The Lofty Optimism of Spotify and the Influence of the Streaming Revolution

I don’t stream music. I fear that may sound sanctimonious or smug, but I don’t mean it that way. I understand the value and utility of these services, and I am glad for the pleasures that they offer to others. My reasons for abstention are both boring and particular: I find the interfaces clumsy and counterintuitive, the economic model makes me queasy, and I’m restless and don’t like always being tethered to the Internet. (There is also the lingering worry that whenever a person is afforded everything for nothing, they’re surely making an illicit pact with some dark and craven force—but, I mean, it’s probably fine?) Because I still relish the experience of choosing and purchasing albums, I’ve accrued enough that I never feel as if my listening options are in any way circumscribed. If I want or need to hear music that I don’t own, I might start scampering around on YouTube, but mostly, I prefer keeping the whole routine off-line. Look, I’m already paralyzed enough by choice in this world—that’s me, waving my cane from the top of my stoop and hollering to the heavens, “Give me less!”

On Tuesday, Spotify—which has more than seventy million paid subscribers and more than a hundred and fifty million users, and now claims to be the most popular streaming service in the world—will begin selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s prospectus includes lofty goals: “Our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by these creators.”

Of course, Spotify did not invent creation—nor the idea of making a living as an artist (if anything, it’s merely complicated artistic existence), nor the activity of listening to music and feeling inspired—but, since its launch, in 2008, it has changed the way we think about all of those things. For a critic, the question of how listeners acquire and consume new music can feel tangential or tedious—it’s far more exciting, after all, to talk about the music itself—but the two topics are once again becoming inextricably intertwined. Just as the advent of the commercial recording industry (and, later, the evolution of analog recording formats, from wax cylinders to 78-r.p.m. disks and long-playing vinyl records) changed the way musicians write and produce songs, so, too, has streaming. With everything now cleaved from its original time and circumstance (and, it feels worth noting, its cultural and historical context), young songwriters can cull influence from all sorts of disparate sources and make work that feels, somehow, both new and ancient.

The popularity of streaming has led to obvious changes in how music is being produced—in 2018, a pop song needs to sound excellent piping out of a laptop’s tiny speakers and on headphones—but streaming has also resurrected the idea that the medium through which an album or track is made available is as much an aesthetic choice as anything else. This past fall, on the first day of an undergraduate seminar I teach on musical subcultures, I asked my first-year students what kind of music they liked. More than one answered “SoundCloud.” When I wondered aloud if SoundCloud was actually just an online distribution platform (like Spotify, it allows its users to stream millions of songs for free) and not a genre in any traditional sense of the word, I received only blank or vaguely pitying stares, as if I had just ordered everyone to check their telegrams for news about the space race. Since SoundCloud was founded, in 2007, it has slowly become synonymous with a tender but scrappy style of rap music, as practiced by artists such as Lil Pump, the late Lil Peep, and XXXTentacion. The sound is garbled and sometimes anesthetized, but, mostly, its brazen laziness feels like a corrective to overproduced and overconsidered mainstream hip-hop. That these artists gathered on SoundCloud might be incidental to SoundCloud itself (I think it would be hard to argue that the company deliberately courted or curated them), but it nonetheless reminds me of when I was a teen-ager, and we often casually referred to labels as genres: you liked Dischord stuff, or Saddle Creek stuff, or Thrill Jockey stuff, and so on. The method of distribution mattered.

Spotify has yet to foster a creative community in the same way. It’s far too big to feel like anything other than an anonymous platform—its library already seems terrifyingly boundless, and is only growing. Just last week, Drag City Records, an erstwhile indie-rock label based out of Chicago, and one of the few remaining Spotify holdouts, finally agreed to share most of its catalogue online. (One notable exception is the singer and harpist Joanna Newsom, who is signed to Drag City, but has called Spotify a “villainous cabal.”) Even Taylor Swift, who once righteously refused to allow her work to be streamed there, has given in. She recently released an exclusive video of her new single, “Delicate,” to the company’s users. A product that once seemed untenable, if not immoral—all of this music, for free, and it’s legal?—is now mainstream.

The inherent optimism of Spotify lies in its founding belief that “music is universal and that streaming is a more robust and seamless access model that benefits both artists and music fans.” The company is essentially insisting that freer and easier access to music is the only thing that matters; everything should be available to everyone, because freedom of choice is an essential freedom. If your options are limited, then you, too, are limited. Putting aside whether this is true or not, and ignoring the significant question of whether Spotify fairly compensates musicians for streams (I think most artists, even the rich ones, would agree that it does not), the idea of access equaling freedom is certainly appealing. Even if Spotify’s model ends up devaluing songs, maybe value will accrue elsewhere. Perhaps, even, for the company’s new stockholders: by the end of the first day of Spotify’s public ownership, analysts anticipate that the company will be worth twenty to twenty-five billion dollars.


The Anguish of a Generation
