Why the Next Song Matters: Streaming, Recommendation, Scarcity

Abstract

This article explores how human curation and algorithmic recommendation are figured in cloud-based streaming platforms. In promoting their services as alternatives to illicit file-sharing, platforms such as Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music have long touted the access they provide to a massive database of music. Yet the effectiveness of appeals to musical plenitude have been thrown into doubt, as high rates of user turnover threaten streaming's economic viability. Curation and recommendation have thus been posited as solutions to this problem, as means of producing and reproducing consumer desire. By attending to the fantasies woven around streaming and music recommendation more specifically, this article highlights the peculiar form of subjectivation at work in the way recommendation hails listeners. The normative listener constructed through such modes of hyper-personalized address is ideally one that is as dynamic and adaptive as the algorithmic systems that adjust to their fluctuating needs, dispositions, and desires.

From selling songs to engineering experiences: exploring the competitive strategies of music streaming platforms

“…These platforms 'see' their users as 'dividuated' individuals, composed of multiple identities with different preferences, needs and behaviours performed at different moments in time (Prey 2018, Drott 2018a)and they seek to persuade subjects to see themselves as such (Eriksson et al 2019). To generate demand for their services, music streaming platforms must convince individuals that their lives are decomposable into a series of moods, moments and need states, for each of which there is an ideal song or playlist to be found (Drott 2018a).…”

“…We argue that it is precisely this capacity to accommodate contrasting needs, through the staging of lean forward and lean back experiences, that underpins how music streaming platforms seek to attract and engage users. Importantly, music streaming platforms 'see' listeners not as having one stable identity, but as adaptive individuals with many identities that are performed through practices and captured in the digital data traces they leave behind (Prey 2018, Drott 2018a. Staging both lean forward and lean back experiences allows music streaming platforms to cater to the changing needs of different individuals as they interpolate across time and space.…”

“…Temporal windowing is used by Spotify to encourage users to maximise their engagement with specific content before it is replaced. Whilst music streaming platforms 'play up' (Pike 2015) the virtues of unrestricted access and the unprecedented possibility of choice regarding what to listen to, this example demonstrates that they are also re-introducing forms of scarcity (Drott 2018a). In so doing, music streaming platforms seek to habituate consumer behaviour and create what one key informant described as 'appointments to listen' (Digital Manager, Music Distributor).…”

“…But instead of being tied to a specific individual, such as a record store clerk, and their perceived personal biographies, cultural capital or legitimacy, streaming users trust platforms and become attached based on the effectiveness of recommendations (Jansson and Hracs 2018). In so doing, Drott (2018a) suggests that personalised music recommendations have the potential to (re)imbue music with the 'affective intensity'evoking pleasure and delightthat has allegedly been lost in an age of abundant access to digital music. As Eriksson et al (2019, p. 136) put it: 'the selling point of Spotify is not necessarily music but music streaming framed as a deeply personal and intimate even happiness inducing practice.…”

“…The platform studies literature has identified the practice of curationthe strategic selection, presentation and arrangement of information, goods, services, and peopleas central to how digital platforms generate value for themselves and their multiple users (Van Dijck 2013, Morris and Powers 2015, Barna 2017, Srnicek 2017, Jansson and Hracs 2018, Prey 2018, Drott 2018a, Webster 2019b, Eriksson 2020. By deciding what is valuable or relevant to a given situation and what is not, Bhaskar (2016) asserts that curation is reducing complexity, saving time, reducing cognitive burdens, filtering for quality and overcoming 'choice overload,' a bi-product of having abundant access to goods and services in the platform economy.…”