Czechia on the Streaming Periphery: A New Study by Miloš Hroch and Petr Szczepanik Reveals Spotify Inequalities

Spotify once promised to disrupt the old structures of the music industry. However, in recent years, criticism of the streaming service has intensified, revealing quite the opposite. Spotify has created a complex web of gatekeepers operating at various levels and wielding different types of power. A new study by Miloš Hroch from ICSJ FSV UK and Petr Szczepanik from the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, attempts to untangle this often-invisible network of intermediaries and presents its own typology. The article “Playlisting the Periphery: Platform Intermediaries and East-Central European Music Visibility in Spotify’s Geography” was published in the prestigious journal New Media & Society.

Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek once claimed that any teenager could launch a pop career from their bedroom and reach a global audience. Yet, Hroch and Szczepanik’s article shows how different the view is depending on whether you look out onto a Central European housing estate or the skyscrapers of London’s economic center. Their research adds a geographic perspective to the ongoing debate on Spotify and streaming and focuses on the still under-researched region of East-Central Europe. Drawing on insights from the political economy of global media and platform studies, the study shows how Spotify deepens the inequalities between cultural centers and peripheries—and how these inequalities are experienced by those trying to succeed in the music streaming market.

Equal Opportunities? Not for Everyone

Music platforms often present themselves as fair environments where everyone has equal chances regardless of origin or label value. However, research shows they often exacerbate inequalities instead. Spotify categorizes its markets by priority and allocates resources and attention accordingly.

Both algorithmic and editorial playlisting tend to favor Anglo-American music, making it difficult for artists from peripheral regions to break into Spotify’s curated playlists—key tools for visibility. Regions like East-Central Europe are viewed by Spotify more as sources of user growth and cheap labor than as exporters of music.

Hroch and Szczepanik’s study reveals that while subscription numbers are growing in Central Europe, the region remains on the fringes of the global music market. Their research is based on industrial ethnography and interviews with intermediaries who use the platform to promote music—whether they are employees of local branches of multinational record labels, digital distributors, or the artists themselves.

How to Sell Music on the Periphery?

The authors identify four types of actors who serve as intermediaries between peripheral music production and the global platform:

1. Artists adapting to the platform,
2. Traditional gatekeepers adapting to the logic of the digital music market,
3. New distributors aligned with platform logic,
4. Gatekeepers within the platform itself.

Their distance from centers—whether Spotify’s corporate power, concentrated in offices around the world, or traditional cultural metropolises like London—shapes how they present music and what strategies they use to gain platform visibility. The study shows that people on the fringes of the platform economy have limited opportunities to attract attention or change the prevailing inequalities—and often end up reinforcing the very hierarchies they seek to overcome.

The full article “Playlisting the Periphery: Platform Intermediaries and East-Central European Music Visibility in Spotify’s Geography” is available [here]. The study is part of the research project “Opportunities and Barriers to Cross-border Distribution of Czech Music Production” (supported by the Czech Ministry of Culture under the NAKI III program), conducted in collaboration with Palacký University Olomouc.