Streaming Music, Streaming Capital
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In Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, Eric Drott analyzes the political economy of online music streaming platforms. Attentive to the way streaming has reordered the production, circulation, and consumption of music, Drott examines key features of this new musical economy, including the roles played by data collection, playlisting, new methods of copyright enforcement, and the calculation of listening metrics. Yet because streaming underscores how uneasily music sits within existing regimes of private property, its rise calls for a broader reconsideration of music's complex and contradictory relation to capitalism. Drott's analysis is not simply a matter of how music is formatted in line with dominant measures of economic value; equally important is how music eludes such measures, a situation that threatens to reduce music to a cheap, abundant resource. By interrogating the tensions between streaming's benefits and pitfalls, Drott sheds light on music's situation within digital capitalism, from growing concentrations of monopoly power and music's use in corporate surveillance to issues of musical value, labor, and artist pay.
About this Author
Eric Drott is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968-1981.
Reviews
"Chapters meticulously underline how music's shift from a tangible good to part of a streaming service supports interlocked ideological, technological, and economic functions. . . . Most compellingly, the book spotlights the gray market efforts to exploit the data-driven infrastructures of streaming platforms. . . . Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty."
"Drott has created a remarkable synthesis of existing literature on the 'streaming economy'--the financial, legal, and cultural ecosystem in which music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music exist. Drott is a nimble reader, navigating a wide range of academic disciplines from macroeconomics to literary theory, alongside music industry trade publications, marketing materials, and, critically, data analytics-the language in which 'big tech' speaks to itself. Taken as a whole, Streaming Music, Streaming Capital is an exhaustive account of the history of these platforms, their current state (up to 2020, more or less), and some interesting speculation about their future."
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