Distributed agency in live music programming: showcase festivals as calculative infrastructures

This paper examines the role of music programmers – the individuals responsible for curating lineups for festivals and venues – in the contemporary live music market. Drawing on empirical data from in-depth interviews and participant observation, it analyzes how programmers select emerging artists under conditions of high uncertainty. While traditional sociological accounts emphasize programmers’ individual taste and cultural capital, this study draws on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to argue that music curation is a distributed process embedded in socio-technical arrangements. The analysis conceptualizes showcase festivals as recurring assemblages of market devices that function as calculative infrastructures, enabling the comparison and collective evaluation of artists. By stabilizing shared contexts of assessment and facilitating peer observation and trust-based coordination, these events help programmers manage uncertainty and align expectations. In this view, the power of the intermediary lies not primarily in individual taste or cultural authority, but in their embeddedness within broader systems of valuation and coordination. The paper concludes that the final lineup is not a simple expression of habitus, but a relational effect of organizational constraints and networked mediation.