Streaming Music

Practices, Media, Cultures

Sofia Johansson, Ann Werner, Patrik Åker, Greg Goldenzwaig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351801980
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Streaming Music examines how the Internet has become integrated in contemporary music use, by focusing on streaming as a practice and a technology for music consumption. The backdrop to this enquiry is the digitization of society and culture, where the music industry has undergone profound disruptions, and where music streaming has altered listening modes and meanings of music in everyday life.

The objective of Streaming Music is to shed light on what these transformations mean for listeners, by looking at their adaptation in specific cultural contexts, but also by considering how online music platforms and streaming services guide music listeners in specific ways. Drawing on case studies from Moscow and Stockholm, and providing analysis of Spotify, VK and YouTube as popular but distinct sites for music, Streaming Music discusses, through a qualitative, cross-cultural, study, questions around music and value, music sharing, modes of engaging with music, and the way that contemporary music listening is increasingly part of mobile, automated and computational processes. Offering a nuanced perspective on these issues, it adds to research about music and digital media, shedding new light on music cultures as they appear today.

As such, this volume will appeal to scholars of media, sociology and music with interests in digital technologies.

1
Music, the Internet, streaming

Ongoing debates

Sofia Johansson and Ann Werner

Introduction

The way that music is produced, distributed and listened to has unquestionably changed alongside the development of the Internet. For over two decades, these transformations have caused a great deal of consternation and optimism, in equal measure, for those who care about music. Not long ago, commentators proclaimed the music industry as seriously threatened, if not “dead”, in the face of illegal file-sharing and music artists’ ability to circumvent traditional means of distribution to reach their audiences. At the present time the industry seems to be adapting, with streaming services introducing new business models, while older forms of music, such as the album and music videos, have been integrated into new listening environments.

Attempting to understand questions of how technologies for music intertwine with broader social change, these transformations have been the subject of a lively scholarly debate. Following the rise of the Internet as a complementary medium for popular music use throughout the latter half of the 1990s (cf. Katz 2004, Ayers 2006, Jones 2011) towards having a more central place in music consumption and music economies, analyses of specific developments related to music and the Internet, such as the rise of the MP3 file, file-sharing, online music fandom, digital music sales, and music streaming, relate to the music landscape as in a state of flux: with record labels, publishing houses, concert promoters, and artists grappling with economic and legal uncertainties alongside the introduction of key players such as Apple and Spotify. However, as hypothesized by Steve Jones (2011, p. 444), the “real revolution in popular music in regard to the Internet” can likewise be thought of, as not primarily concerning industry upheaval or the development of new formats and services for music listening, but rather “the availability of news, information, and discussion about music and musicians” facilitated online, for example by fans. From such a standpoint, “music and the Internet” becomes a very broad area of analysis, encompassing a range of sub-fields – including the study of the Internet as a tool for information and sociality – and reflecting wider questions of how the Internet is linked to transformation of the production and consumption of culture and media artifacts (e.g. Messaris and Humphreys 2006).

This chapter summarizes some of these overarching debates, discussing core themes that cut across scholarly studies on music and the Internet, and how these open up for enquiry into contemporary music use. It also synthesizes recent research on music streaming, examining some of the analytical questions that follow its expansion in music consumption. Streaming, in this context, can be described as a system of delivery for media content on the Internet, particularly music and movies/videos, which, apart from relying on a process of copying “bits” of data, also depend on the aggregation of large data sets as a fundamental principle, and which has become heavily associated with platforms like Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify (Vonderau 2015, pp. 717–718). But, the term may also refer to the, usually online, practice of watching or listening to music, movies or videos not downloaded to a personal device, but available in the “cloud”; where the content provided by a streaming service is not owned by the user and removable from the service at any time, whilst accessible from multiple devices. Additionally, streaming has significance as a metaphor, which in itself may shape the values and practices attached to it (Burgess and Puschmann 2014, Vonderau 2015, Hagen 2016). In focus here, however, is streaming as a delivery system and a format for music consumption.

The music industry – in flux and in control?

