The number of papers and books dealing with the digitisation of music has increased dramatically at least since the publication of Jonathan Sterne's MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Reference Sterne2012), which provided a historical account of its development from a science and technology studies’ perspective. The last IASPM Biennial Conference, held in Canberra, included a number of sessions and one panel about the digitisation of music in which the subject of streaming featured prominently, and where the originally Swedish company Spotify, whose name has become almost synonymous with music streaming, was mentioned repeatedly. The recent publication of Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music (Eriksson et al. Reference Eriksson2019), authored by a group of mainly Swedish research scholars funded by the Swedish Research Council, has brought further attention to that company. Using a mix of ethnographic and digital methods, Spotify Teardown offers a critical insight into the development of the company from minor to major agent, and the way in which it has transformed music into flowing data and data about users’ behaviours into commodities.
Like the authors of Spotify Teardown, the four collaborating authors behind Streaming Music: Practices, Media, Cultures, Sofia Johansson, Ann Werner, Patrik Åker and Gregory Goldenzwaig, are affiliated with Swedish universities. However, the purpose of their book, which was published one year earlier, is quite different, and their approach is also distinct from those of previous works on the subject, many of which are referenced in its text and notes. Firstly, Streaming Music: Practices, Media, Cultures does not focus on a particular company or agent, but on the practice of streaming, considered as both a system of content delivery and a modality of music consumption (p. 13). Yet the authors also adopt a quite vague notion of music streaming, since they deal extensively with the Russian site VK, which is properly a social networking website, and devote a whole chapter to YouTube. Secondly, their analytical perspective is cross-cultural, as they study the behaviours and discourses on music streaming in two specific towns: Stockholm and Moscow, and thus their research reflects the common points and relevant differences between the data collected in both locations (pp. 3–5). In taking this comparative stance the authors distance themselves from the uncritical universalism that is typical of much literature on music and technology. Also, as Sofia Johansson and Ann Werner point out in Chapter 1 (‘Music, the Internet, streaming’), a lot of scholarly attention has been devoted to ‘the type and degree of interference inflicted upon the music industry by developments around the Internet’ (p. 13), a topic of which they provide a brief but very balanced account in that chapter. However, the focus of the authorial team is decidedly on consumption, that is on the experiences and practices of listeners (not just fans or dedicated music audiences), which they explore empirically.
Thus, across the book the authors draw on the results of a qualitative empirical research conducted in Stockholm and Moscow between autumn 2012 and summer 2015, consisting of 17 semi-structured focus groups, which followed an interview guide (included in the book as Appendix I). Whereas investigating a population of young university students (80 undergraduate students at Moscow State University and Södertörn University in Stockholm) may be seen as a mere matter of convenience, the authors justify their choice because of the relevance of online music consumption among the young (p. 5). Also, focus group discussions are exploratory tools and do not normally aim at statistical representativeness. Nevertheless, the question of how the authors analysed the data collected in this way remains open, especially since the research path leading from those data to the points made in the various chapters is not always easy to trace. The empirical research was supplemented by the collection and critical analysis of material from three digital ‘platforms’, Spotify, VK and YouTube, between spring 2013 and summer 2015 – a process that was informed by the data collected in focus groups discussions, and which constitutes Part II of the book. The interplay between these two research methods corresponding to two different approaches (‘Practices’ vs. ‘Platforms’, according to their titles) is probably one of the strongest aspects of the book.
The three chapters that constitute Part I deal with online music in everyday life (Chapter 2), connectivity culture (Chapter 3) and the perception of musical value (Chapter 4), and provide useful summaries of major themes and trends in music streaming studies. Yet in them the authors also put across some points based on the focus groups they conducted, and now and then quote the words of focus group participants to illustrate them. Besides valuable considerations on different levels of engagement with online music (pp. 39–40), on the importance (or lack of) of genre definitions in the experience of music streaming (pp. 49–50), on users’ expectations of privacy (pp. 55–6) or on the material and artistic value of music (pp. 67–74), the authors perceive significant differences in the way in which Swedish and Russian students discuss their music streaming experiences, and they connect these differences to the main ‘platforms’ they use: the subscription service Spotify being overwhelmingly popular among Swedish students (p. 35) and the social network VK being the main website where Russian students download or stream music for free (p. 34). Also, these differences are related to contrasting attitudes towards file sharing and so-called music ‘piracy’, as well as to differences in the configuration of national music industries, as the authors point out in the Introduction (pp. 3–5).
