Streaming platforms emerged with the promise of endless exploration of music from all around the world from the convenience of an internet-enabled device. However, their utopian promises are far from the Western-centric infrastructures and management that underpin the music products currently delivered by these services (Campos Valverde 2025). Leaving aside the media industries’ co-opted considerations of equality manifested via representation and visibility, how can we rekindle scholarship interest in questions of cultural imperialism and global flows of music in the software-dependent streaming era? In this talk, I will mobilise Dylan Robinson’s (2020) framework of inclusionary structures of music culture and apply it to music streaming services, proposing the concept of ‘inclusionary discovery’. While Robinson’s framework of ‘hungry listening’ analyses the extractive trend of incorporating indigenous or minority musics to Western classical live performance and recording, here I will propose a broader understanding of this principle as the underlying ideology that underpins the exploration and discovery of music in the streaming industry for all racialised musics as a whole. Using material collected from interface analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and industry documents, I will demonstrate how playlists, recommender products, and public discourse elements of streaming platforms such as marketing copy and PR statements emphasise the idea of discovery of music from a perceived ‘other’ in terms of geography, race, and location, which is always situated outside the Western mainstream ‘centre’. The talk will conclude suggesting alternatives to the music streaming industry extractive practices of music curation and consumption.

Dr Raquel Campos Valverde (she/her) is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, covering aspects of the ERC-funded MUSICSTREAM project related to users, experiences, emotions, and pleasures. Before joining Leeds, she was a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King's College London. Her research interests lie at the intersection of popular music, platform studies and ethnomusicology. Raquel’s current research deals with software governance and cultural inequality in streaming platforms. Her latest publication is “Inequity by design: Music streaming taxonomies as ruinous infrastructure”, in the edited collection Music Streaming around the World, edited by David Hesmondhalgh and published by University of California Press.