Listen to My Spotify Playlist: How Streaming Affects Music Consumption and Culture

The winter season has become synonymous with Spotify Wrapped season, wreaking havoc upon us trembling listeners, fearful of what our Wrapped will unearth. Maybe you listened to Your Best American Girl by Mitski 100+ times that year (if this is you, I hope you are doing well). Or maybe you’re embarrassed that you enjoyed that new Drake album a little too much. Whatever it may be, these occasions where the streaming overlords decide to broadcast our most intimate listening habits are cultural moments. They mark the dominance of this particular mode of consumption and illuminate the relationship between the artist, the consumer, and the third party of the streaming platform. But to better understand this relationship of streaming, I will meditate on how we consume music, the creation of intangible queer and POC musical spaces, and the oppression of artists’ subjectivity.

I. We’re All Psychic: Music Consumption Through Psychological Means

For many artists, whether it be in music or not, their art is an extension of their self—an exploration of identity, a specific moment of their life, or an expression of vistas and dreams. For Belgian-Egyptian songwriter Tamino Amir, this is no different. His music often draws from his Arabic roots, subconsciously incorporating Arabic scales. Yet, even with music being so deeply rooted in an artist’s personal lore and art’s inherent role in the construction of self, how can something so intimate be released and consumed? Tamino Amir ruminates on this fact in a recent interview with GoldenPlec:

“It’s a strange idea that you release something, and it finds an audience, but numbers are quite abstract for me, it’s only when you play for those people, when you feel the vibe, when you can feel what it’s doing, that’s when you fully experience it.”

When an artist releases their work, they are often met with the dizzying reality that once their music is consumed, it no longer belongs to them. Even though the artist is the creator, the audience imbues their own meanings and memories into the work. The piece then becomes a thing of collaboration, alive, where the constructed meaning is transposed and re-molded in its consumption.

Beyond copyright law and beyond the didactic terms of ownership in the agreements artists make with their labels, the feeling of ownership has entered our sphere of consumption. Have you ever felt so connected to a song that it became your own memory, imbued with senses and moments? Or have you ever had a song permeate crucial moments so pointedly that it became an essential part of your sense of self? You know, that one song by that one obscure artist (that no one else supposedly seems to know) is yours.

Amoeba in Berkeley, CA captured by Golden Gate Xpress. Amoeba is one of many record stores in the Bay Area championing physical media.

In our modern capitalist society, the rise of new technologies, such as streaming, has trumped the legal ownership of physical “things.” In the past, status in consumerism was driven by the incessant need for tangibility–to own a car, a house, or precious jewelry. And although physical ownership still exists, it is no longer the only component critical to consumption. We now have film streaming, audiobooks, online games, digital journalism, cryptocurrency, and other forms of consumption only available online. Now, it is psychological ownership that drives consumerism—a feeling that something is yours. 

When we stream music, we are fostering this sense of ownership. We curate our playlists meticulously to match a certain emotion, memory, or genre. These songs, in turn, become intensely intimate artifacts of ourselves. Such as the song only belongs to your bedroom late at night when you’re staring blankly up, the song hitting the ceiling as you wait for it’s meaning to come tumbling down. Or in that smoky club, saturated and blinking with the hues and heat of a modern-day music commune. Or maybe a song functions as a bridge, a conversation keeper, between yourself and that random stranger at the party. Deeply personal, psychological ownership transposes our consumption of music from the object to the abstract.

The music-memory connection has always existed, but it is now less shrouded by collector’s culture. Sure, we still have a few kitsch cults that enjoy record or DVD collecting (I personally prefer cassettes), but it’s not how the mainstream consumes media. Even the most stringent record spinners will turn to streaming sometimes. 

While this emotional connection to music used to manifest in tangible collections of CDs, cassettes, and records, with the rise of streaming services, these have been replaced with a sense of ownership forged solely through psychic means. 

