Literature review: genre theory and studies of music streaming

To better understand how genre constitutes identity and difference in the current age of algotorial mediation in streaming, it is crucial to discern what genre means. In popular music studies, genre is understood as both a theoretical concept and an empirical field. Scholars have studied individual popular music genresFootnote ²¹ and discussed the social practicesFootnote ²² and institutional and corporate processesFootnote ²³ at work in genre formations. Scholarly work has identified issues of denomination and delineation,Footnote ²⁴ temporality,Footnote ²⁵ and questions of identity, difference,Footnote ²⁶ and collectivityFootnote ²⁷ as central issues relating to genre formations. Initially, the study of genre was divided into two approaches, which sought to create systematic typologies on the one hand and understood genre as social practice on the other.Footnote ²⁸ Seeking to combine these approaches, Franco Fabbri defines genre as a ‘set of musical events’ created from a ‘definite set of socially accepted rules’. Footnote ²⁹ He outlines five rules that constitute genre: musical (‘formal and technical’); semiotic; performance-related (‘style’ of performers and audience); social and ‘ideological’; and economic and juridical. Although Fabbri's model may appear rigid, he opposes the idea that genre classification is objective and determinable by fixed musical or social parameters. Instead, drawing on de Saussure's theory of meaning as a system of difference that lacks positive value,Footnote ³⁰ he understands genre as fundamentally relational, temporally and spatially contingent, and dynamic.

David Brackett has theorized popular music genre and social identity, studying the associations between genre and race/ethnicity in twentieth-century American popular music.Footnote ³¹ Drawing on the Deleuzian concept of assemblage, he describes genre formations as fleeting processes whose boundaries are ‘permeable and fluctuating’ but nevertheless culturally and socially safeguarded.Footnote ³² He argues that how people identify with different types of music informs processes of genre division in popular music and that, in turn, the associations between genre and (racial) identity take part in the formations of identity by mediating ‘social connotations’.Footnote ³³ Thus, categorizing similarities in genre does, for Brackett, also involve categorizing similarity in identity, including gender, race, and ethnicity. In similar ways, Georgina Born describes the relationship between genre and identity as an affective process of ‘mutual mediation’ between the ‘self-organizing historical entities’ of musical formations and social identity formations.Footnote ³⁴

Formations of genre and identity have in popular music not only mediated each other, but also been shaped by technologyFootnote ³⁵ and the qualities of technologically mediated music have informed new ways of listening, changed performance practices, and led to the emergence of new musical genres.Footnote ³⁶ Scholars have studied how technologically mediated popular music genres and their distribution through media channels such as commercial radio stations have shaped people's awareness of themselves in relationship to a mediated community.Footnote ³⁷ Since the late 1990s, the internet and new digital and online media technologies have been central to these developments.Footnote ³⁸ Feminist scholars have argued that technologies cannot be seen as ‘neutral artefacts’.Footnote ³⁹ Rather, gendered power relations and articulations of gender shape and are shaped by the discursive and material qualities of technologies,Footnote ⁴⁰ including in digital technologies, where cultural beliefs, identities, and social relations are ‘materially reproduced’ in software design.Footnote ⁴¹ For example, it has been argued that the recommendation algorithm of Spotify constructs popular music as masculine in most genresFootnote ⁴² and that algorithmic culture is gendered in music streaming.Footnote ⁴³

In neoliberal capitalism, difference and diversity are understood in positive (although often hierarchical) terms as difference expands possibilities for commodification through the creation of several niche markets (such as women and ethnic minorities) and multiplies branding strategies. For neoliberal society, the meaning of difference is not tied to debates about equity, but rather to ever-expanded opportunities for branding and commodification through a rhetoric of individualization.Footnote ⁴⁴ Tendencies of diversification and singularization that resonate with the neoliberal commodification of difference have also been identified in post-millennial pop music. As Jeffrey Nealon argues, core values of twentieth-century popular music including being authentic, individualistic, and free – or, in short, ‘not being like everybody else’ – have become organizing elements in contemporary neoliberal capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁵ And Robin James has proposed that resilience, traceable in the sonic, compositional, and textural qualities of twenty-first-century pop music, works as a post-feminist performance of individualized empowerment that sustains white supremacy and patriarchy in the context of neoliberal capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁶ The algorithmic logics of streaming technology similarly address users as highly individualized through personalized recommendations of cultural content.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars studying popular music genre and media technology predicted that the advent of the online digital music industry would entail a democratization and diversification of tastes and genres,Footnote ⁴⁷ the creation of new niche markets and increased visibility for artists and genres from peripheral parts of the global music industry.Footnote ⁴⁸ These prognoses were tied to the idea that music genres, such as the digital online media they are organized and mediated by, were becoming ‘less centralized’,Footnote ⁴⁹ leading to a popular music culture in which listeners would become ‘sole gatekeepers’Footnote ⁵⁰ of cultural production and consumption. By contrast, more recent analyses of online media culture have acknowledged the renewed centralization in cultural production, through shifts in market structures, forms of governance, and infrastructures associated with the platformization of media technologies,Footnote ⁵¹ including in music recommendation.Footnote ⁵²

