Paper presented at DH Benelux 2026 in Maastricht, June 3, 2026

At DH Benelux 2026 in Maastricht (June 2–5), we presented the paper The playlist pipeline: Reconstructing the historical music programming of the Indonesian programme of Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep. The paper grew out of a tutorial course at the University of Amsterdam and is co-authored by Jelmer Datema, Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, Kiete Schmitt, Annabel Simons, Thomas Smits, Loren Verreyen, and Melvin Wevers.

The pipeline uses vision-language models to extract music playlists from digitized broadcast logbooks (1950–1966) and cross-references them with Discogs, resulting in a catalogue of over 71,000 record entries. The analysis surfaces how Rock & Roll entered programming through genre expansion rather than replacement, while Indonesian musical content declined from roughly 12% to 3–4% — raising questions about the cultural politics of post-colonial public diplomacy through music programming.

The abstract is available on Zenodo. A datapaper detailing the dataset and its creation will soon be published.