Chance the Rapper, Spotify, and Musical Categorization in the 2010s

Watch brick and mortar fall like dripping water, uh!

—Chance the Rapper, "Blessings"

In early 2017 Chance the Rapper was on top of the world. He won three Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist, Best Rap Album, and Best Rap Performance, all for his freely distributed, independently released, stylistically eclectic mixtape, Coloring Book. Driven entirely by social media, touring, and streaming services, his wins seemed to embody the utopian potential of the music industry's ever-increasing reliance on streaming to mediate popular music consumption. The Grammy website lauded Chance as the first "streaming-exclusive" artist to win an award, and his successes appeared to benefit from the liberational, decentralizing potential of novel digital distribution practices.¹

This utopian vision was recently rearticulated by Daniel Ek, cofounder of Spotify, in an open letter accompanying the company's official registration for public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Filed with Spotify's SEC registration documents on February 28, 2018, Ek's letter extols his company's purported boundary-erasing capabilities for both listeners and musicians. "In this new world," he proudly proclaims, "music has no borders. … We're working to democratize the industry and connect all of us, across the world, in a shared culture that expands our horizons."² Concurrent public and critical discourses similarly note a dissolution of popular music's generic borders, often reaching the seemingly logical conclusion that, in a time when so many musicians create in/with multiple styles, genre loses its ability to structure meaning; in short, "genre is dead." How might we assess the related tropes about dehierarchized musical worlds and the decline of traditional pop formats and genres alongside the success of a work like Coloring Book ?

This article suggests and investigates places where genre continues to function, places that act as testing grounds for genre's roles in contemporary US popular musics. Genre is not dead, and the move toward ubiquitous streaming in the 2010s reproduces genre in familiar and problematic ways that are inextricably linked with the taxonomization of people. The work done by contemporary streaming services, audiences, and public discourses reiterates racialized generic groupings, slotting neatly into histories of race in American popular music and decades' worth of genre theory literature that describes how genre shows up for experience as a dynamic cultural process.³

After outlining pertinent ways that genre permeates contemporary musical discourses, I focus on one aspect of genre that filters through Spotify directly: metadata. As an indexing mechanism, metadata—specifi-cally genre tags—provide a useful diagnostic tool for materially assessing genre's active role in Spotify's ecosystem. In particular, disparities in the cardinality of musicians' genre tags correlate to broad-scale stylistic and demographic categories. Chance's Coloring Book and its surrounding critical discourses provide another useful locus for investigating imbricated aspects of genre, audience, technology, and race at this specific historical nexus. Although the mixtape's stylistic play seems homologous with the boundaryless musical landscape of Ek's marketing proposal—in which musicians and listeners regularly participate in multiple genres, ostensibly democratizing aspects of musical experience—Coloring Book's streaming success is tied to mediated categories geared toward specific high-value audiences. As a mixtape, it participates in a lineage of promotional, freely distributed musical content meant to generate exposure entirely through novel mid-2010s technological affordances of streaming and sharing. As such, it was acutely subject to the kind of taxonomizing work done by Web 2.0 media and technologies like Spotify that facilitate musical experiences for millions of people.

Ultimately, Spotify's ecosystem seems to replicate the segregation and exclusion that have fundamentally structured US popular-music categorization for its chronological entirety. Many studies have shown how music and musicians throughout the history of American popular music have entered into broad and inextricably racial networks of genre—from antebellum listening practices that enacted a "sonic color line" and sumptuary laws that segregated both people and sound during the turn of the twentieth century, to racial disparities in early vinyl record distribution and mid-1900s radio.⁴ In each case, folk taxonomies of largely white...