Initial studies of genre in music streaming have suggested that the logics and affordances of music streaming media constitute genre in new ways; for example, that Spotify's mood- and activity-based playlists, which use algorithms to draw on both the sound of the music and the activities of the user, recast genre as context.Footnote ⁵³ As the playlist has become a central articulation of Spotify's power in the digital music industry,Footnote ⁵⁴ it has also become a site of negotiations of identity and difference, along the lines of gender,Footnote ⁵⁵ sexuality,Footnote ⁵⁶ race, and other social factors. Ignacio Siles et al. propose that streaming playlists themselves may be understood as genres, defined as affective orientations that combine musical, sociotechnological, and sociomaterial elements.Footnote ⁵⁷ While some studies suggest that music streaming fundamentally changes the meaning of genre in music culture, in this article, we emphasize the continuities between genre in streaming, earlier formations of genre, and their mediations of identity and difference. However, we also point to the ways in which Spotify's algotorial mediations of genre, including automated processes, data analysts, music editors and listeners, shape categorizations of genre and identity in new ways.

Nick Seaver finds that creators of algorithmic music recommendation systems frequently describe these systems as ‘post-demographic’ technologies wherein listener behaviour is taken as a primary indicator of a listener's ‘musical identity’.Footnote ⁵⁸ These systems segment listeners using scales of ‘avidity’, or ‘musical enthusiasm’, that describe listeners’ interest (or disinterest) in exploring new types of music. However, as Seaver explains, although avidity expresses the claim to move beyond ideas about genre and identity in the segmenting of listeners, it rearticulates discourses of musical taste and listening practices that have been coded in terms of gender, class, and age. For example, Seaver recounts how an engineer explained the concept of avidity by contrasting the repetitive pop tastes of teenage girls with the eclectic listening of the knowledgeable (male) jazz listener.Footnote ⁵⁹ By showing how presumptions about genre, taste, and identity are built into algorithmic systems of recommendation, Seaver illustrates how music streaming's automated systems are not oppositional cultural formations, but rather result from the internal ‘culture’ of software companies.Footnote ⁶⁰ Automated systems thus are, in the words of Andrejevic and colleagues, ‘an extension and intensification of social relations of production’.Footnote ⁶¹

Tom Johnson has shown how Spotify's organization of genre in metadata rearticulates previous discourses of genre and identity in popular music culture.Footnote ⁶² He identifies two main characteristics of Spotify's genre metadata: first, Spotify's genre tags vary starkly in scope and scale, resulting in uneven levels of detail and description. For instance, as a locally and temporally specific genre, the tag ‘merseybeat’ gives more insight than the broad category ‘pop’.Footnote ⁶³ Second, Johnson finds that the number of tags assigned to artists varies greatly and is in accordance with the specificity of genre tags: while the indie band Dirty Projectors were assigned twenty-six different genre tags, highly commercially successful artists such as Rihanna or Drake only received a few tags each.Footnote ⁶⁴ Building on Umberto Eco's concepts of overcoding and undercoding, Johnson argues that these variations in scope and scale perpetuate earlier ascriptions of cultural value in popular music. As overcoding enables increased differentiation in terms of genre and identity formations, the fine-grained genre distinctions within rock and indie genres rearticulate ascriptions of cultural value to musical genres that have been coded as white and male throughout the history of popular music.Footnote ⁶⁵

Identity and difference in two Spotify genres

Spotify's organization of 6,000 genres is characterized by division into subgenres, a continuation of previous popular music genre practices within music industries and fan cultures, where large genres are divided into sections: pop, indie pop, and electro pop are presented as related but different, where pop is the umbrella term. As explained earlier, we understand the denominators and boundaries of genres as always constructed, dynamic, and permeable;Footnote ⁷⁹ however, compared with the genre system pre-dating Spotify, subgenres have multiplied. Spotify's genre system includes well-known genres (e.g., rock, pop, and hip hop) but also cross- (e.g., ‘pop rap’), and new genres (e.g., ‘escape room’). As McDonald has explained, he coined the latter term to describe ‘collective listening patters’ he had noticed in Spotify's user data.Footnote ⁸⁰ Neologisms such as ‘escape room’ or ‘bubblegrunge’ most readily illustrate the intersections of automated auditory and textual analysis, user data analysis, and direct human interventions in Spotify's organization of genre. However, other idiosyncrasies of Spotify's genre categorization demonstrate how its mediation of genre differs from earlier constructions in popular music cultures and industries. For example, a further characteristic of Spotify's organization of genre is the creation of mood-based genres (e.g., ‘rap calme’ (mellow rap in French)), and time- or location-specific genres (e.g., ‘vintage italian pop’, ‘atlanta indie’, and ‘african rock’). Additionally, Spotify also uses genre categories explicitly referring to gender, sexuality, and race (e.g., ‘transpop’, ‘queercore’, and ‘black americana’). Like the location-specific genres, such tags rearticulate and intensify the association between musical genres, identity, and difference. Spotify's genre tags illustrate how its system of categorizing music bridges the distinction between auditory and cultural aspects of genre; in other words, it ‘calls into question the style/genre binary’.Footnote ⁸¹ But beyond that, and as we will discuss later, it further intensifies and renders explicit the associations between genre and identity in new ways.

