Digital Crescendo: Transformed Music Consumption and Exchange in the 21st Century
“Take the music business…new generations have toppled the music industry by file sharing, downloading, and Myspace. Rock ‘n’ roll belongs to the people,” Patti Smith said back in 2011. In the following decade, the status quo was toppled yet again with decline of downloading and Myspace in place of a rise in streaming platforms and new social media sites. In short, the music industry has undergone immense change after the digital revolution at the end of the 1990s to end up where it is in 2023. Artists, distributors and listeners are all involved in a transformed industry. In this essay, I interpret old and new music landscapes through concepts and frameworks from economic anthropology, focusing on the consumer’s side and two industry facets in particular: distribution and consumption. After giving a brief overview of the overhaul of the industry, I will analyze how the transition to a non-physical format for music has diminished the cultivation of social networks that were once fostered through the commercial and gift exchange of physical records. Then, I will illustrate how social media, coupled with the accessibility of streaming sites, has created new avenues for self-communication while actively contributing to a democratization and globalization of music. Ultimately, I aim for my analysis to paint a nuanced picture of the music industry and of how individuals, especially consumers, engage with music and one another in the digital era.
The music industry has always been in a constant state of change as it adjusted to new technologies and consumer preferences. Yet, until the turn of the millennium, the modes of distribution, as well as the roles played by the record labels, the artists and the fans, were generally fixed. To put out a record, artists would usually have to sign on to a label, who would subsidize their use of a recording studio and then handle the distribution of the physical copies of the record, whether that be vinyls, cassettes or CDs (Abhijit). That all changed around 2000 when teenage hacker Shawn Fanning created Napster, a service through which users could download music on the internet. Napster kicked off a wave of change in music distribution that has arrived at present day music streaming services such as Youtube or Spotify (Wikström). Almost anybody can publish a record on these sites without going through a record label, and users can play any of these published records. Simultaneously, social media has transformed the behaviors of both consumers and artists within the music industry (Frenneaux). These developments have wrested away a notable degree of control record labels had over the industry, and transferred it to new company models and individuals.
The advent of music streaming services marked a shift in how music is distributed, emphasizing a non-physical format that has diminished the tangible and meaningful aspects of ownership of music for the everyday consumer. Consequently, the circulation and recirculation of records has become largely unviable. Instead of going to the record store, purchasing a physical CD, going home, and inserting it into their CD player to hear a desired song, most consumers today have a streaming service on their device and can play any song they want with the click of a finger. Using Chris Gregory's definition of a commodity as a “socially desirable thing with a use-value and an exchange-value, (Gregory 10)” it becomes apparent that music in this new form has diminished exchange value and does not operate in the economy as a traditional commodity. For instance, albums or singles released on these streaming platforms can’t be individually sold or bought and don’t change in value, whereas physical copies of music have exchange value and are therefore often sold and recirculated on the market. A major consequence of this shift is the decline in the social networks that were once facilitated by places where one could physically exchange or buy music, such as record stores and collector’s circles whose numbers have been plummeting (Wikström).
The unviability of recirculating music in its prevailing popular format is even more evident in the inability of records to participate in gift exchange compared to CDs or vinyls. In the West, the most common type of gift exchange necessitates the transformation of a bought commodity into a gift. That’s why the “ideal gift,” James Carrier claims, transcends the contradicting impersonality of gifting a commodity by, “transmuting the dross of its material aspect and exchange value into an expression of love” (Carrier 94). Good gifts allow themselves to be appropriated so that a measure of sentimentality and festivity can be attached to them. CDs or vinyls fit into the category of “ideal gifts” because their physical nature allows for their materiality to be masked by, for instance, wrapping them in wrapping paper. While I have already examined how records on Apple Music or Spotify do not fit into the category of “commodity” and so may not run into the same problem of being obviously commodified, their virtuality means that they can’t be altered by users to attach sentimentality or festivity. When I moved from Berlin to Zurich in the late 2000s, my parting gift to my classmates was a CD with songs we had sung together in class. The songs held sentimental value for us, and each kid got a different-colored CD case. The modern-day equivalent of that would be sending Spotify playlists to my classmates, but it is apparent that the fact that songs in the digital format cannot be sufficiently appropriated to make an ideal gift.
At the same time, the contemporary music industry has adapted to embrace social media, ensuring that music consumption continues to play a crucial role in fostering interpersonal connections. Although I have argued that modern playlists make lackluster gifts, aided by social media, they have become vital tools of self-communication in the digital era. For instance, it has become a social “rite” for Spotify users to share their year-end “Wrapped,” a collection of their most played songs and artists on sites such as Instagram. Carrier emphasizes that a key element of consumption revolves around its social dimension. People possess an inherent inclination to forge an identity within social contexts through their consumption patterns, and Carrier notes that, “[The association of consumption and social standing] tends to be understood in terms of personal dislikes and likes: taste” (108). Today, social media is filled with people “communicating” their consumption, or taste, by adding a desired song to play in the background of their “stories,” or by reposting their favorite artist’s X feed, or by posting their “Wrapped.” Then, one only needs a quick search on YouTube to listen to whatever record the person posted, which stands in contrast to the pre-digital era, where the physical ownership of the specific record was necessary to understand other people’s tastes. To convey one’s self-identity in interpersonal contexts has always been a motive of music consumption, but the integration of social media into the music industry has intensified this process.
While I have addressed how the digitalization of music cultivates social bonds on an interpersonal level, the combination of the modern music streaming services and social media has also contributed to the globalization of the music industry. This process has often been discussed as a “democratization” in which, “the transnational nature of digitalization benefits not only the large media companies but also smaller cultural formations. For many minorities… digitalization has offered new ways to reach out to both members of the group and those outside it (Brusila). For reasons discussed before, major record companies, most of which were situated in the Global North, had outsized influence on what records got published and where they were sold before the digital era. Since virtually anyone who wants to publish a record on streaming services can do so with relative ease, that filter has been removed, and people have the same ubiquitous access to music regardless of where they live (Wikström). A digital offering akin to these streaming services is Wikipedia, a platform that sociologists Sylvain Blaess and Christian Fuchs have characterized within the framework of info-communism. This classification arises from the accessibility of Wikipedia’s articles, where anyone can publish content that is freely available to all, mirroring the way records on the costless versions of streaming services are accessible for anyone to listen to. While the genuine potential for democratization exists within platforms of this kind, Blaess and Fuchs also caution that their gratis nature means that the producers of these articles or records are essentially engaging in unpaid labor. The general lack of compensation for artists in the new streaming system has garnered controversy from the beginning and is an ongoing debate. Nevertheless, the accessibility of these sites for both artists and consumers has advanced the globalization of music at a rapid pace, exemplified by the increased frequency with which non-English music, such as that of K-Pop group BTS or Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny, penetrates popular music in the U.S. (Todd).
The music sector is a complex and expansive phenomenon, and there are many more factors that have interplayed to produce its transformation than what has been presented in this essay. It’s also important to recognize that physical records are still being made and sold, with vinyl sales even being on the rise in recent years (Sisario). Nonetheless, it’s clear that we’ve entered a new digital age that has drastically changed the way people get their music. Where the social dimension that comes with the consumption of music once manifested itself in physical spaces, social media has risen to compensate for their decline in innovative ways. Free-to-access streaming platforms have brought both globalization opportunities and ethical challenges. The next decades will likely present another round of technological innovations with the power to change the music industry’s landscape yet again.
Works Cited
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