Audio Content Curation in Digital Music Streaming Applications: Music Recommendations in Spotify Playlists

Digital audio streaming services grant digital media users access to seemingly infinite music if they are connected to the Internet. But abundant music brings a problem: users facing too many songs from which to choose. This problem is solved by curating music to suit users, thus introducing a recommendation system in the form of playlists to help users navigate in consuming relevant music to them. This conceptual article highlights the role of music curation as an important aspect of digital music streaming, represented in the form of playlists. A literature review is the research method as the article revisits such concepts as streaming, digital music streaming, playlists, and Bhaskar’s idea of curation. The article also introduces the Wesley-Maclean concept of gatekeeping digital music streaming’s content curation. The result demonstrates that curation is a mixture of using algorithms that see music consumption as statistics and the human touch to curate music qualitatively. Curation function can also be developed as a kind of service with significant commercial value. This article aims to enrich the perspective of digital content curation that contributes to research on digital content in general.