users can organize, explore and present their music are important in music discovery. This paper focuses on the organization and presentation of music through folksonomy in the visual interface of Spotify. The site’s interface is evaluated to determine its overall folksonomy-friendliness using a framework based upon an analysis of wayfinding features. Folksonomy is a social tagging strategy that exemplifies the innovation of dynamic web interfaces but is surprisingly scarce in music streaming interfaces. It can be found in sites composed of user-made content, where users categorize music in their own words. How music is organized in streaming interfaces, and whether it reflects a user’s own musical vocabulary, impacts upon a user’s access to a variety of music, their modes of interaction, and overall power dynamics, in which one path of listening may have more influence than another.

This paper focuses on the organization and presentation of music in the visual interface of Spotify. Rather than evaluating Spotify’s user interface (UI) for design, this paper investigates taxonomical and folksonomic ideologies behind standard music discovery features, which impact upon categorization. The UX tool of wireframes are employed deconstruct Spotify’s layout (Figures 5 and 7) to understand pathways users have available through wayfinding features and allowing us to observe the ratio of folksonomy-friendly functions available. Interfaces are referred to throughout this paper in the same manner as Morris and Power, they are defined as “all that greets a user” at the face of a website or app, including content organization and the navigational (wayfinding) options (Morris & Powers, 2015, p. 110). Organizational systems in music discovery, namely taxonomy and folksonomy, constitute approaches to information categorization and classification. Music discovery is the process by which users find the music they listen to. It is apparent through this research that there are few instances of folksonomy in Spotify. One potential reason for this is due to the complications that folksonomy poses for control. Taxonomy is suited for curatorial services, including the automated recommendations that Spotify provides. Simplicity for the end user often takes precedence over the richness of data, as Hogan indicates, invisible algorithms are limited by a reductionism in presentation of information evident in single column ordering and ranked lists, which are inherently taxonomical (Hogan, 2015).

The term folksonomy emerged in the early days of the Web 2.0, when dynamic and interactive websites began to replace static webpages. Coined by Thomas Vander Wal in 2004, the term recognized sites such as Flickr and Del­.ic­io.­us, which use social tagging to organize and group material. Folksonomy today still involves text-based hyperlink labels but also includes hashtags. Users create tags to categorize their own content or the preexisting content they encounter online, rather than follow recommendations from administrated menus. Folksonomies are “describing tools” and can be used as personal systems of organization and sense-making as users explore catalogs (Jeorett & Watkinson, 2015). On the other hand, taxonomy allows for musical subgenres to be neatly stacked within genres, which creates useable paths for algorithmic song recommendation. This approach to genre though is becoming increasingly complex as databases continue to grow rapidly. Connections between genres also continue to grow as musicians experiment with hybrid styles. Genre maps are becoming de-centralized and look like networks more than trees, such as The Echo Nest project, “Music Popcorn” (refer to Figure 4).

Whilst folksonomy is appropriate for the descriptive labeling of increased amounts of music data, it does have complications in implementation, particularly regarding control. With much music content shared across commercial streaming services, presentation and discovery features are major selling points of any interface, including Spotify. Such music streaming experiences are branded, with services seeking to distinguish themselves in the saturated market. Morris and Powers describe the deliberate yet subtle administrative control in music streaming interfaces, saying that services aim to give the appeal of an “everflowing” and endless stream of music, whilst stratifying for “different levels of consumers, and different groupings of musical consumption activities” (Morris & Powers, 2015, p. 118).

Folksonomy is a tool for engaging with the musical Long Tail in streaming. At the intersection of science and economics, Wired editor, Chris Anderson encountered the Long Tail. Anderson found that where digital retailers were not restricted by what they could stock (traditional supply and demand of physical stock), having a variety of niche products drew more consumers to the service (Anderson, 2010). A major development of moving to digital music has globally exposed the Long Tail, that is, diversity and things outside of mainstream culture. Anderson, noticed the appearance of the long tail in 2004 prompted by Amazon recommendations which used collaborative and content filtering (to recommend similar items, or items other users have enjoyed). The result is a new economic pattern, as consumers may wander further in there listening with increased availability. Researching the Long Tail, Gaffney and Rafferty (2009) advocate for folksonomy as it allows for exploration of the less popular ends of music catalogs and can account for rapidly growing and changing music genre vocabularies.