These cultural differences may also be traced in the detailed analyses that form Part II, which are highly interesting exercises in digital ethnography. Thus, in Chapter 5 Patrik Åker observes the structure of Spotify during two years and a half, and traces changes in the way in which the information is organised, which features are made available to users or highlighted, etc. Contrary to theorisations of Spotify as a disruptive agent with specific characteristics, the author of the chapter shows that it is in fact a service in constant change, and argues that these changes often reflect tensions between traditional strategies of the music industry and the new possibilities offered by online streaming. The notions of archive and database are central to this chapter, although Åker considers Spotify as a ‘transactional archive’ (Beer and Burrows Reference Beer and Burrows2013) fed with data generated in interaction with its users, and a form of ‘dynamic memory’ (Ernst Reference Ernst2013) (pp. 84–5, 102). Even if he tries to figure out how the infamous Spotify algorithms may influence the recommendations made to users, algorithms are not the main question here. Åker himself takes the task, in Chapter 6, of analyzing the Russian social networking website VK and observing how users interact with different features. While the author insists on presenting VK as an example of ‘post-recorded culture’, based on a notion of ‘recorded culture’ that is, in my opinion, too closely linked to the structuring power of the music industry, he also describes how it functions as a meeting point for different music communities and an (often chaotic) space for real participatory culture (p. 125). At this point comparisons with Spotify's public image as open to all (its tagline being ‘music for everyone’) may come to readers’ minds, in appreciating how much close the Russian website VK seems to be to the fashionable concept of ‘sharing’.
YouTube, which is dealt with by Ann Werner in Chapter 7, was not originally a video streaming service, as the feature that would make the next video play automatically (called ‘autoplay’) was introduced only in 2015 (Elliott Reference Elliott2015). However, its inclusion in the book is justified – as happens with mobile music (music streamed on mobile phones, mainly), dealt with in Chapter 8 – by its importance in young users’ music experiences. In the chapter on YouTube Werner not only analyses the structure of the website and the possibilities it offers for interaction, but also introduces key reflections on its temporal dimension, for instance the fact that it provides a service in real time (here and now) on a website that is, however, changing constantly, and the fact that the website's ever changing look represents and contains multiple temporalities, i.e. traces left by previous visits. The chapter also touches on music content and includes an examination of three music videos that went viral on YouTube in 2013: PSY's Gangnam Style, Baauer's Harlem Shake and Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines (pp. 138–41). Although somewhat tangential to this collection, this examination breaks new ground for the understanding of the mechanisms of popularity on YouTube, and of the race and gender issues involved in it. The chapter on music streaming through mobile phones, authored also by Werner, expands some of the issues presented in Chapter 3 (Part I), on connectivity culture, and reflects again on differences in practices between Swedish and Russian users, underlining key material aspects, like battery time or storage space, which are often left out of scholarly studies. Werner also stresses the need to contextualise discursive ideas about music and mobility expressed by users (pp. 154–7).
In a surprising historical turn, the final chapter presents music streaming as ‘an individualized equivalent to Muzak’ (p. 162) and connects it to the culture of ubiquity (Kassabian Reference Kassabian2013). While this is a sound point, and it is useful to reflect on the ‘soundtrack logic’ that is central to many users’ experiences (p. 164), the authors also admit that, unlike Muzak, streaming seems to ‘enhance a private experience rather than a social one’ (p. 163). Also, seeing music streaming as a form of Muzak does not help explain the complexities related to the collection and usage of data users by ‘platforms’ as Spotify, which basically work as databases. Nevertheless, in their conclusions the authors emphasise the importance of analysing the algorithmic logic, which companies as Spotify protect as a trade secret (p. 165). They also insist on the need to study streaming as a cultural form, albeit a constantly changing one, in order to understand how it remediates other cultural forms, for instance the album or radio, reflecting also tensions in the music industries.
All summed up, the collection Streaming Music: Practices, Media, Cultures offers key insights into the ongoing transformations in music consumption by music streamers, prompting us to reflect on such dichotomies as ownership vs. access, or evolution in musical taste vs. repetition. While these insights are based on empirical research, that is on opinions expressed by Swedish and Russian users, a strong point of the collection is that they also draw on the authors’ thorough analysis of the structure and evolution of various streaming sites, as well as on their bibliographical knowledge and critical skills. As I mentioned above, the comparative approach (Stockholm–Moscow) is probably the most valuable contribution made by this book, since it raises such critical issues as the meaning of sharing, the price of music and the value of musical communities. However, the subjects touched in each chapter are manifold, and in this sense the book opens many doors for other scholars to work further on a subject that is essential today to understand the musical lives of the young and the not so young.