While a diverse and expansive field of study, it is possible to discern some key areas in the scholarly attention to music and the Internet. The first, dealing with the macro-context around music production, concerns the type and degree of interference inflicted upon the music industry by developments around the Internet. Jim Rogers (2013, pp. 4–7) illustrates how a common narrative in popular as well as academic accounts of the topic has drawn on ideas of a proposed “death” of the recording industry and associated stakeholders and businesses, with major recording companies seen as deeply unsettled or driven to ruins by falling revenue from physical music sales and copyright infringement on revenue streams. Perceived by some commentators as a welcome disruption to a once all-powerful group of large corporations, which could give artists and consumers greater control (Lessig 2008), while lamented by others as a threat to the very core of music production, Rogers (2013), however, counters ideas of a sharp decline in the music industry as a whole. Drawing on interviews with music industry personnel, he provides an account of a more complex reconfiguration, exemplifying for instance how a global decline in record sales can be juxtaposed by a revival of music publishing and the live sector in a digital era, and thus arguing against earlier overall depictions of a singular industry in decline (cf. Arditi 2012, Rogers and Preston 2016). Such an emphasis on reconfiguration, rather than decline, ties in with analysis of recent structural change relating to streaming services: providing a service for listeners (access to music) instead of relying on the sale of delineated products, and where physical distribution is less important (Wikström 2013, Anderson 2014). ¹As recently highlighted by Guy Morrow and Fangjun Li (2016), the characteristics of the new music economy, likewise, differ greatly between parts of the world, even though much of the debate about the music industry has focused on an Anglo-American context and especially on the major US-based recording companies (Marshall 2013).

Thus, in terms of economic performance and the overall structure of what might, in fact, be more accurately referred to in plural rather than as a singular industry, given the wide range of actors it entails (Nordgård 2016), recent scholarly accounts have drawn attention to complexities in terms of business models and diversification in different sectors and markets. But they have also underlined a consolidation of ownership (Burkart 2014, pp. 396–397) ²as well as the longstanding battles over copyright and piracy (cf. Frith and Marshall 2004, Gillespie 2007, pp. 40–50) – with the main recording companies depicted as continually fighting for, and gradually asserting, control over the Internet as an arena for music distribution (Burkart and Andersson 2015). Examining the impact of iTunes Music Store on the economy of the major record labels, David Arditi (2014), for instance, argues that the development of iTunes into the giant of online music retailers since its introduction in 2003, providing legal downloads of music files, helped these maintain dominance in the market by creating entry barriers for other actors to upload music to the store. Similarly, Patrick Burkart (2014), in an analysis of digital music distribution, states that streaming services, too, through licensing deals with major labels, and – as in the case of Spotify – granting recording companies’ part ownership, can be regarded as furthering industry control, not only over distribution, but also over consumption:

Streaming services and online lockers deliver total control of music to the company; music rental supplants owning and collecting recorded music. The control of the technology passes from the music fan. If the terms of service change without notice, or if the subscription lapses, the music “user” risks losing his or her archive to the cloud.

(Burkart 2014, p. 404)

Although access-based streaming services appear to compete with digital music sales (Wikström and DeFillippi 2016, p. 2) and subvert file-sharing practices, their expansion can thus equally be analyzed within wider frameworks of control and power; as part of the music industry and as closely allied with the main recording companies.

