Meg Tarquinio has spent an enormous amount of time thinking about your music streaming habits. And chances are she's helped shape them too.  

"I can tell you about the Philippines and their holiday music listening patterns compared to the U.S. and Denmark," says Tarquinio, without a trace of boastfulness. "I'm obsessed with curation. I love it."

Digital curation is "solving the problem of excess," says Tarquinio, who earned a master's degree in English literature at UAlbany.  Before Tarquinio's current role as vice president of strategy and A&R at Nettwerk Music Group,  she gained an encyclopedic knowledge of curation, technology, and users' behaviors as the director of music curation and programming at gaming and video streaming service, Twitch, and earlier, as the head of curation strategy at Spotify, where she built the music streaming giant's global editorial playlist ecosystem. In short, her job was to create a playlist for every moment, every mood: whether it was music to help you focus, songs to sing in the car or even selected audio bits on James Joyce, Tarquino and her team built those playlists and so many more.

It's clear why a music label like Nettwerk which, according to its website, prides itself in the "ability to anticipate shifts in consumer behavior and effectively leverage technology to place great music in the hands of the fans" would need Tarquinio's skillset. Upon joining the record label — her first — Tarquinio was given the freedom to figure out where she could bring value beyond A&R, ultimately landing on brand and content strategy.

"At a lot of labels, a lot of the workflows are artist-specific and release specific," Tarquinio says of the industry practice of being hyper-focused on a campaign for a finite amount of time.  "As a label, we have a catalog of music in the same way that Spotify has a catalog of music," she says in explaining her role. "So, what are the things that we can do to add value and drive value for our artists that sit across our entire catalog? That's when I'm coming in and doing some fun stuff."

That 'fun stuff' partly consists of working with new and emerging artists like Paris Paloma and the band Amistat, among others on her growing international roster, and figuring out how to amplify discovery of their music that goes far beyond the hand-curated playlisting era that she, in part, helped create.

"It was a different era than we're in now. [A playlist on a music streaming service] was the top of the discovery funnel. Now, TikTok is the top of the discovery funnel," says Tarquinio. The artist-generated content on artist- owned and operated channels, she adds, is the most powerful way for musicians to connect with their fans and build loyal communities.  

When asked about the existential threat that technology and, particularly, A.I. presents to the music industry generally and her job specifically, Tarquinio is unshaken. "It depends. I think for us, as a label, we're very much in it for the productive disruption and finding the kind of disruption that actually helps an artist's career long term ... I get to do what I'm interested in and good at. It's really nice."

Learn Meg's tips on how to build the perfect playlist on our UAlbany Magazine Music Mini!