What if the Musical Genre is No Longer Enough? Digital Methods for Investigating the Illusion of Categorisation

To reflect on the contemporary relevance of musical genres, it is necessary to integrate a historical tradition of theoretical thinking with research on platform power and internet cultures which can be validated by novel empirical investigation methods. For the latter, digital tools used to analyse and aggregate metadata, become key resources for research. In our paper, exploiting the potential of digital tools, we first present some perspectives on Spotify’s genre classification system; then, by studying genre on YouTube and TikTok, we show how these are perceived and reworked by platform users. In this way, we demonstrate how in some cases the non-transparency of data provided by platforms should be compared with other types of analysis, directly carried on internet cultures. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that all metadata we can access via our digital tools is in the hands of corporations that have the power to change their accessibility and their function within the system at their will, thus affecting not only the kind of agency they perform on current communities of listeners and musicians and their conception of genres, but also our epistemological grasp on the matter. We use the case study of the recent changes in Spotify’s staff to show how the use of music genre in the Spotify Wrapped feature has changed in the last three editions, thus showcasing the power that corporate decisions have on the manipulation of the imaginaries regarding genres, being them existent or made-up.