The widespread uptake of digital platforms – from YouTube and Instagram to Twitch and TikTok – is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways. Ultimately, the article shows how the playlist format occupies an uneasy position between order and disorder within the digital music economy which has not yet been fully accounted for in the context of music-oriented media studies. On the other hand, it discusses how the playlist is far from a perfected means of measurement and control, and sometimes acts as an unruly transport device. On the one hand, the article considers how playlists – like containers in general – materialize principles of modularization and automation in ways that enhance control and remote oversight. Such an approach seeks to complement previous research concerning playlists, which has often analyzed their emotional and affective dimensions but paid less attention to how playlists enhance calculative, mathematical, and logistical retail flows within the online music economy. technical solutions that assemble, preserve, and transport music objects and thereby uphold logistical operations within the music industry. In particular, it approaches Spotify’s playlists as container technologies – i.e. This article explores the role of editorial playlists in Spotify’s streaming economy.

Spotify obscurity score