On-demand streaming music has been part of the collective imagination for more than a century. It can be traced back to the 1888 publication of Edward Bellamy’s million-selling science fiction novel Looking Backward, in which a man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000. Amidst the mind-blowing technological developments he encounters on his journey is a “music room,” in which 24-hour playlists are piped in to subscribers via phone lines. With no shortage of astonishment, the man proclaims that “an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will” is perhaps the pinnacle of human achievement.
The splashy, celebrity-laden debut of Beats Music earlier this year may not have been accompanied by such gobsmacked wonder, but at the same time, the smartphone-based music subscription service sponsored by AT&T is the latest iteration of Bellamy’s fantastic 19th century notion. Beginning with Pandora’s 2005 launch and dramatically ramping up with Spotify’s controversial 2011 debut, streaming has become the preeminent technological force driving digital music into the 21st century. Though the idea of streaming music pre-dates recordings, the industry’s investments in today’s technology is designed in large part to wrench back control via unlimited access after a decade of ceding power to mp3-downloading fans.
So far, it’s working. According to Nielsen SoundScan’s 2013 report, sales of single mp3 downloads declined 6 percent from 2012, while streaming activity increased by 32 percent. The Recording Industry Association of America’s own data reveals that sales of physical media declined 12.3 percent between 2012 and 2013 while paid subscriptions to streaming platforms increased 57 percent. CDs and mp3s won’t simply disappear—they’re still vital parts of digital music's ecology—but faced with streaming, they feel destined to become the digital equivalents of once-dominant analog predecessors like vinyl records and cassettes.
Though streaming platforms are very much a product of the digital-era presumption that all the world’s information should be accessible with a single click, their form and function derives from another early music medium. A few decades after Bellamy’s book captured the imagination of millions, and at the same time that the business of selling records was taking off, “music rooms” were manifested by broadcast radio. Nationwide, parlors were filled with sound by national radio networks like NBC and CBS, which interspersed music with periodic bursts of news, narrative programs, and advertising. From the 1920s forward, the business of selling and consuming music has been structured by a technological dialogue between programmed music streams and individual recordings.
If the recording industry has its way, music ownership will give way to a model completely based on access, but with an important shift. While radio broadcasts are based on a one-to-many model of transmission, streaming platforms aim to zero in on the tastes of the individual listener. Like many other modern industries, the recording industry is doubling down on big data, giving their catalogs to the coders, and betting on a future of distribution and discovery dictated by quantification. Behind the interfaces of streaming platforms are vast databases of songs coded with pinpoint metadata and matched with freely provided listener taste preferences, an infrastructure designed to execute the recording industry’s century-long mission: suggesting with mathematical detail what a listener wants to hear before they know they want to hear it. Combing through a huge corpus of ever-expanding data for each individual song can be a vastly different undertaking compared to older forms of music marketing and distribution. What used to be a question of persuasion has become a problem of prediction.
Listeners are well-served by streaming platforms, but for artists, they cast the question of compensation in a stark new light. While the value debates that dominated the mp3 moment pitted fans against artists, the emergent streaming era has so far seen the return of corporate exploitation, with a speculative twist: The rich or soon-to-be-rich build innovative products, convince an ailing recording industry to sign over their catalogs, acquiring the bricks-and-mortar of their operations—digitized recordings—for fractions of a penny on the dollar. These operations are mostly funded by venture capital, periodic rounds of investments, or as cogs in vast empires of information, and they can feel overwhelming for fans and artists alike. (...)
As streaming takes center stage for music commerce, questions with long histories must be reframed. In what ways are the non-stop interactions between databases and algorithms shaping our musical tastes? Do streaming platform business models inherently exploit artists when listener choice scales to infinity? Should speculative capitalism be the driving force for large-scale innovations in music technology, and is there a feasible alternative? Are we living in a technological golden age of creative possibility, cross-cultural communication, and sheer abundance, or a surveillance state controlled by privately-held brands promising endless access at the expense of imperceptible control? Answers to these questions are piloting digital music deep into the 21st century, but critically evaluating current technological developments means keeping an eye on the lessons of the past. (...)
More recently, computer engineers have looked to content-based recommendation as a way to address music-as-music, not simply as a generic commodity. Under this heading falls what’s long been called “machine listening”—epitomized most popularly by the Shazam app—in which songs are scanned for musicological factors and matched against those of other songs in infinite configurations. The Echo Nest uses machine listening, but it’s far from the company’s most important innovation. That would be its unique process of data retrieval and curation, which entails scraping information from social media platforms, Wikipedia entries, album reviews, and blog posts, which employees then shape into metadata, attached to songs and artists. When describing this labor-intensive aspect of the coding and recommendation process, Whitman suggests the Echo Nest is a living creature with an endless appetite: “If there’s a new artist, we’ll ingest it and try to learn about it.” (...)
“We don't just see that you have liked a song, we know about that song," Whitman continues. "To us, a song is not just a database entry, it’s the key, the tempo it’s in, the instruments.”
by Eric Harvey, Pitchfork | Read more:
Image: uncredited