II. The Ephemerality of Streaming–a New Subversive Space

Ephemeral, streaming is transient. Instantaneous. We have more access to music today than at any other point in history. What that means, for artists, is an exceptional increase in reach. Streaming somewhat acts as a bypass for Queer and POC artists to enter larger modes of consumption. And in these larger audience ranges, marginalized consumers are more easily able to unearth music that makes them move.

Traditionally, only musical artists who assimilated to the ideologies of white supremacy and heteronormativity could break into the mainstream, and thus reach an exceptional state of visibility (this is not to discredit the work of Black and queer artists who were able to enter the mainstream and pave the way for the artists of today but to make a general comment of how artistic consumption is bounded by dominant spheres of oppression). Queer, POC, and other subversive scenes were relegated to the underground, forced to construct their own definitions of visibility at the margins. 

Chicago House, and truly the house genre as a whole, was born in the Southside of Chicago. The genesis of the house genre was insurgent, a subversive movement that derived from Disco Demolition in which radio host Steve Dahl took to Comiskey Park and burned disco, soul, and reggae records. He cited their departure from “Godliness” to be the reason (basically if you were Black, gay, or anyone who sympathized with their music, you were cut). Black and queer artists were forced to forge their own music community, creating a new genre in the process. So, Robert Williams opened “The Warehouse”, a members-only gay club in 1977. Here, the Chicago music scene found a new beat, a new hedonism away from Dahl’s ideology. It was a distinctly queer space, in the midst of a segregated city, where Black, queer, and trans people could partake in communion. In the Warehouse, marginalized bodies were able to negotiate and affirm their own identities within the radical genre of House. It was beautiful, Black, and queer.

And even though these physical, tertiary queer spaces are still of utmost importance in building community, with the advent of streaming, identity-affirming music can proliferate apart from underground, dissident venues. Black and queer and trans people can seek subversive spaces in the comfort of their own homes. Effectively, in the music realm, marginalized people no longer need to feel ownership over a physical space to survive. Oppressed peoples can now take ownership of their identities digitally. 

For example, online playlists have replaced the need for a physical or material mode of music consumption. While in the past this was done with mixtapes on cassettes and CDs, with the rise in popularity of streaming services came the rise in popularity of the playlist.  Playlists are for creating an atmosphere, undoubtedly a form of expression of identity. We make playlists for certain seasons and certain moods. We curate songs that scream to us salvation or songs that allow us to revel in our melancholy. We name these playlists, we share them with friends who share the experiences we try to convey, and we integrate them into every waking minute of our lives. These playlists define the passing moments of our lives and our tastes; playlists express and embolden our identities.

The medium of online playlist-making and the ephemerality of streaming compounded allows for a greater ability to take ownership of our identities through music. Identity-affirming music is now just at our fingertips–reaching outside of the mainstream is effortless. Queer and POC identities no longer have to be relegated to the underground or physical realm, but can permeate through our most personal spaces: in our car drives, on our walks through the city, and in our beds at night. 

III. That’s Not Yours: The Loss of an Artist’s Subjectivity 

In early 2022, Joni Mitchell joined Neil Young in removing her music from Spotify. She asserted, “I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”  

Neil Young spurred this decision as an act of protest against Spotify’s $100 million contract with Joe Rogan, a notorious far-right commentator who purports anti-vax sentiment. “They can have Neil Young or Rogan. Not both,” Young contended. Young’s decision was complicated by the legal terms of ownership with his publisher and record label but at its core, his action asserted his claim to the consumption of his own work, disallowing a streaming service that entitled Covid misinformation from also disseminating his music.

Yet in the fallout of his decision, this act of reclamation fell somewhat on deaf ears. Alongside the thousands of fans who spread the #CancelSpotify in support of Young came the counter-trend of users claiming “Neil Who?”. And in the day following, Spotify chose Rogan. To this day, when searching Neil Young and Joni Mitchell on Spotify, the only results populated are scant: some covers, a few demos, a few live recordings.

