Open call

How do algorithms shape what we listen to?

A research team from Charles University is looking for volunteers for a study of music streaming

Prague, 21 September 2026 — Opaque algorithms, and music from the major labels recommended at the expense of the independent scene. That is a fraction of the criticism levelled in recent years at Spotify, the largest music streaming platform. A current research project sets out to examine what these new ways of recommending do to European and Czech music.

The Cultural Industries Research Group (CIRG), which includes staff from the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, is looking for people who subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music and would like to take part in a study of music streaming. Among other things, the findings are meant to feed into current debates on European regulation of music streaming, which — unlike so-called video-on-demand services — is under no obligation to support European content.

The research sets out to map which music listeners are shown on the basis of what they have listened to before, and which tracks the platform plays of its own accord (in autoplay, for instance) without their having chosen it. It runs at the same time in Poland, Sweden, Germany and Romania, so that the researchers can follow how the map of music streaming changes from one European Union country to another.

Platformisation — which among other things meant the shift to streaming — has radically changed access to culture, bringing new ways of recommending, personalising and consuming. Studies in recent years have pointed to inequalities in how music is recommended. On the basis of their earlier choices, listeners are enclosed in the same circuits, whether of genre or of geography. Streaming services such as Spotify, the strongest player on the market, are meanwhile not transparent about how their recommendation mechanisms work.

The original promises of the global platforms — that they would remove barriers to access and to the circulation of music — have not been fulfilled. Our preliminary results show, for example, that Spotify's editorial playlists significantly disadvantage artists from Central and Eastern Europe, whether we compare their inclusion with creators from English-speaking territories or with the visibility of regional repertoire across various other platforms.

Petr Szczepanik, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, member of the research team

Algorithmic recommendation systems more often make visible music from the centres of popular music than from the peripheries.

Thanks to pressure from professional organisations and music associations, this is also being debated at European Union level. A European Commission study published this year likewise pointed to inequalities in how discoverable European culture is in platformised ecosystems, and we want our research to contribute to those debates.

Miloš Hroch, Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University

Participants will be asked to document the way they normally move through a streaming platform: how they use its interface, explore playlists and look for new music. It is neither time-consuming nor technically demanding, and it needs no special equipment — a smartphone is enough (see how it works). Among other things, this lets the researchers observe how the platform environment, in its personalised mode, affects the visibility and discoverability of music, including its national and genre diversity.

The data should help the team deepen its understanding of how design, curation and algorithms shape different kinds of inequality, and of how European music is streamed: how far the platforms keep listeners inside their own country, and how much of the cross-border exchange the platforms so often advertise actually happens.