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Many thanks to Sumanth Gopinath, Ben Piekut, Marianne Wheeldon, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for the useful commentary and suggestions they provided on earlier versions of this article. Thanks as well for the feedback I received at the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, and Yale University, where I was fortunate enough to share some of this research.
The online streaming service Beats Music was launched in January 2014. Just over a year later, in June 2015, it passed into history, having been acquired by Apple as part of the technology giant's efforts at adapting to the emerging ecosystem of cloud-based music streaming.1 Having seen the dominant position iTunes once enjoyed within the digital music market erode along with the ownership model of music distribution upon which its dominance was founded, Apple's acquisition of Beats presumably aimed at smoothing its transition to an economy in which music was less a good to be exchanged than a utility or service to be rented.2 Much of the fanfare that surrounded Beats during its brief life span – and much of the justification for the $500 million price tag the platform commanded upon its sale – concerned the premium it placed on curation. Highlighting the ineffable ‘human touch’ that artists, music industry professionals, celebrity DJs, and other cultural authorities conferred on the playlists they had been commissioned to compile, Beats sought to differentiate its service from those of competing platforms, above all industry leader Spotify. ‘We appreciate the importance of what music is, that it's not just a digital file’, remarked Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails frontman turned chief creative officer for Beats.3 Such respect for the value of music was also manifest in the belief that the task of contextualizing and lending meaning to individual tracks was not something that could be entrusted to algorithms. According to Jimmy Iovine, the company's founder and chairman, what separated Beats from its competitors was the importance it attached to ‘humanity, taste, and context’.4 The algorithmically driven recommendation engines powering Spotify, Pandora, Deezer, and other platforms were, in Iovine's and Reznor's estimation, incapable of stitching together songs into cohesive playlists – and thus incapable of sustaining a consistent mood or atmosphere...