The Artist as a Subscription: Patching music as an artistic device

Abstract

This article aims to explore the concept of patched/versioned musical works as creative ecologies. It identifies how the internet’s involvement in music creation and dissemination influences choices related to the release of such works. Throughout this writing, the author looks at the increasingly volatile structures surrounding recorded music in the early twenty-first century as a result of streaming platforms such as Spotify and video-based social media sites such as TikTok becoming the primary means for music consumption. It explores this volatility as a method for approaching the release of new music within dynamic musical ecosystems and looks at the growing art scene focusing on this way of working, drawing parallels between artistry and subscription-based services where content continually evolves over time.