“Genrefluid” Spotify Playlists and Mediations of Genre and Identity in Music Streaming

Abstract

Recent popular discourse has claimed that music and listeners’ tastes are becoming increasingly “genrefluid” in popular music culture, and this idea has been linked to the logics of music streaming services. This article analyzes the Spotify-curated playlist Lorem, which has been presented by the company as a primary illustration of “genrefluid” music curation and listening, to investigate Spotify’s mediations of genre and identity at the intersections of media discourse, genre metadata, and curated sound. I discuss how the idea of genrefluidity links post-genre and post-identity discourses to the technocultural logics of algorithmic recommendation. At the same time, Spotify’s mediation of genre remediates earlier hegemonic associations between genre and identity in popular music culture. This article concludes that musical categorization in music streaming does not transcend genre and identity but is characterized by ambivalent mappings of genre and identity mediated by the logics of algorithmic technologies.