Mattia Merlini Voidgaze and Phantom Genres Functions and Dysfunctions of Music Genres on Streaming Platforms Paper presented at The Aesthetics of Absence in Music of the 21 st Century Hosted by the University of Oslo, Oslo, 25.05.2023 PART I: ORIGINS – Why am I here? December 2022. Like many other Spotify users, I was very curious to find out some statistics about my yearly listening activities, thanks to the by-now classic service called “Spotify Wrapped”. To my surprise, among my supposedly favourite genres I found an intriguing yet to me unknown label: voidgaze. I immediately googled it, only to find out that the exact words I had in my mind had already been written by other people: “What the hell is voidgaze?”. Another entry in the Google results struck my attention even more. It was a webpage on the musical social network Last.fm, literally stating that voidgaze was “a fake genre made up by Spotify” and then listing a handful of related better-known subgenres generally revolv- ing around post-black metal. “Mystery solved”, one could say, but I was still curious of un- derstanding why a fake genre ended up ranking so high in my Wrapped, especially since I am not even so familiar with post-black metal. So, I decided to dig a bit deeper into the matter, employing full-scale IT tools (Zanotti 2023) that I am now going to introduce. PART II: TOOLS – How to do research on genres in the age of streaming? The music recommendation system located at the core of all that concerns genres on Spotify is called “The Echo Nest” and was acquired by Spotify in 2014. Over the years, The Echo Nest has developed systems capable of building a “music intelligence” (or “musical brain”) by associating with each track uploaded on Spotify metadata acquired from two main sources: 1. the acoustic analysis of uploaded tracks, afforded by the so-called “machine