Algotorial

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 22:37:00 +0100

“Algotorial” bezeichnet eine Mischung aus algorithmischer und redaktioneller (editorial) Kuration und wurde offenbar von Spotify gecoint. Vor allem Meg Tarquinio, die ehemalige Head of Curation Strategy, scheint dafür verantwortlich. Sie redet in diesem Podcast darüber, der jetzt in meinen Lesezeichen landet.

Knowing what songs might be particularly “singable” is difficult to describe in algorithms. It might be the song that was on repeat last summer, or a particularly catchy refrain that is repeated over and over. Maybe it appeared in a TV show or movie recently to remind you of your teenage years. It’s hard to describe why, but you know it when you hear it. This is where human intuition comes in.

Ich habe inzwischen tatsächlich in den Podcast hereingehört und fand diese Stelle über die Notwendigkeit (oder vielmehr Überflüssigkeit) von individuellem Geschmack bei Kuration sehr aussagekräftig:

I actually am like anti-taste. I don’t know that I believe in good taste or bad taste. A lot of times I think there’s this myth around editors and curation that suggests, ‘Oh, this person loves this song so they’re going to put it into a playlist.’ But I think for good curators, or just curators in general, that’s not how it works.

Of course, if you’re a curator in a space that you love – like folk music – and you’ve grown up listening to folk music, you’re going to love a lot of the music that you’re programming. But you’re not programming it because you love it. That’s just kind of a correlation versus causation situation.

I think you’re programming it because you understand the space and you understand the audience, and you know that they would love it in this specific context. So I think the more that you can divorce your personal taste from what you’re doing, or at least have an awareness that that’s just an association versus a reason for anything that you’re doing – that’s the way to go for sure.

– Meg Tarquinio, ex-Head of Curation Strategy, Spotify

kemper.FYI

Algotorial