Searching for a genre through ENaO's ‘research’ function initially presents exact matches lists of all artists assigned the genre, which include names, thumbnail pictures, follower numbers, and genre tags. The logics governing the positioning of artists on the lists remains unknown, but placement appears to relate to follower numbers, production value of thumbnail images, and number of genre tags. ENaO also presents Spotify's genre metadata through playlists, which differ in sequencing from the exact matches lists. Further, in the Spotify-created playlists representing rap français and the user-generated playlist and media discourse surrounding bubblegrunge, discourses of identity, difference, temporality, and place are also drawn upon in similar ways. Our contextualization of Spotify's system of genre tags in playlists and media discourse shows that genre participates in the organization of music and its association with identity and difference in streaming services, and in contemporary popular music cultures. In our analysis we proceed to discuss how.

Constructions of gender, race, and class

Although some music critics used the term ‘bubblegrunge’ in the 1990s, most fans and musician became newly aware of bubblegrunge following the 2021 publication of Spotify Wrapped, where some Spotify users found the genre listed among their top five genres of the year. Presenting individualized streaming data including most streamed genres, artists, and songs in a social-media-ready format, Spotify Wrapped has become an annual marketing tool for the company – and a site for Spotify's mediation of genre. Writer Justin Curto jokingly suggests that wondering about the meaning of Spotify's genre categories following the publication of Spotify Wrapped has itself become tradition,Footnote ⁸² and Mark Beaumont similarly suggests that ‘[t]he best thing about Spotify Wrapped … is having your taste broken down into genres you never even knew you liked, or even existed’.Footnote ⁸³ In December 2021, fans and musicians expressed confusion about bubblegrunge, urged Spotify to explain the genreFootnote ⁸⁴ or made suggestions about its (gendered) meaning in social media posts. For example, the band Mannequin Pussy (@mannequinpussy), who learned that they had been tagged as bubblegrunge, suggested in a tweet that the genre ‘means rock music with female vocalist[s]’, sarcastically exclaiming that ‘we did it girls we got our own genre of music’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Although music critics presented bubblegrunge in the 1990s as a (rockist) critique of pop-oriented (white, male) rock bands,Footnote ⁸⁶ the word's reference to the 1960s term ‘bubblegum pop’, describing catchy guitar-based pop primarily marketed to teenage girls, gendered the original use of the term ‘bubblegrunge’. The media discourse surrounding Spotify's bubblegrunge genre discussed earlier indicates that it is gendered differently from the 1990s term and quantitative representation of gender among artists offers further insights. The representation of gender among the 239 artists and groups tagged as bubblegrunge by Spotify in May 2022 strongly suggests that the genre signifies gendered difference from the normative maleness of rock. In our sample, the largest subset of bubblegrunge artists were mixed gender groups with 47%, followed by 34% of female-identified solo projects or female-only bands, 16% male-led solo projects or male only bands, and 3% non-binary-led solo projects or non-binary only bands.Footnote ⁸⁷ Thus, bubblegrunge includes more solo female and mixed gender bands than other rock genres on Spotify, where male artists dominate. For example, a survey of the artist images of Spotify's ‘grunge’ tag as visualized on ENaO in September 2022 suggests that among the top thirty artists listed as grunge, Hole was the only band with non-male band members. Importantly, although there are more female and non-binary musicians in bubblegrunge, the roles of band members rearticulate gendered discourses in music. Almost two-thirds of the lead vocalists (64%) in our sample were identified as female by online sources, followed by 22% male, and 8% non-binary lead vocalists, and in 7% of the songs, lead vocals were shared by musicians of different genders, reinforcing the feminization of vocal performanceFootnote ⁸⁸ and the coding of the electric guitar and other rock instruments and technologies as masculine.Footnote ⁸⁹ Apart from stylistic characteristics such as instrumentation and texture that are broadly associated with alternative rock, female lead vocalists arguably constitute the primary unifying element of many songs in Spotify's bubblegrunge category.

