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Economic, cultural, social, and political life is being increasingly shaped by digital platforms including social networking sites (Facebook), streaming services (Netflix) and sharing platforms (AirBnB). While social scientists have tracked the rapid emergence of platforms and developed useful conceptualisations about what they are and how they operate, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the nature of platform competition or the experiences of users. To address these gaps, this paper focuses on the illustrative case of recorded music, where platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music, face intense competition due to similarities in price and content. Drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews, 20 app 'walk-alongs' with Spotify users and an analysis of 120 documents (industry reports, trade magazines, press releases and news articles), it demonstrates how the basis of competition has shifted from content, price and curation to the engineering of compelling experiences that harness the unique and interconnected affordances of platformisation. The paper nuances our understanding of the dynamic and contingent nature of platforms, the processes of datafication and curation underpinning their interventions in markets and everyday life, the geographies of these virtual distribution and consumption channels, and the ways in which users imagine, value, and experience music streaming platforms.

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Not only do music streaming platforms offer on-demand access to vast catalogues of licensed music, they are actively shaping what and how it finds us through personalisation. While existing literature has highlighted how personalisation has the potential to transform the part that music taste and consumption play in the performance of class identities and distinction, little is empirically known about its sociological consequences. Drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews with a combination of key informants and Spotify users, this article demonstrates that personalisation is undermining opportunities to achieve social distinction by taking over the labour of music curation and compressing the time needed to appreciate music for its own sake. It demonstrates that those with cultural capital at stake – in the case of this study, young, (primarily) male cultural omnivores – experience personalisation as a threat, highlighting how particular claims to social distinction are being contested in the platform age.

From providing on-demand access to vast catalogues of recorded music at little or no cost to the use of Big Data to personalise the experience of consuming music, music streaming platforms, such as Spotify and Apple Music, have the potential to disrupt the part that music taste plays in the performance of class identities and the reproduction of class privilege in ways not previously encountered. The influential sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, demonstrated that cultural taste-what and how people consume cultural goods, such as music, food and fashion-is shaped by class background and in doing so serves to mark and reproduce class differences in everyday life. In this commentary, I consider how sociologists might address the important but challenging question of if and how are music streaming platforms shaping the part that music taste plays in the performance of class identities and the cultural reproduction of class privilege. I discuss some ways in which music streaming platforms may be shaping how class identities are performed through how people consume music, drawing attention to consumption practices that have the potential to both involve and resist the use of music streaming platforms in the pursuit of social distinction.