Streaming Music, Streaming Capital

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.

“Streaming Music, Streaming Capital is terrific. Eric Drott offers us an assured and learned guide to understanding recorded music in the present conjuncture and likely for years to come. As a study of the political and psychic economies of music streaming, it is unparalleled and will be a must-read.” - Sumanth Gopinath, author of (The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form) “Eric Drott offers a much-needed analysis of recorded music, online streaming, and their mutual mediation. With its incorporation into digital platforms, music’s oft-celebrated power to connect takes on new significance as it becomes, simultaneously, a lucrative asset, a service to rent, a means of data accumulation, and an extraeconomic resource. Drott’s fascinating examination of this new music economy’s coherences and contradictions deserves to be widely read.” - Marie Thompson, Senior Lecturer in Popular Music, The Open University “For those awaiting the definitive critical interrogation of the global music streaming economy, Eric Drott has provided a consummate account. Drott refuses the fallacy of music’s exceptionalism, and in this skilled reading music portends many of the wider crises characterizing our world.” - Georgina Born, Professor of Anthropology and Music, University College London "Drott, impressively, manages to treat the subject at great length along the way, displaying a deep knowledge of Marxist economics and music biz commerce." - Dave Mandl (The Wire) "Brilliant. . . . Streaming Music, Streaming Capital offers rich insights into the ubiquitous digital logics of our time: datafication, optimization, platformization, surveillance. . . . [It] deserves very high praise." - Abby Beilman, Jacob Mitchell, Jewon Ryu, Max Ritts and Shan-yu Wang (Antipode) "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." (Choice) "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." - Joel Harold Tannenbaum (Orange Blossom Ordinary)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction  11. Streaming Music  222. Streaming Capital  633. Music as a Technology of Surveillance  1014. Counterfeiting Attention in the Streaming Economy: Spam, Click Fraud, and Fake Artists  1445. Streaming, Cheap Music, and the Crises of Social Reproduction  193Epilogue  235Notes  255Bibliography  307Index  331