While the representation of gender among artists, band members, and lead vocalists genders the bubblegrunge category feminine quantitatively and sonically, artist thumbnails also visually code the genre in gendered ways.Footnote ⁹⁰ On ENaO's artists list, (female-led) solo projects such as Lucy Dacus, Soccer Mommy, and Snail Mail, all among artists with the highest follower numbers, are represented by close-up portraits against brightly coloured backdrops. These images depict female artists as authoritative and professional, while their largely subdued visual style – through clothes, hairstyles, and make-up – authenticates the artists within the discursive frameworks of the singer-songwriter and alternative rock traditions that value naturalized constructions of artist personae, in contrast to more explicitly stylized personae common in genres such as pop.Footnote ⁹¹ Some images subtly queer presentations of femininity and masculinity through hairstyles, fashion, and posture: Snail Mail channels teenage boys in 1970s high school prom pictures in her pastel pink tuxedo and Katy Kirby's pose, short, slicked back hair, loose fit jeans, and white rib tank call back to James Dean, thus invoking female masculinity.Footnote ⁹² Posing against a sky-blue backdrop, the non-binary artist Jodi looks straight at the camera, wearing a pastel pink turtleneck shirt and an iridescent butterfly earring. Right arm lifted overhead, they hold a single stem of a soft pink blooming flower, visually constructing a hyperfeminine softness associated with the hyperpop genre, which has centred trans and queer identities.Footnote ⁹³ However, most images resonate with visual imagery associated with indie and alternative music, presenting artists as young and not overly stylized or sexualized, and bands as groups of (often mixed gender) friends. Artist images further indicate that the bubblegrunge category is slightly more inclusive of musicians of colour than rock at large, as artist images suggest that there are some Black and Brown solo artists and band members, although the visual representation largely confirms the construction of indie and alternative rock as white genres.Footnote ⁹⁴

The 354 artists in our sample tagged as rap français by Spotify were identified by MusicBrainz as male solo acts (89%) and duos/groups (11%). The artists whose gender is assigned on MB, Wikipedia, or in Spotify bios were all identified as men.Footnote ⁹⁵ As with bubblegrunge, MB does not identify the gender of individual musicians in groups, but artist information on Spotify and Wikipedia suggests that there were no identifiable female, trans, or non-binary artists in the sample. Rap and hip hop genres are known to be male dominated and this is reflected in ENaO's visual representation of Spotify's genre categories; for example, in September 2022, Cardi B was the only female artist among the top thirty artists of the rap genre tag and hip hop's top thirty was all male. Still, it seems unusual, almost surprising, not to find a single female, trans- or non-binary musician among 354 artists. Well-known female French-speaking rappers such as Shay (tagged as francoton, french hip hop, and pop urbaine) and Lala &ce (tagged as french hip hop and rap calme) are not assigned to rap français and the lack of included female artists rapping in French genders the rap français genre masculine on Spotify. When we analysed the Spotify-created playlists ‘PVNCHLNRS’ and ‘Fresh Rap’ in 2023, one female rapper, Doria, had been tagged as rap français.

The genre's overwhelming masculinity is not only identified through content analysis of artists’ gender identity, but also presented in artists’ visual styles in their thumbnail images. The pictures follow style codes of masculinity in rap: facial expressions are serious and among top artists on the exact matches list, several artists wear sunglasses (e.g., MAES and Uzi), hide their faces (e.g., Kalash and Gazo), wear hats and hoodies (e.g., Alonzo and Rohiff) or make hand signs (e.g., Guy2bezbar and Moha la Squale), all connoting common tropes of toughness associated with Black masculinity in rap culture.Footnote ⁹⁶ Backdrops are rarely visible, but some show cars (e.g., Hamza) or simple facades of apartment buildings (e.g., MRC, YL, and Kamikaz). The artist's image of Lacrim, positioned as number four on the exact matches list, shows a bird's-eye view of a mansion and a luxury car. Juxtaposed with the austere facades of apartment buildings – symbolically evoking the banlieues of Paris – shown by multiple other artists, his image helps construct the tension between poverty in the banlieues on the one hand, and success, luxury, and money on the other. It invokes a central myth of rap, the narrative trope of rags-to-riches,Footnote ⁹⁷ where poverty and luxury are not contradictions, but create meaning together. Black masculinities in rap are often expressed through ‘hardman’ tropes,Footnote ⁹⁸ where a serious and tough masculinity is presented to connote stability and strength, while also, especially in gangsta rap, drawing on ideas about hustling or criminal acts. This presentation resonates with bell hooks's theorization of ‘patriarchal [Black] masculinity’ as an identity formation rooted in slavery and reinforced by capitalism throughout the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹⁹ She argues that the development of what she labels ‘gangsta culture’ among Black men in the United States, and which she sees presented in rap cultureFootnote ¹⁰⁰ was founded in late capitalism, where earning money by tricking the system became the goal.Footnote ¹⁰¹ US rap culture has influenced global rap culture and while ‘gangsta’ identities in rap today are not simply misogynist or glorifying violence, as sometimes indicated in public debate, they rely on patriarchal ideas and the hope of tricking capitalism to become rich through hustle, as outlined by hooks. Some artist thumbnails contradict these racialized and patriarchal figurations: for example, with his back turned to the camera, the artist Zamdame is looking out over the open sea, MMZ is portrayed under a big blooming cherry blossom tree in bright pink against a white backdrop, and Chanceko is pictured in a snowy landscape with trees. These images present alternative masculinities by foregrounding artists’ connections to nature, affirming Murray Forman's argument that constructions of authenticity in hip hop in the 2020s increasingly present Black masculinities that sidestep the stereotypical ‘gangsta’ figure.Footnote ¹⁰² The thumbnail of Doria (the only female rap français artist) also differs from the ‘gangsta’ figure: wearing a furry white bucket hat and bright purple sweatshirt, she faces the camera with a smile.

