Description
Book SynopsisIn
Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, Eric Drott analyzes the political economy of online music streaming platforms. Attentive to the way streaming has reordered the production, circulation, and consumption of music, Drott examines key features of this new musical economy, including the roles played by data collection, playlisting, new methods of copyright enforcement, and the calculation of listening metrics. Yet because streaming underscores how uneasily music sits within existing regimes of private property, its rise calls for a broader reconsideration of music’s complex and contradictory relation to capitalism. Drott''s analysis is not simply a matter of how music is formatted in line with dominant measures of economic value; equally important is how music eludes such measures, a situation that threatens to reduce music to a cheap, abundant resource. By interrogating the tensions between streaming’s benefits and pitfalls, Drott sheds light on music’s situa
Trade Review“
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
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Streaming Music 22
2. Streaming Capital 63
3. Music as a Technology of Surveillance 101
4. Counterfeiting Attention in the Streaming Economy: Spam, Click Fraud, and Fake Artists 144
5. Streaming, Cheap Music, and the Crises of Social Reproduction 193
Epilogue 235
Notes 255
Bibliography 307
Index 331
