From Torrent to Stream

Abstract

Music production in the 21st century shifted from a largely commodified industrial model to a radically decentralized one, technologically facilitated by new efficiencies in search of functionality, delivery, and peer-to-peer connectivity. In the older music economy, the media of music (its tangible forms—vinyl, cassette, compact disc, etc.) were fused with its contents (its sounding forms—songs, pieces, etc.), thereby facilitating their efficient circulation as physical commodities (grounded in licensing agreements, copyright protections, and so on). In the newer economy, medium and content are increasingly delinked; the former is effectively dematerialized (or, more accurately, micro-materialized as virtualized format), thereby posing new challenges to law and policy governing musical creation, distribution, and consumption. In the context of music’s new technological prostheses (digital recording studios, on-demand streaming services, algorithmic aggregators, and the like) the question of equitable sources of revenue for musical labor has re-surfaced as a central debate in our times. The article assesses the promise of disintermediation in relation to new formations of labor, characterized by increased entrepreneurial reliance on flexible and globalized networks of production and distribution.