Serendipity on radio and streaming: Between musical discovery and recognition

Abstract

This article seeks to discuss, within the scope of radio and audio media studies, how serendipity articulates discovery, memory and recognition, standing at the heart of current Music Streaming Platforms’ rhetoric and musical culture. Fortuitous discovery mobilizes affections and helps to build bonds (either with platforms or radio stations), representing a major role in music innovation and circulation. Combining a range of current Global South references with critical theories on media and memory, we address similarities and differences between music programming and curation on radio and streaming, refuting computer scientists’ ambition to engineer serendipitous experiences and highlighting that serendipity must be correlated with the listeners’ sociocultural background. We conclude that acknowledging the complexity of serendipity opens doors for thinking of critical issues concerning musical consumption, conditions of listening, identity, representation and audio media agency. These are central themes in restructuring of the music industry, in a context of platformization.