The playlist generated by ENaO for rap français starts with three melodically oriented tracks with melodious rap flows and melodic hooks in vocals and instrumental arrangements. The playlist is balanced in the relationship between melodically oriented and rhythmically oriented rap flows, the latter primarily characterized by the dismal and monotone cadences, heavy beats, and gloomy samples of drill. The Spotify-generated playlists ‘PVNCHLNRS’ and ‘Fresh Rap’ also represent these stylistic types. To illustrate the sonic and lyrical representation of Black masculinity in rap français, Yaro ft. Ninho on ‘Dernier Etage’ serves as an example.Footnote ¹⁰³ Set at a moderate tempo, the song is introduced by two pairs of three descending synth chords; combined, the motive's downward motion and a subtle harmonic ambiguity in the pattern's latter part create a melancholic melodic–harmonic backdrop. Yaro's rap is subdued at a moderate tempo, while the distribution of his vocals across two time-shifted vocal tracks creates the effect of two voices echoing each other. Jointly, Yaro's mellow and melodic rapping style and the melancholic effect of the synths fittingly soundtrack the lyrics’ storytelling. In the first verse, Yaro describes a late-night scene: Overlooking an open terrain, he observes his ‘brother’ returning home from prison, while Yaro is selling drugs to get himself away from the streets. ‘Dernier etage’ (top floor), repeated in the lyrics, carries multiple meanings: is the song's narrator feeling like he is on top of the world, is he striving to be on top and with money to leave a poor neighbourhood behind, or is he rather so sad that he may jump off the building he is standing on? Although the lyrics draw on ‘gangsta’ ideals of drugs and crime, they are complicated by the sadness and lack of celebration conveyed through musical arrangement and rap performance. Thus, ‘Dernier Etage’ creates an ambiguous Black masculinity. We will return to sounds and lyrics of bubblegrunge, and their implications for identity and difference in the next section.

Constructions of temporality and (music) history

Grunge is a genre that is distinctly temporally and spatially situated: originating in the American Pacific Northwest in the mid-1980s, it gained mainstream popularity in the 1990s. In contrast, Spotify's bubblegrunge category mainly includes musical projects formed in the 2010s, most of whom have released music in recent years. Music in Spotify's bubblegrunge genre is not stylistically similar to grunge or music called bubblegrunge in the 1990s, but loosely shares stylistic characteristics of indie or alternative rock. On the opening song of ENaO's ‘The Sound of Bubblegrunge’ playlist, ‘Get Bummed Out’ by Remember Sports,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ lead vocalist Carmen Perry draws the listener right into a scene: ‘Waking up to just say your goodbyes, feign composure but I know you lied, I know you try so hard, so so hard’, she states soberingly. Skipping an instrumental intro and sidestepping conventional verse–chorus structures, the track juxtaposes a perpetual loop of four chords with sudden shifts in tempo and intensity, creating an unstable soundscape scoring the ending of a relationship that never really was. Combined, ‘jangly’ surf rock guitars and a driving minimalist rock drum kit perform sonic conventions associated with indie pop and rock since the late 1980s, while Perry's subtly adolescent, matter-of-fact vocal tone centres the young female-identified subject as the narrative's protagonist. Following a quiet and somewhat hesitant guitar intro, the playlist's second song, ‘Dark Green Water’ by Great Grandpa,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ intensifies in emotive weight as lead vocals, shared by a female and a male band member, set in. Moving in parallel melodic steps set an octave apart, the singers’ full vocal qualities in chest register lend gravity to introspective and emotive lyrics: ‘All things fade into dark green water down by the lake, mistakes were made and that's the heart of this pain.’ In the subsequent chorus, additional vocal tracks are paired with guitars and drums and synchronized to hit heavily on each downbeat, creating the heightened sense of introspection and emotivity associated with emo that originated in the mid-1980s and has been further popularized in several waves since. In sonic stylistic terms, these songs substantiate the juxtaposition of divergent generic roots in Spotify's bubblegrunge genre, where neither grunge nor music described as bubblegrunge in the 1990s are main stylistic touchpoints.