Some music apps use tagging to bring new approaches to the music archive, exploiting smart technology and social media to gamify online music experiences. Adjacent to this, online folksonomy has progressed beyond simple hyperlinked text-based tags to include time-based tags (annotations) and geotags (tags linking geographical data) across networked environments. Time tags and geotags let users pinpoint moments or map material geographically. Data is shared across a variety of devices promoting a deeper way to interact with media. In the 2010s, there are now many music discovery and music-based social media apps available. Many are aggregators, filtering trending music from various music streaming and media sites (Band a Day, Next Big Sound, White Label), some offer algorithm-based recommendations (iHeartRadio, Discovr,) and are social-based music sharing sites (Cymbal, 8tracks). Innovative apps take a novel approach to music discovery, for example, Songza curates playlists based on moods, WhoSampled shows who artists have sampled in their music and for a brief year Twitter’s #music pooled music from personal twitter feeds to create a playlist (Gensler, 2014).

Innovations in the presentation of data (and the increased capacity for it storage) have seen a growth in aggregation and customization services. Infomediary apps explore the data of music streaming platforms in novel ways. Spotify-linked (companion) apps provide interesting insights into user data and create novel ways to explore its large musical database. “Forgotify” lets you listen to neglected songs; “Drinkify” matches a drink with your music; “Serendipity” shows the regions of two listeners who are listening to the same song simultaneously; “Climatune”, a collaboration with AccuWeather, links weather, location, and mood in playlists; The Echo Nest provides a range of equally exciting apps, including the map generating “Music Popcorn” and “The Wreckomender” (providing antithetical playlists from a chosen song). Whilst companion apps use data to provide insightful curations of music or new ways to manually explore catalogs, the first of port of call is the streaming interface which greets a user with familiar wayfinding features.

Common wayfinding features

Wayfinding features in music streaming interfaces help users navigate ever-immense streamable libraries of music. Sites such as Spotify use a range of recognizable features, including menus, headers, featured content sections and customizable search bars and filters for navigation cues. Design in music streaming is faced with the particularly daunting task of making the abstract and intangible (music) into something visual and digestible. Around the same time as the release of the iPod, Maeda wrote The Laws of Simplicity, negotiating complexity and simplicity in emerging digital design: “establishing a feeling of simplicity in design requires making complexity consciously available in some explicit form” (Maeda, 2006, p. 45). The field of Information Architecture (IA) grew out of the problem of designing for abundant data, addressing labels and attributes, that is, the descriptive details of content and whether the nomenclature (how the labels are named) involves folksonomy. UX design focuses on the user’s overall experience of a product or interface. In extension of IA, UX design developed around a value system based upon usability and usefulness, centered on the user’s emotional response to interactive services and products (Six, 2014). Alongside UX, UI designers work with the visual elements of the interface, including layout and color, to help interfaces achieve these design principles.

One of the primary concerns of human-computer interaction has been usability, but this has grown to also include where design can promote enriching experiences (Harper, Rodden, Rogers, & Sellen, 2008). Human goals are important to understand for experience design, as Kymäläinen says, because users reveal value in experiences of sharing, creating, collaborating, and configuring (Kymäläinen, 2015). Rosenfeld and Morville wrote the iconic “Polar Bear Book”, defining an information ecology. The information ecology is a system of three interdependent areas: (1) Content refers to what a service hosts, be it images, music, video, or text; (2) Context, comprised of goals and resources; and (3) Users, the target audience (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2006). Due to the visual format of music streaming sites, labels and written information needs to be succinct and relatable: “the goal of a label is to communicate information efficiently; that is, without taking up too much of a page’s vertical space or a user’s cognitive space” (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2006, p. 82). Poor labeling can destroy a user’s confidence in the site and it can expose businesses that don’t have their users in mind.

Labeling systems can be planned and unplanned. Folksonomy falls into the unplanned side, whereas taxonomy is ordered and hierarchical. Drop-down menus and scrollable featured content are planned and presented in a linear order. Streaming interfaces use lines to depict logical, hierarchical and purposeful paths. Straight lines in keep with a longstanding notion of rationality (Ingold, 2016). In planned labeling systems, users only need to learn the hierarchy of system rather than the individual labels. On the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Lost in Spotify: folksonomy and wayfinding functions in Spotify’s interface and companion apps
• 2 Promises and pitfalls: the two-faced nature of streaming and social media platforms for beirut-based independent musicians
• 3 Beyond the black box in music streaming: the impact of recommendation systems upon artists
• 4 Revenue, access, and engagement via the in-house curated Spotify playlist in Australia
• 5 Metrics and decision-making in music streaming
• 6 Digital music gatekeeping: a study on the impact of Spotify playlists and YouTube channels on the Brazilian music industry
• 7 Organizing music, organizing gender: algorithmic culture and Spotify recommendations
• 8 What do we do with these CDs? Transitional experiences from physical music media purchases to streaming service subscriptions