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The introduction to Streaming Music, Streaming Capital offers an overview of the major features of the streaming ecosystem. A key argument is that the development of streaming platforms since the late aughts provides important insights into music’s complicated relation to capitalism. Not only does the platform model respond to crises that have afflicted the capitalist world-system since the 1970s (long-run stagnation, declining rates of productivity and profitability, a drying up of attractive sites of private investment, and so on), it also illuminates the degree to which processes of capital accumulation depend on domains that lie on the margins of or outside capitalism, including music. As a result, even as music continues to be commodified or assetized, it simultaneously functions as one of the “‘non-economic’ background conditions” identified by Nancy Fraser, a resource like social reproduction or the “free gifts” of nature that capital relies on without accounting for this reliance.
The introduction to Streaming Music, Streaming Capital offers an overview of the major features of the streaming ecosystem. A key argument is that the development of streaming platforms since the late aughts provides important insights into music’s complicated relation to capitalism. Not only does the platform model respond to crises that have afflicted the capitalist world-system since the 1970s (long-run stagnation, declining rates of productivity and profitability, a drying up of attractive sites of private investment, and so on), it also illuminates the degree to which processes of capital accumulation depend on domains that lie on the margins of or outside capitalism, including music. As a result, even as music continues to be commodified or assetized, it simultaneously functions as one of the “‘non-economic’ background conditions” identified by Nancy Fraser, a resource like social reproduction or the “free gifts” of nature that capital relies on without accounting for this reliance.
“Streaming Music” considers what streaming makes of music. Drawing on theories of musical mediation developed by Georgina Born and others, this chapter examines some of the key ways that platforms mediate music. On streaming services, music is enacted as data, metadata, intellectual property, and much else besides. Taken together, this constellation of mediations conspires to make a change in music’s politico-economic condition appear otherwise, as if it were a change of ontology, imposed by a novel technological system. Stream versus download, object versus event, music as good versus music as service: such commonplace dichotomies, which undergird popular narratives about the development of streaming, deflect attention away from a more significant mutation: platforms’ transformation of digital copies from durable to disposable goods, a transformation that exploits digital reproduction’s enactment of recorded music as a quasi-public good at one level to reinscribe music within the regime of private property at another.
“Streaming Capital” examines the industrial organization of music platforms. The “multisided markets” they convene confer upon music a peculiar economic status. By ensuring that users never pay directly for music, platforms make music appear to users as if it has been decommodified, transformed into a quasi-public good. Yet for agents situated on other sides of streaming’s multisided market (labels, publishers, and the platforms themselves), music remains thoroughly commodified. On the one hand, on streaming platforms music appears to users as simply there, as something free for the taking, much as nature (and water in particular) has long been imagined within classical and neoclassical economics. On the other hand, as a public good that has been privatized, digital music’s givenness on streaming platforms is contingent, being conditional on users having paid the requisite toll to gain access to the enclosure where this music is housed.
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