In addition to missing sonic temporal links, bubblegrunge also differs from the visual conventions of grunge. A quick scroll through ENaO's visual representation of Spotify's grunge category illustrates these conventions, revealing an abundance of group shots in black and white and black-to-navy hues, capturing mostly black-clad, mostly male musicians with serious facial expressions, or in live performance settings. Although some artist thumbnails of bubblegrunge recall early 1990s rock music, they resonate more strongly with indie and alternative rock rather than grunge: images feature streetwear items such as baseball hats, sports jerseys, and dungarees (e.g., Origami Angel, Another Michael, and Sun June) or use filters to create rose-coloured hues and grainy or overexposed effects of analogue photographs (e.g., Lomelda, Hovvdy, and Mannequin Pussy).

The sonic and visual qualities of bubblegrunge create an ambivalent temporality. Although most music has been released in the 2010s and early 2020s, artists draw on musical and visual conventions associated with indie and emo, genres that originated in the late twentieth century. Given the missing links to grunge and 1990s bubblegrunge, Spotify's bubblegrunge genre becomes a misnomer and is constructed as an ahistorical category, disconnected from the history of rock, and lacking identification and recognition among artists and listeners. Johnson argues that Spotify's genre metadata appears to be most differentiated in the realm of indie and alternative rock, which he understands as overcoding, describing the ascription of value to a cultural sphere by way of a heightened stylistic differentiation.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ However, in the case of bubblegrunge, the category does not resonate with stylistic difference. Rather, the stylistic variance, missing links to grunge, and outsized presence of female lead vocalists construct bubblegrunge as ‘other’ to the (male, white) rock canon.

Given the initial (social) media reactions to bubblegrunge discussed above, it is noteworthy that some Spotify users have since embraced the genre. In March 2023, searching for bubblegrunge in the ‘playlist’ section of Spotify's user interface returns over 150 playlists, the majority of which are user-generated playlists.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Leading in followers at the time of our analysis (about 3000) is the playlist ‘Best of: Bubblegrunge’ by the Spotify user It's Me, Christy. The thirty-one songs of the playlist were added just days after the publication of Spotify Wrapped 2021 and ENaO's research tool shows that all but one artist featured on the thirty-one songs are tagged as bubblegrunge. Resonating with music in Spotify's bubblegrunge genre discussed above, ‘Best of: Bubblegrunge’ features stylistically eclectic alternative and indie music released in the 2010s and early 2020s. The playlist also resonates with and even exceeds the gendered coding of Spotify's bubblegrunge genre tag as all but one song feature female-identified lead vocalists.

The user-generated ‘bubblegrunge’ playlist illustrates how listeners have embraced Spotify's gendered and temporally ambivalent genre to categorize stylistically variant rock-adjacent popular music. And while Spotify listeners’ original reactions to bubblegrunge on social media expressed amusement and bewilderment about the genre, it has since come to inform how some listeners understand and categorize their own music listening – and their identity as listeners. In March 2022, Twitter user @_mistymeg tweeted: ‘this time last year I didn't know what bubblegrunge was, and now it's all I am’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In the grand scheme of Spotify's mediation of genre, these examples are few, but they still interestingly point to a co-construction of genre and identity between listeners and media technologies that is increasingly mediated by Spotify's categorization of music. They show how bubblegrunge turned from an idiosyncratic genre tag that caused amusement and confusion to a gendered and temporally ambivalent organization of music that (some) listeners have come to identify with.

