Playlisting the periphery: Platform intermediaries and East-Central European music visibility in Spotify’s geography

This article examines Spotify’s engagement with East-Central European (ECE) music markets, exploring how platformization intersects with peripherality. Using insights from the political economy of global media and platform studies, it situates Spotify within the asymmetrical geographies of platform capitalism, where peripheral regions are more consumption markets than cultural centers. While Spotify emphasizes egalitarian access through playlisting and algorithmic tools, the findings reveal persistent inequalities shaped by “spatial gatekeeping.” Focusing on how regional actors, mediating between artists and the platform, experience these inequalities, the article draws on interviews and “scavenging” ethnography to develop a typology of “platform intermediaries,” including regional playlist editors, digital distributors, major label representatives, and music creators. These intermediaries internalize spatial gatekeeping in their practices and platform imaginaries, which reflect perceived distance from geographic and algorithmic centers and aspirations to transcend peripherality. The article offers a nuanced account of platform geography’s asymmetries as experienced from the periphery.