The corporate rhetoric of streaming platforms often assumes a tight link between their scale-making ambitions on the one hand and the creative interests of musicians on the other. In practice, most musicians recognise that claims of musical ‘democratisation’ are deeply flawed. The creative ambivalence this produces is an understudied pillar in scholarship on digital music platforms and suggests that these systems can be more creatively constrictive than empowering. Based on ethnographic research among Spotify engineers, record labels and musicians, this article explores how music recommendation systems become inculcated with a corporate rhetoric of ‘scalability’ and considers, following Anna Tsing, how this impacts musical creativity further down the value chain. I argue that the ‘creative ambivalence’ that these technologies produce should be more fully understood as woven into a complex web of social relations and corporate interests than prevailing claims of technological objectivity and ‘democratisation’ suggest.

中文翻译：

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Spotify 和音乐的民主化

流媒体平台的企业言论通常假设一方面他们的规模制作野心与另一方面音乐家的创作兴趣之间存在紧密联系。在实践中，大多数音乐家认识到音乐“民主化”的主张存在严重缺陷。这产生的创造性矛盾心理是数字音乐平台学术研究中未被充分研究的支柱，并表明这些系统可以更具创造性地限制而不是授权。基于 Spotify 工程师、唱片公司和音乐家之间的民族志研究，本文探讨了音乐推荐系统如何被灌输“可扩展性”的企业言论，并按照 Anna Tsing 的观点考虑这如何进一步影响价值链的音乐创造力。