Various online music magazines use rap français and hip hop français interchangeably, defined as a French-speaking popular music genre inspired by US hip hop and rap, emerging in France in the 1980s. According to this cultural history, rap français has existed for almost forty years and MC Solaar, active since the 1990s, is the genre's most internationally successful artist. Music journalists and scholarsFootnote ¹⁰⁹ have described rap français as a stylistically diverse genre of rap, commercially successful mostly in France and other French-speaking countries. The genre has specialized record labels such as Def Jam France, the French branch of the influential US record company, and the most successful artists of the genre are also entrepreneurs in film, streaming culture, and merchandise. For example, in 2020, artist Gims released a Netflix documentary narrating the past ten years of his career. In Spotify's genre metadata, rap français as genre tag is distinguished from french hip hop, and hip hop français does not exist as a genre tag. However, a range of additional tags, such as pop urbaine, drill français, rap conscient, rap calme, and francophone are used to tag artists that perform rap in French, and it was common for the artists in our sample to be assigned several of these genre tags. Whereas the genre rap français existing in France long before Spotify and increasingly popular since the 1990sFootnote ¹¹⁰ would include music from all the genre tags mentioned here, rap français on Spotify signifies a genre that is defined in narrower stylistic and temporal terms. Being recently released is a common denominator of the tracks chosen to represent rap français on the genre playlist generated by ENaO. Twenty-three tracks (3%) out of 717 on the playlist were released before 2017, none of these are in the top thirty-five and no track on the list was released before 2013. The focus on novelty in constructions of rap français on Spotify is even more evident on Spotify's curated rap français playlists ‘PVNCHLNRS’ and ‘Fresh Rap’. On ‘PVNCHLNRS’ about half of the songs were released in 2023 and the other half in 2022. On ‘Fresh Rap’, all songs but one was released in 2023, this playlist is also branded as ‘all the latest rap français’ motivating a focus on novelty among the songs. Here it is important to remember that Spotify playlists are algotorial, influenced by the streaming technology and editors that are in their turn working closely with record companies prone to want to showcase their latest artists. The temporality of the playlists is thus co-constructed.

Founders of rap in France (e.g., MC Solaar who is tagged as french hip hop, french rock, jazz rap, and old school rap français) and major stars, such as Gims, are missing on each of these playlists, and so are any artists who have not released music recently. This practice of selecting ‘the latest’ is not specific for Spotify – pop radio has also often focused on the latest hits. However, the genre tagging of Spotify further emphasizes the construction of rap français in terms of the present and of youth by separating the genre from ‘old school rap français’ where older artists are placed. For example, the 46-year-old artist Booba is tagged old school rap français despite releasing music in 2023. This presentation locates rap français in youth and the contemporary moment, rather than a historic continuum, and constructs it as a young genre, its artists being active in recent years. Further, the artists in Spotify's rap français genre look young. When the genre is constructed as young and new, the temporality of present rap français is disconnected from the genre's history.

David Brackett discusses genre as a temporal project, whose mediation of meaning (including through relationships to formations of identity) is contingent on the successful production of temporal lineage and teleology.Footnote ¹¹¹ In contrast, Spotify's mediations of bubblegrunge and rap français do not resonate with constructions of the past as attached to these genres beyond Spotify. Rather, they disrupt temporal lines, in favour of constructions of the present that reach into the future. Studying Netflix and Twitter as cases for theorizing the temporalities of digital media, Rebecca Coleman argues that these media construct an ‘expanded present’,Footnote ¹¹² in which ‘pasts and futures may be implicated and engaged’.Footnote ¹¹³ Spotify's mediations of rap français and bubblegrunge through genre metadata, visual representation, playlist curation, and media discourse may be understood as instances of an expanded present where constructions of the past are suspended in favour of a present reaching to the future.

Place and the construction of international and national music

A total of 86% of the artists in our sample of Spotify's bubblegrunge category were based in the United States, followed by 6% UK-based and 4% Canada-based artists, while the remaining 4% were constituted by Australia, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Spain. Many artists assigned bubblegrunge have additional tags, using US location-based prefixes, such as chicago indie or midwest emo. These regional descriptors vary strongly in scale, ranging from the Swedish town of Umeå (population 90k) to the American Midwest (population 69m). Similarly, artists in rap français are also commonly assigned tags with regional descriptors, including rap marseille and rap lyonnais. Here, tagging practices appear to resonate with conventions of alternative music cultures that have constituted genres in close relationships to local scenesFootnote ¹¹⁴ and to music markets as national (in Fabbri'sFootnote ¹¹⁵ sense). However, the vast differences in scope and scale complicate previous concepts of scenes, which have historically built on an understanding of relatively small-scale networks of artists, record labels, venues, and media,Footnote ¹¹⁶ and raise questions about how regional and national specific genre categories constitute identity and difference in Spotify's mediation of genre.

Bubblegrunge includes a wide range of location-based tags from across the United States, and some other cities, regions, and countries. However, most artists are based in the United States and just under a quarter of artists are signed to five US independent record labels, remediating constructions of indie as forming through local scenes. Simultaneously, the dominance of US artists and labels affirms the US centricity of the popular music industry more broadly. The latter is both articulated and hidden in Spotify's genre metadata, where it results in the uneven calibration of geographic descriptors and the omission of ‘US’ as a location marker. The (unmarked) rearticulation of US-centricity in bubblegrunge is further supported by stylistic elements, as artists primarily draw on American alternative music traditions and rearticulate English as the normative language of alternative rock (neither ENaO's playlist nor the user-generated playlist include a single song in a language other than English). Combined, these elements construct bubblegrunge as an indie music genre, in ways that remediates the formation of local scenes and independent labels in alternative music culture, where the United States is established as its implicit yet unmarked centre. The spatial situatedness of bubblegrunge further illustrates the negotiation of stylistic and sociocultural dimensions of genre in Spotify's tagging practices, which are mediated by unknown combinations of machine listening, text analysis, and interventions by data analysts.