Joni Mitchell and Neil Young pictured in performance together, published by Deadline

Young and Mitchell’s act of protest was birthed from an incessant need to reclaim one’s own work. For them, Spotify was not merely a platform to release work but a ledge for advocacy–the meanings imbued in their work must be congruent with the disseminator. So, how could their work truly be theirs, when the mode of consumption is antithetical to such? And although they succeeded in asserting their sovereignty over their own work, in the end, the cogs of the hyper-capitalist machine chugged on. They may legally own their music but their ownership is flattened by the system. Spotify granted Rogan a platform for their own profit and what we, as consumers, have lost is Mitchell and Young’s music, which arose from a slower period of music creation. 

Streaming music perpetuates a one-size-fits-all, flattened logic where production is directly dependent on the mode of consumption. Artists get paid in what is called a “pro rata” model in which payout is determined in proportion to how an individual artist’s streams stack up to other popular, out-performing artists in a given time period. What this means is that payout is privileged to top artists, already cushioned by their top label, and mid-sized artists are impeded from receiving a fair share. This also disallows fans from determining where their subscription dollars are doled out, leaving recognition and payment, solely, in the hands of the “pro rata” model.

To make matters worse, streaming is a necessity for the survival of artists. In order to succeed in the industry and to reach a wider audience, artists must submit themselves, professionally and artistically, to the streaming schema. That means that artists are often forced to forsake their creative integrity for choruses and melodies that will translate to the most possible streams. Effectively, subversion, challenging the status quo, and any semblance of artistic individuality are disincentivized and eradicated. Mat Dryhurst, an artist and a teacher at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in Berlin, laments this fact in a recent NPR interview: 

One-size-fits-all is a very crude, barbaric approach to music. And actually, the internet and music might be a whole bunch more exciting if artists were given the tools to make the experience of consuming their work as unique as, arguably, the work is in itself.

It is clear that the current streaming payout model smashes any semblance of subversion. It converts music into a good to be consumed, produced based on demand, and nothing more. It is not bold to assume, then, that the creation of genres at the margins, such as Chicago House, would not have the same power, the same means, to proliferate as it has done before. An artist’s subjectivity, their feeling of ownership and domination over the work they create, is desecrated under the rule of streaming platforms. 

This is further compounded by the process of psychological ownership. Music streaming, although it creates a stronger personal connection, risks rendering music merely a site of consumption under the current system. According to a 2020 study published by the American Marketing Association, when consumers attach their sense of self (such as through playlist-making) to the consumable work, it mimics an attachment to a brand as a consumer. The artist is a brand, and even though artists have always had to market themselves, this fact becomes bloated, compounded with the music market status quo that squashes subversion. Music streaming risks rendering music as merely an object of consumption. 

Although streaming services allow for deeper reclamation of identity for the consumer, it also flattens music into a hyper-capitalist good–a reflection of the logic of the streaming market. Once an artist releases their music, it no longer belongs to them. It is merely a fleeting good in the market, inhabiting a space where profit and consumer needs prevail. Deranged from a living work of collaboration between the artist and the consumer, the exchange of music is interjected by an oppressive third party–the streaming status quo.

IV. Taking up Space in a Consumption Culture That Denies Us

The oppressive nature of streaming is no fault of the listeners. We are all victims of a hyper-capitalist world and neoliberal logic has bled into our most treasured cultural spaces. But as listeners, as artists, as creatives, as people who may exist on the margins, music will always remain a medium of liberation. Although the logic of the streaming market bounds us, the creation of new queer, trans, and POC spaces belongs in our hands. And just as marginalized folks forged a new subversive tangibility in Chicago, we also have the ability to define our sovereignty, our musical and cultural ownership, in our online world. 

This article was originally published for Berkeley B-Side’s Fall 2022 Print Edition and has been workshopped for online publication.