Shaping the canon: Spotify and the construction of Spain’s música urbana

Abstract

In the second half of the 2010s, a new music genre named música urbana has emerged in Spain, and a music world –a network of collaborative practices organized around the production, distribution and consumption– has sprouted around it. In this paper, we argue that music streaming services and playlisting practices are becoming a new kind of sociotechnical gatekeeper that influences the shaping of music canons in unprecendented ways. We will focus on Spotify in order to point out methodological challenges and proposals suitable to empirically determine sociotechnical actor’s influence on popular music genre formation.