Distant Streaming - Music Research Colloquia

A presentation by Eric Drott, University of Texas at Austin.

Abstract

This paper explores the effects of streaming and datafied listening as they extend beyond streaming platforms.

One case study concerns the afterlives of the data that platforms collect on users, once these exit platforms via their strategic partnerships with a wide variety of businesses, including data brokers, ridesharing services, insurance companies, financial firms, as well as other platforms.

The second concerns the affective and energetic flows that streaming catalyzes, as these feed into broader processes of social reproduction.

Taken together, these two examples of streaming’s distant, dispersed effects highlight the need to avoid limiting critical discussion of music’s entanglements with capitalism to just music, or just the music industry. Rather, music's platformization sheds light on the many ways it is increasingly caught up in wider socioeconomic processes that extend beyond the conventional boundaries of the culture industries.

About Eric Drott

Eric Drott is associate professor of music theory at the University of Texas at Austin.

His research spans a number of subjects: contemporary music cultures, streaming music platforms, music and protest, genre theory, digital music, and the political economy of music.

His first book, Music and the Elusive Revolution, examined music and politics in France after May ’68, in particular how different music communities responded to the upheavals of the period. His second book, titled Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, will be published by Duke University Press in early 2024. Also forthcoming is the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music, which he is co-editing with Noriko Manabe.

In 2020, he received the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association.

Join the event

Online only – please join via Zoom at the scheduled time.

This event is part of the 2023-24 School of Music Research Colloquia.