O formato playlist: a prescrição musical entre filosofias de programação radiofônica e engenharias da experiência musical automática

Abstract

This thesis investigates the features, conditions of production, and communication of the automatic music playlist in streaming platforms. By conceptualizing the playlist as a format, I highlight the importance of studying the web of cultural, political, and social values that influence decisions that prescribe the way we consume music and shape the artifacts with which we access a lot of cultural products today. Facing an object that avoids scrutiny by denying access to independent researchers, I combine a scavenge of web archives, corporate and editorial documents with a more traditional bibliographic research of academic and trade papers about the concept of playlist and the development of music recommendation systems. I add to this documental analysis three interviews with music curators and an analysis of the daily offers of playlists on streaming platforms’ web players. This qualitative research seeks the emergence of themes and concepts to understand the ways in which automatic playlists are built and how they are publicized by those who produce them, software engineers, and music curators. The thesis defends that automatic playlists are produced based on an imagined listener that seeks a personalized individual experience and that the role played by the system is informed by a programming philosophy defined as an engineering of music listening. Moreover, the playlist format is composed of both automatic and editorial expressions that can't be separated, primarily because streaming platforms work hard to blur the lines between them in both their presentation and in their production conditions, driven by the platformization of these industries of digital music promotion and distribution. Finally, I reflect on the possible consequences of this platformed way of music prescription to the advancement of music diversity and to music experience itself in today's society.