Streaming’s Effects on Music Culture: Old Anxieties and New Simplifications

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.

How does involvement build loyalty towards music-streaming platforms? A multi-analytical SEM-ANN technique

“…From the practical perspective, the findings help practitioners recognise the role of user curation, as a vital non-core supporting service, which can further user-brand involvement, brand trust, brand engagement and brand loyalty towards MSPs to drive the network effects of MSPs, ensuring long-term business success (Hracs and Webster, 2021; Wang, 2011). Rather than focusing solely on enhancing their core service experience – that is, the music-streaming experience – MSPs should seek to enhance the experience of user curation as well, to motivate participation and promote greater user-brand involvement, thereby building a stronger relationship between users and platform brands that may subsequently translate into platform loyalty (Hesmondhalgh, 2021). For instance, MSPs can try to drive user participation by increasing the visibility of user-curated playlists in search rankings and imposing a monetisation system for high-rank user-curated playlists to incentivise users into investing more time and energy into user curation.…”

“…Spotify, for instance, has been deliberatively demoting user-curated playlists in favour of Spotify-curated playlists to ensure that the ultimate control over users' consumption agendas remains in the hands of the platform brand (Prey, 2020). Consequently, playlists have become less social, more impersonal and biased over time in the eyes of some MSPs users (Hesmondhalgh, 2021; Hracs and Webster, 2021). That said, user reactions to the supplant of user curation with algorithmic curation have been mixed, with many expressing a preference for algorithmic curation, as it makes it simple to find complete playlists that match their musical tastes without having to manually sift through the enormous catalogue (Webster, 2020).…”

Current Trends in Music Pedagogy in Higher Educational Institutions

“…Specialists highlight the problem of the principles of submitting samples of musical literature, including in the process of mastering educational programmes in higher musical educational institutions. "Streaming", within the framework of which the cultural fund of the past and present is broadcast, reflects, first of all, the function of music as the sound background of the industrial world, whereas it is predetermined to transfer the aesthetic experience of perceiving beauty from previous generations to future ones (Hesmondhalgh, 2021).…”

‘Losing Work, Losing Purpose’: Representations of Musicians’ Mental Health in the Time of COVID-19

“…This might include sharing media online via a cultivated social media platform (and if a following is large enough, being paid for posts), running a record label, writing songs for other musicians and/or generating income via streaming. Indeed, streaming income has become a contentious issue in recent music industry scholarship and in the wider music industries vis-à-vis its effectiveness at generating income for artists (Hesmondhalgh, 2020(Hesmondhalgh, , 2021Hesmondhalgh et al, 2021).…”