MB presents most artists of rap français as French nationals (93% of the artists with a nation assigned on MB are French), while a small number of artists were identified as Belgian (4%) and Swiss (1%) and 2% of the coded artists were identified as being from the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Madagascar, DRC, and Cameroon.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Further, as all artists rap in French, the genre is constructed as linguistically French. For rap français artists who could not be coded because information about nationality was absent on MB, we examined artist thumbnails, social media and Spotify bios, names, and lyrics, which resonate with the overall picture. These artists also rap in French and seem located mostly in France. The language and location of artists fit the category's linguistic construction, as ‘français’, and indicate that the ‘French’ live in France. The Spotify-created playlists largely feature artists tagged rap français and only nine songs (on ‘PVNCHLNRS’) and six songs (on ‘Fresh Rap’) are performed by artists not included in our sample of artists tagged as rap français. Among the eleven artists performing these songs, some are attributed adjoining genres tags (francoton, rap Marseille, french hip hop, pop urbaine, rap conscient, drill français, French pop, and rap calme) and some have no tags (they are new artists with one release).Footnote ¹¹⁸ The genre rap français as constructed on these Spotify playlists has some room for variations of genre tags, includes some more established artists, and broadens stylistic qualities towards increasingly pop- and R&B-oriented sounds. However, the outward construction of rap français on the Spotify-created playlists resonates closely with the internal construction of the genre in Spotify's genre metadata.

Tagging practices point to the tension between sonic and social aspects of genre that Fabbri would deem ‘formal and technical’ versus ‘social and ideological’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Notably, while ‘rap’ is the reference point of ‘rap français’, no artist tagged as rap français is also tagged as rap. By missing the relation to rap and hip hop, rap français is musically detached from very similar artists due to nation and language. Analysing Spotify's ‘related artists’ function, Tamas Tofalvy and Júlia Koltai find that nation (in the form of label location) and language mediate reconstructions on Spotify of centre and periphery in the music industry.Footnote ¹²⁰ Studying Hungarian metal bands’ association with local and international bands, they find that international label contracts and English language in lyrics prompt the association with international bands, thereby rearticulating the centre of the music industry as English speaking and US based, and its associated patterns of power. In rap français, the name of the genre and the absence of ties to the umbrella genre rap detach rap français from artists outside the francophone world and construct it as periphery to rap's US centre, while Spotify's genre tag rap français and its playlists ‘PVNCHLNRS’ and ‘Fresh Rap’ construct a French universe.

According to information on MB and Wikipedia, almost all artists in rap français's exact matches list (who had such information available) are of North, West, or Central African descent, with the Republic of the Congo (colonized by France), DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) (colonized by Belgium), Senegal (colonized by France), and Algeria (colonized by France) being the most common countries of parental origin.Footnote ¹²¹ French and Belgian colonial pasts in Africa are also drawn upon in song titles (e.g., ‘Kongolais Mauvais’ (‘Congolese mistake’) by DA Uzi) and artists names (e.g., Yaro, an area of Burkina Faso and Jok'Air, referencing the spirit Jok in Acholi culture), invoking languages, regions, cultures, and nations in Africa.Footnote ¹²² Artists in our sample mix Paris slang, Arabic slang, and accents from francophone Africa and use samples and sounds from pop music of West Africa and Central Africa (e.g., Guy2Bezbar's ‘Beretta’). These multimodal qualities construct colonial French identities as central to rap français; rap français is thus multimodally constructed as French coloniality, a concept describing how former colonial structures affect identity, society, and culture in the contemporary world.Footnote ¹²³ Rap français thereby continues to negotiate a colonial history of extreme violence and racism by the French and Belgian colonial powers, a history that has been manifest in the genre's focus on racism, social impoverishment in urban France, and postcolonial ties to Africa.Footnote ¹²⁴ While rap is also a genre negotiating US coloniality, Africa, slavery, and ‘the Black Atlantic’,Footnote ¹²⁵ rap français's ties to French coloniality in Africa are not historical, but an ongoing reality, negotiated by artists, whose parents may have been born in African countries, or who may have been born there themselves.

Spotify's genre metadata implicitly constructs bubblegrunge as a US-centric genre with outposts in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and other western European countries, while rap français is explicitly constructed as a French genre with outposts in Belgium, Switzerland, and a few African countries. When (white) Anglo-American identity remains the unmarked yet normative identity of indie and alternative rock music and rap français symbolically negotiates the African coloniality of France, negotiations of identity remain central to Spotify's mediation of these genres.