The playlist pipeline: Reconstructing the historical music programming of the Indonesian programme of Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep

The abstract presents a computational pipeline for reconstructing the historical playlists of Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep's Indonesian programme (1950–1966) from digitized broadcast logbooks. Using vision-language models for document parsing and metadata extraction, combined with linking to the Discogs music database, the authors extract over 71,000 record entries and analyse genre trends and repertoire composition. The findings reveal that Rock & Roll's rise in the playlist was driven by expansion rather than displacement of existing genres, while Indonesian repertoire steadily declined from around 12% to 3–4% over the period, raising questions about the cultural politics of post-colonial public diplomacy through music programming.