In music streaming services, for instance, curated content provides platforms with additional “gatekeeping powers” (Bonini and Gandini, 2019). Robert Pray (2020) goes further to argue that the power of a music streaming platform like Spotify, which has to stitch together diferent markets—such as the music, advertising, and financial markets—in order to survive and expand, lies principally in its own curated playlists. Pray calls this “curatorial power”, that is, “the capacity to advance one’s interests, and afect the interests of others, through the organizing and programming of content” (2020: 2). For musicians, being included in Spotify playlists means fame and revenue to the point that “record labels have become increasingly dependent on landing on Spotify-curated playlists”; for advertisers, playlists ofer the opportunity for native advertising, while for investors playlists represent the promise that eventually Spotify will become profitable by producing its own music and avoid paying costly copyright fees to record labels (2020: 3). By “unbundling albums and reassembling them into playlists” (2020: 3), Spotify re-places a fragment of the cultural commodity—the song—into a new ordered constellation that promises to advance new regimes of profit. For users, the curated playlist is an added value that distinguishes Spotify from a music torrent site and can persuade them to pay for the service. Apple News+, Apple’s subscription-based news service, is more than just a news aggregator; it is a curated enterprise that reframes news piece as personalized content (Bandy and Diakopoulos, 2020). As Apple puts it, “experienced Apple News editors curate the day’s top stories from trusted sources, and advanced algorithms help you discover stories you’ll find interesting” (Apple News, 2023). Through this service, Apple can position itself as a powerful intermediary between the news sites and the public and reap whatever benefits accompany this role.
In platform capitalism, platforms deploy curation in two ways: on the one hand, they strive to establish themselves as experts, particularly through algorithmic recommendation systems that curate user connectivity and the provision of curated services, such as, the playlist or curated news (van Dijck, 2013; Langley and Leyshon, 2017: 5). On the other hand, they are sites that allow for massive amounts of curatorial/entrepreneurial labor from ordinary users while also attracting consumers who want to curate themselves. The remainder of this chapter focuses on these latter two points.
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Homo Curatorius