Abstract
This chapter discusses the reaction of musicians and recording industry professionals to specific novel affordances of music streaming services which are directly linked to their digital platform nature: third-party playlist promotion and automated recommendation systems. In semi-structured interviews with Australian musicians and industry workers conducted in 2017 and 2018, specific practices in distribution which were adapted to these platform features were avoided, derided or not well understood by the research participants. The chapter will briefly discuss the finding that participants in the Australian music industries were disinterested in these platform affordances, followed by two recent examples of strategies that embrace these platform affordances. This chapter seeks to clarify distinct strategic activities for seeking access to different kinds of playlists. It discusses the (dis)interest in approaching different playlists and clarifies some misconceptions surrounding the concept of playola. The perceived legitimacy of different approaches to promoting music on playlists can be linked to the entrenched European concept of the autonomous artist; negative reactions to these new affordances are framed as a defence of legacy logics of preselection, where workers and intermediaries seek to maintain control over a system which constructs hits and stars, and views valuable music as fundamentally rare.
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Notes
- 1.
While workers in the music industries, such as my participants, often frame ‘value’ in an economic sense, hits and stars are almost always framed to audiences as purely cultural phenomena (Marshall, 2013). To distinguish between intrinsic cultural value and economic value here therefore would arguably involve engaging with a disingenuous binary in popular music; the two values are generated together, and an intrinsic cultural value does not exist pre-commodification. For example, Hirsch (1969) described the preselection system as one that adds ‘value’ at each stage and, while this can be taken as mostly involving economic value, preselection often does bestow a use or cultural value that does not necessarily yield economic returns.
- 2.
I use the term ‘artist brand’ with the knowledge that it is a dehumanising and problematic concept to equate human personalities with musical products (Gross & Musgrave, 2020), but that it is a core logic of how music industries operate, similar to how songs and recordings are abstracted into intellectual property. I follow Meier (2017) in theorising the artist brand as popular music’s core commodity and primary basis of capitalisation. I agree with Morrow (2020) that popular music itself is not a brand; rather, that artist brands are commercial constructions of the ‘artist’ which function not only as investments and assets, but also as business entities operated by the labour of both musicians and non-musicians. While much of the authenticity of artist brands is based on a concept of the artist being their true self and concealing these economic structures (Marshall, 2013), I find it a compelling and accurate theorisation to view artist brand music as a mode of production and artist brands as commodities, rather than to portray popular music as a purely cultural phenomenon.
- 3.
Spotify altered its in-house pitching procedures following interviews in 2018 to standardise the process and open it to all users (see Spotify, 2018). However, I confirmed with interview participants that pitching by insiders still occurs in addition to this standardised process.
- 4.
DSP is an acronym for digital service provider, a common term for MSS.
- 5.
Playlist Pump was one company two participants mentioned as an Australian firm based in Sydney with which they had met and chosen not to work with at that time. Playlist Pump did not respond to my interview request.
- 6.
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Morgan, B.A. (2022). Optimisation of Musical Distribution in Streaming Services: Third-Party Playlist Promotion and Algorithmic Logics of Distribution. In: Morrow, G., Nordgård, D., Tschmuck, P. (eds) Rethinking the Music Business. Music Business Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09532-0_9
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