Research Colloquium: Music production and consumption in the streaming age

Research Colloquium: Music production and consumption in the streaming age

After a period of radical transformation and uncertainty, the production and consumption of music are beginning to assume a certain degree of stability. In particular, music streaming services have become central to the new eco-system of music in many countries. This colloquium discusses existing research on this emergent eco-system and the kinds of research questions that remain to be answered.

Features likely to be discussed include:
•the rise of file-sharing and online digital music retail sites and most recently online music streaming services, and the decline of CDs and ‘high street’ record shops;
•the increasing penetration of the IT industries into the realm of music, alongside the now shrinking oligopoly of corporate record companies and a struggling sector of independents;
•new business models based on data collection and analysis (especially in the case of streaming services), subscriptions and subsidiary rights income, rather than direct sales to consumers;
•responses by record companies based on strengthening intellectual property legislation and practice, and a continuing focus on ‘blockbusters’;
•the increasing availability of technologies that enable amateurs and semi-professionals to make their products more widely available, at least in principle, and the consequent availability of a greater abundance of music;
•greater competition from other leisure and cultural forms, arguably making music less significant as a cultural form than in previous years;
•an increasing proportion of music consumption (in terms of time and money) is spent on older product—and the relationships of this to a musical culture of nostalgia and ‘retromania’;
•personalisation and mobility: the increasing tendency for music to be consumed via personal and often mobile devices;
•an increasing ‘ubiquity’ of music.