ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses some of the key debates and issues raised in relation to curatorial functions of digital sound cultures, with particular attention to curation on licensed music streaming services. It addresses three overlapping but distinct orders of curation: first, curation as individualized practices of recombinatory and reflexive consumption; second, curation as collaborative, archival, and educational projects carried out by distributed regimes of value; third, curation as the primary output of algorithmic cultures online, wherein cultural technologies are engaged in the automation of classification and presentation. The examples provided in this chapter demonstrate that each of these curatorial practices is mutually mediating, with each order of curation—individualistic, collaborative, and algorithmic—intersecting, informing, and shaping the other (Born 2011). Much in the same way that it is impossible to speak about the online curation of sound without considering the technical infrastructure that engenders digital socialities, we must also address the mutating forms of curatorial labor that are appropriated and instrumentalized in the production of automated curation. A rigorous analysis to the sociotechnical systems of curation online must address the agencies at work within these assemblages, parsing whose tastes and values are being performed, and to whose benefit these curatorial acts serve.
