I half recall punk guru Tony Wilson, at the music conference SXSW in 2000, flogging a slogan for the Napster eruption: ‘Disintermediate or Die’. But in this book, a global study of legalised music streaming more than a decade after its commercial triumph, a key term is reintermediate. Music streaming platforms, aka MSPs, have shifted record sales, from the old rackjobbers positioning a display at just the right spot in the department store over to datafication – getting on just the right Spotify or Tidal playlist. A new industry of intermediaries has risen out of the severely pruned-back hedges of the old.
To tackle the question, David Hesmondhalgh, whose regularly updated textbook, The Cultural Industries, has put him alongside Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, and Simon Frith in the upper echelon of explanatory British cultural studies dudes, assembled a team – his own intermediaries. This collection is the work product of MUSICSTREAM, a research project funded by different grants of the European Research Council, with co-investigators, post-docs, and fees to secure open access funding. There are other ways to do this kind of writing. Independent critic and non-academic Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist appeared on many year-end lists for its writerly, aggrieved dissection of the Swedish powerhouse. Eric Drott’s Streaming Music, Streaming Capital has quickly become the go-to single-author academic account – Pelly as a keynote lecture.
Music Streaming Around the World, by contrast, is patchier as a read, but covers a lot more ground. We get, for example, Emília Barna on the ‘semiperipheral’ perspective of Hungary, based on eleven interviews with digital distributors, record label figures, musicians, and reps of three local rights collecting agencies. The latter have sued Spotify and French streamer Deezer to at least pay the standard scraps. The global companies in turn push for corporate standards, like profile pictures: ‘this sterile background bullshit’, one scene figure complains (p. 57). As Hesmondhalgh notes in his assured introduction, we cannot assume that this version of music capitalism is worse than its precursors, but there is reason to sniff cultural imperialism each time Spotify or Apple Music opens a local office, puts a small team in charge of playlist creation, and imposes pop business standards. Then again, platformisation, as Andy Eisenberg shows, has propped up Kenya’s ‘broader market failure’ of piracy, allowed India a path to pop outside Bollywood film music (with its skewed copyrights), and seen Latin America’s share of the global pie double.
Will China prove as decisive an exception to Western pop as it has to Western economics? In the chapter that most made me want to read a book-length study, Shuwen Qu and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye write about ‘Douyin hits’, found on short video platforms (SVPs) outside the MSP norm.
These songs typically feature highly imagistic lyrics, memorable fifteen-second hooks, and short lifespans of three to six months. Despite the massive popularity of top-charting Douyin hits, SVP users often barely recognize or remember the names of artists behind them, or sometimes even the names of the songs that go viral. This form of anonymity … is associated with a deliberate depersonalization of hits, where the artist’s identity is intentionally de-emphasized as part of the production logic. (pp. 64–65)
Where Pelly and Drott assumed a single experience of music streaming, Hesmondhalgh’s collaborators find a range of outcomes. If the market in India is subscription averse but welcomes ad-supported streaming, Japan’s market, Noriko Manabe documents, is quite the opposite. There, it is almost disreputable not to acquire the physical object and the adaptation of streaming has long lagged behind that of other nations. Darci Sprengel writes about the positioning required of a service founded in Lebanon.
Overall, I suggest that as Anghami attempts to cater its service to a MENA/SWANA [Middle East and North Africa/Southwest Asia and North Africa] user base, it navigates a particular postcolonial condition wherein it reproduces certain capitalist logics of accumulation, dominant in the global music industry, in order to participate in it while also striving to address the needs of listeners and musicians back home. Put simply, it cannot be too local or too global. (p. 82)
When playlist pitching MSPs in Italy, Francesco D’Amato finds, ‘The metric considered by far the most relevant—and on which, according to some, a song’s very “repitchability” depends—is not the growth of overall streams but rather the increase in the percentage of streams defined as “active”’ (p. 139).
Hesmondhalgh and his team of grantees, then, have given us a book that, structurally, itself performs a kind of reintermediation on the topic of platformisation. I will admit, more talk about songs and scenes, evoked vividly, would have been a pleasure. But by letting so many, in the best sense, semiperipheral scholars briefly ponder this and that, here and there, Music Streaming Around the World upends the dominance of the Global North. It shows us a planetary set of pop outcomes that are as much – almost literally half and half – domestically focused as globalised and cosmopolitan. The result is a quiet rejoinder to authors quick to see the intersection of capitalism and music only from places where the future is already old news.
