Petr Szczepanik
@petrszczepanik.bsky.social
620 followers 410 following 19 posts
Media industries in East Central Europe | streaming platforms | production studies | Assoc. Prof. at Charles University, Prague
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petrszczepanik.bsky.social
6/6 These actors develop “platform imaginaries” that internalize spatial gatekeeping. Their sense of distance from platform and cultural centers shapes how they pitch, optimize, and strategize—often reinforcing the very hierarchies they seek to overcome.
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
5/6 The article offers a typology of intermediaries: (1) platform-responsive creators, (2) adaptive traditional gatekeepers, (3) platform-aligned distributors, and (4) intra-platform gatekeepers—each with distinct roles in navigating platform power.
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
4/6 Platform intermediaries matter—but their agency is shaped by geography. Artists, digital distributors, and local label staff carry out “visibility labor,” yet their influence depends on proximity to Spotify’s algorithmic and corporate core.
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
3/6 ECE countries like Czechia or Poland are positioned as consumption markets rather than hubs of exportable music. Spotify’s playlist strategies and market segmentation reflect and reinforce this peripheral status.
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
2/6 Despite Spotify’s rhetoric of egalitarian access, visibility remains uneven. Editorial playlists reproduce older center–periphery hierarchies, prioritizing Anglo-American content while marginalizing artists from less central regions.
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
1/6 New article on how Spotify engages with East-Central Europe (ECE) and how platformization reinforces global inequalities. Based on the political economy of platforms and interviews with local "platform intermediaries" navigating algorithmic and geographic peripherality.
🔗 doi.org/10.1177/1461...
Playlisting the periphery: Platform intermediaries and East-Central European music visibility in Spotify’s geography - Miloš Hroch, Petr Szczepanik, 2025
This article examines Spotify’s engagement with East-Central European (ECE) music markets, exploring how platformization intersects with peripherality. Using in...
doi.org
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
The article is a part of the EJCS special issue "Global Media Industries in Semi-peripheral Europe", ed. by Aniko Imre and Sylwia Szostak.
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
5/5🔹 Production designers and local citizens as Benjaminian allegorists – They ‘mourn’ the fragmentation and commodification of their lived world while also anticipating its reintegration into the (digitally composited) fictional world of the final show.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
4/5🔹 An allegory of platform capitalism – beyond its fictional world, Carnival Row serves as an unintended figuration of today’s streaming production mode, where local labor and sites are both essential and erased.
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
3/5🔹 Industry-informed textual analysis – what reading strategies can uncover traces of peripheral labor and locations without falling in the trap of intentional reflexivity? What can Benjaminian concepts of fragmentation, ruins and restitution teach us about allegories of streaming productions?
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
2/5🔹 Mobile streaming production deepens global inequalities – While bringing unprecedentedly high-budget, complex commissions to peripheral regions, it reinforces labor asymmetries, centralizes financial and creative control, and fosters new dependencies.
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
1/5🎥🏭When platform capitalism meets local labor: A Prague perspective on global streaming production.

My new article examines how Amazon's Carnival Row—filmed in Prague—embodies the contradictions of platform imperialism. 🧵👇

#StreamingMobileProduction #PlatformImperialism #CarnivalRow #Prague.
petrszczepanik.bsky.social
2/6🔹 Mobile streaming production deepens global inequalities – While bringing unprecedentedly high-budget, complex commissions to peripheral regions, it reinforces labor asymmetries, centralizes financial and creative control, and fosters new dependencies.
Reposted by Petr Szczepanik