Lost in spotify: folksonomy and wayfinding functions in spotify's interface and companion apps

Music streaming sites are growing rapidly and the novel ways in which site users can organize, explore and present their music are important in music discovery. This paper focuses on the organization and presentation of music through folksonomy in the visual interface of Spotify. The site's interface is evaluated to determine its overall folksonomy-friendliness using a framework based upon an analysis of wayfinding features. Folksonomy is a social tagging strategy that exemplifies the innovation of dynamic web interfaces but is surprisingly scarce in music streaming interfaces. It can be found in sites composed of user-made content, where users categorize music in their own words. How music is organized in streaming interfaces, and whether it reflects a user's own musical vocabulary, impacts upon a user's access to a variety of music, their modes of interaction, and overall power dynamics, in which one path of listening may have more influence than another.