Streaming services, clearly, raise a number of questions for macro-analysis. They seem to have helped in shifting illegal behavior (file-sharing, illegal downloading) to legal forms of accessing music online (Marshall 2015, p. 184), and have also been credited with an important rise in recorded music revenues (cf. Nordgård 2016). At the same time, they have raised a number of controversies, which, as noted by Patrik Wikström and Robert DeFillippi (2016, p. 3), have included concerns over their financial viability as well as the transfer of revenue to music artists – where the latter relates to their impact on genre diversity, smaller artists’ reach, and independent labels’ possibility of survival. David Marshall (2015) and Daniel Nordgård (2016), for instance, discuss how the “streaming economy”, where revenue to artists is based on a pay-per-stream system, while having contributed to an upturn for revenues in recorded music, appears to premier main and established artists, with the top songs and artists making up for a high proportion of the revenue (cf. Rogers and Preston 2016, pp. 64–65). Both Marshall (2015, p. 181) and Nordgård (2016) point out, too, that even though the fractional amounts of money paid for each song play over time may add up to a more substantial sum, this requires long-term financial backup that many smaller labels and independent artists may not be able to sustain, in the long term potentially affecting diversity (cf. Morris and Powers 2015). Yet, both researchers underline how such an economy of scale can be understood as a continuation of previous practices of main recording companies, while some of the responsibilities and roles within these, such as the artist increasingly taking on the role of an entrepreneur (cf. Tschmuck 2016), appear reshuffled.

Music streaming, then, has given rise to new business models with some seemingly significant implications for the music industry, of which not all are yet fully known. However, it is important to remember that industries connected to the recording of music have been the subject of various technological transformations for a long time (Barnett and Harvey 2015, p. 103); changing the formats and carriers through which music is transported. In the following, we will take a closer look at analyses of technology and format in relation to online music in order to further highlight how technological aspects, as well as economic, contribute to shape listeners’ experiences.

Technology, form and format

Debates around the music industry, then, intersect with wider discussions about technological adaptation and musical experience in a digital age. Such discussions are indebted to enquiry into the relation between media, culture, and technology more generally (e.g. McLuhan 1964, Williams 1974, Meyrowitz 1985, Winston 1998), and relate to digital technology as made up of certain technological interventions: hardware and software, providing new forms of engagement. Technology can, of course, be understood in a number of ways, where some may see it as the driving force behind cultural change, others treat it as mere channels of mediated content, while yet others argue that technology has actively changed music (Katz 2004). Bruno Latour (1987, p. 29) has argued that the meaning of a technology or a thing exists when the thing is integrated into other processes, social or cultural, as technological inventions are not always used as they were intended; an argument that seems particularly relevant when it comes to some of the technologies central to music use today. The Internet has morphed far from the original military invention it was, MP3 files were not constructed to be listened to, mobile phones have become “converged” (Jenkins 2006) devices used for literally any form of communication, cultural consumption, and production.

While each new music technology brings particular affordances in comparison to earlier ones, ³so have the digital formats key to contemporary music consumption been analyzed as the basis for particular ways of producing and using music. Jonathan Sterne (2012) has in his work focused on the MP3, following the history of a digital format, and its uses, and showing how it has contributed to transforming music culture (cf. Bull 2007). Jeremy Wade Morris (2015), similarly, takes an interest in what the digitization of music has meant for its form as a commodity, pitting this against what he regards as a narrow research focus on economics, file-sharing, and copyright issues. He considers how music as a digital audio file represents a distinct turn from previous forms of music, introducing the term “the digital music commodity”:

The digital music commodity has a form and a function that is distinct though related to previous versions of the music commodity. Like CDs, tapes, and vinyl records, it plays audio in specific ways and with specific sonic artifacts that are tied to its format. Like other new media, it incorporates qualities of older formats (certain models of listening and forms of playback) and embodies new potentials (modularity, cutomizibility, transmissibility). The digital music commodity is an object in its own right, though it is made visible, audible, and tangible through various software interfaces, media players, metadata and hardware devices.

(Morris 2015, p. 3)

The digital music commodity, in this account, has a basis online, accessible through computers or a range of other digital appliances. As such, it can be seen as distinct from the CD, which Morris conceives of as only musically digital, since it is bound up in non-digital packaging and industry infrastructures (Morris 2015, p. 2). Such a distinction, while not applied in all analysis of digital music, is helpful for drawing attention to the specific technological qualities of music as it takes shape online.

The migration of music from the CD to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: fields of research
• 1 Music, the Internet, streaming: ongoing debates
• PART I Practices
• PART II Platforms
• Conclusions
• Appendix I: Interview guide
• Appendix II: Transcription conventions
• Index