This article explores how human curation and algorithmic recommendation are figured in cloud-based streaming platforms. In promoting their services as alternatives to illicit file-sharing, platforms such as Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music have long touted the access they provide to a massive database of music. Yet the effectiveness of appeals to musical plenitude have been thrown into doubt, as high rates of user turnover threaten streaming's economic viability. Curation and recommendation have thus been posited as solutions to this problem, as means of producing and reproducing consumer desire. By attending to the fantasies woven around streaming and music recommendation more specifically, this article highlights the peculiar form of subjectivation at work in the way recommendation hails listeners. The normative listener constructed through such modes of hyper-personalized address is ideally one that is as dynamic and adaptive as the algorithmic systems that adjust to their fluctuating needs, dispositions, and desires.

中文翻译：

---

为什么下一首歌很重要：流媒体、推荐、稀缺

本文探讨了如何在基于云的流媒体平台中进行人工管理和算法推荐。在推广他们的服务作为非法文件共享的替代品时，Spotify、Deezer 和 Apple Music 等平台长期以来一直在吹捧他们提供对庞大音乐数据库的访问权限。然而，由于高用户流失率威胁到流媒体的经济可行性，呼吁丰富音乐的有效性受到质疑。因此，策划和推荐被认为是解决这个问题的方法，是产生和再现消费者欲望的手段。通过更具体地关注围绕流媒体和音乐推荐编织的幻想，本文强调了以推荐方式吸引听众的主观化的特殊形式。