Inside Playlist Pitching. Music Promotion on Streaming Platforms in Italy

Based on research findings, this chapter aims to examine how relationships between music content providers (producers and distributors) and music streaming platforms play out in everyday working practices and how power relations are expressed, negotiated or contested within them. Streaming platforms are not only the main points of access to digital music but also important places for discovering music and structuring listening paths, particularly through algorithmic and editorial playlists, which have become the focus of their curatorial activity since the middle of the last decade. The promotion activities aimed at directing the inclusion of music tracks in editorial playlists, or rather at confronting the curatorial power of platforms, is an ideal area for observing the tensions, negotiations and tactics that structure the relationship between music providers and music streaming platforms within daily professional routines. On the one hand, therefore, the work falls within the analysis of the concrete practices that take shape in the dynamic and asymmetrical interdependence between music providers and intermediaries who oversee the points of contact with the public; on the other hand, it contributes to studies on the platformisation of cultural production, as it analyses how the curatorial activities of music streaming platforms, and the tactics developed in response to them by music providers, affect the visibility and monetisation of different music projects and musicians.