Abstract
This article identifies five key themes, or sets of criticisms, that have emerged in online commentary on the new musical system centred on streaming platforms, and in related academic research: Streaming encourages ‘functional’ rather than meaningful, aesthetic musical experience. Streaming encourages bland, unchallenging music. Streaming makes musical experience passive and distracted, and music recedes into the background (here the article also discusses limitations of the widely used concepts of ‘ubiquitous music’ and ‘ubiquitous listening’). Streaming makes music tracks and songs shorter, and musical experience more fragmented. Streaming discourages and/or limits musical discovery and adventurousness.The article addresses each of these themes in turn, examining the degree to which criticisms of streaming’s effects on musical experience along these lines might be considered valid, and the degree to which they might genuinely enhance critical understanding of contemporary musical experience. It also considers these themes in relation to older forms of evaluation, particularly those that developed in the 20th century in response to the industrialisation of music, and argues that many recent criticisms problematically reproduce older anxieties and assumptions.
Highlights
The article addresses each of these themes in turn, examining the degree to which criticisms of streaming’s effects on musical experience along these lines might be considered valid, and the degree to which they might genuinely enhance critical understanding of contemporary musical experience
Music streaming platforms (MSPs) are an increasingly important way in which music comes to people, and through which people discover music
This new system for the production, circulation and consumption of recorded music centred on MSPs has generated a huge amount of commentary, debate and controversy, across multiple online sites: mainstream journalism outlets focused on general news and business; in social media, blogs and the proliferating world of business analysis and commentary; academic research; and across numerous other sources concerned with music and its futures
Summary
Academic research has paid considerable attention to music streaming. As in much of the online commentary just mentioned, there has often been a focus on questions of business and/or technology, topics that have generally dominated research on popular music in the social sciences and humanities since 2000. Are five key themes, or sets of criticisms, that have emerged in online commentary on the new musical system centred on streaming, and in related academic research:. I build on sociological and cultural studies research, such as that of academic and critic Simon Frith, who in his classic book Sound Effects, traced a history of 20th-century concerns about music and mass culture, pointing out how popular music was ‘frequently censured by rock fans and critics according to the values and practices of both “high” and “folk” art’ (Frith, 1981: 40). The aim is decidedly not to assert the superiority of academic analysis over the supposed naivety of online commentary It is to suggest some potential lines of dialogue between academic researchers and online commentators, which might provide a basis for more robust forms of analysis of emerging musical systems centred on streaming than those which currently prevail
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