Islands in the Stream
Eric Drott, Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke, 2024)
Rob Drew, Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable (Duke, 2024)
Marc Masters, High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (Univ. North Carolina, 2023)
Reviewed by Joel Tannenbaum
Music, and the way we listen to it, has changed. Music is always changing. The way we listen to music is always changing. Whether the current state of change is bigger, faster, or more profound than previous states of change is a matter for debate. Whether these changes make things better or worse is a matter for debate. Three recent monographs–two fascinating histories of the audio cassette and one contemporary survey of music streaming platforms–consider these questions from different angles and come to different conclusions.
In Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, Eric Drott has created a remarkable synthesis of existing literature on the “streaming economy”–the financial, legal, and cultural ecosystem in which music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music exist. Drott is a nimble reader, navigating a wide range of academic disciplines from macroeconomics to literary theory, alongside music industry trade publications, marketing materials, and, critically, data analytics–the language in which “big tech” speaks to itself. Taken as a whole, Streaming Music, Streaming Capital is an exhaustive account of the history of these platforms, their current state (up to 2020, more or less), and some interesting speculation about their future. Drott is also a relentless critic of streaming platforms, and that is very much the point of Streaming Music, Streaming Capital.
Critics of the streaming economy generally fall into two categories: those who consider it to be a bad deal for artists and those who consider it to be a bad deal for listeners. Drott has time for the former, but his focus is very much on the latter. This poses some unique challenges for Streaming Music, Streaming Capital. It is easy to demonstrate that artists (or rights holders, to be more precise) are paid less from streaming royalties than they were from the sale of physical formats such as LPs and CDs. It is also easy to demonstrate that artists and record labels have suffered from the cultural shift that accompanied streaming–the expectation that music ought to be free and immediately available. It is a more daunting task to argue that listeners are being done dirty by streaming services that offer them continuous access to a hundred million or more tracks of recorded music for roughly the price of a pizza.
Streaming Music, Streaming Capital begins to climb this steep hill by focusing on the ways in which the buying and selling of music in the streaming economy differs from the past. In the old system, listeners paid for ownership of a limited number of songs and albums which were transferred to them via manufactured goods--records, tapes, 8-tracks, minidiscs, what have you. In the new subscription-based model, what is being bought and sold–and who is buying and who is selling–is quite a bit murkier.
Drott lays it out quite compellingly: Streamers are not selling music, but access. Listeners pay a monthly fee to access an immense catalog of recorded music, while labels and artists pay streamers–via a steep cut of the subscription revenues–to access listeners. But wait, there’s more! Listeners also pay streamers with their personal data, which streamers can scoop up by paying attention to what music listeners choose and when. This may not seem particularly valuable, but when aggregated with demographics, location data, browsing habits, and social media activity, listener data can be extremely valuable to parties who wish to sell things to a streaming service’s subscribers, things like weight loss drugs, funerary services for pets or, you know, candidates for political offices.
Given this state of play, streaming services have a strong incentive to herd their listeners into more overtly mood-based listening patterns, and to promote or suppress certain artists or tracks according to how well or poorly they fit this agenda. Spotify, in particular, has two tools at its disposal to fulfill this agenda: machine listening tools that assess tracks and assign them detailed point values based on emotional resonance; and the curatorial power of its editorial playlists, which are increasingly organized around emotional states, times of day, household activities, times of year, and ambient “vibes.” Drott’s dissection of these mechanisms is more than worth the price of admission for Streaming Music, Streaming Capital.
The current streaming economy was born of destruction. In the early 2000s, file-sharing sites like Napster made it possible for users to exchange music for free. The compact disc was widely perceived as being overpriced and listeners showed little compunction about switching their allegiance to an alternative that, while clearly illegal, carried little fear of punishment. Attempts to rein it in via a sanctioned market for MP3s did little to turn the tide. Neither did lawsuits or public awareness campaigns. This is, more or less, where Streaming Music, Streaming Capital begins. Oddly, Drott has relatively little to say about what came before.
Streaming Music, Streaming Capital operates in an explicitly Marxist framework, telegraphed from the outset. The Marxist tradition, despite its heterodoxy, generally agrees on a broad crisis narrative of global capitalism: capitalist accumulation is inherently unstable because a) owners and workers are locked in competition over the distribution of surplus value (a competition in which owners must resort to all manner of trickery and deceit to prevent workers from using the advantage of their numbers to claim their fair share) and b) a tendency toward diminishing rates of profit caused by the need for owners over time to invest more and more of their returns into labor-saving technology.
Thus, the argument goes, capitalism is addicted to constant growth, needing to find new areas of life that can be commoditized and then plugged into the existing system of production, value extraction, and reinvestment. It is also in constant crisis, or on the verge of crisis, and the crisis is reflected in the social and political landscapes of wealthy capitalist countries, as well as impoverished countries that are plundered for raw materials. These assumptions are deep in the DNA of Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, and they compel it to move in certain directions, at certain costs.
Drott’s argument ultimately rests on whether the current subscription-based streaming model is truly different from all the models that have come before it–sheet music, Edison cylinders, vinyl records, cassettes, and compact discs. Drott contends that it is, and that it is a difference of nature, rather than simply degree. Spotify and its competitors are not just exploiting more, they are exploiting differently. The hows and whys vary from chapter to chapter, but a consistent theme is that in the old system, recorded music was a commodity to be manufactured and sold; in the current system, recorded music is an asset that generates rents.
The problem for Drott’s argument is that it was both things under the old system, and both things now. “Reissue, repackage, repackage, reevaluate the songs!” sang the Smiths in the 1980s. The exploitation they were describing–the artist’s catalog and “brand” as a perpetually renewable source of value, to be realized through the production of new physical releases, is considerably older than Spotify. The narrative of Capitalism in Historically Predetermined Crisis can meet your rhetorical needs, but ideological narrative frameworks tend to demand absolute loyalty from the individuals who employ them.
For the streaming economy to be symptomatic of “late” capitalism, it has to be definitively different from what has come before (during capitalism which was less “late”). What came before, in this instance, is the old, mercantile music industry, the widget factory in which the widgets in question were Beatles LPs, Run DMC cassettes, and those Putumayo Presents CDs they used to sell at Starbucks. So, is the music industry of the post-Napster apocalypse so different from its pre-apocalyptic ancestor?
Two excellent histories of the cassette tape suggest, in a roundabout way, that it was not. High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape by Marc Masters paints a vivid picture of a sclerotic 1970s music industry that was unable to respond to the cultural urgency created by new musical forms such as punk, hip-hop, and metal. Into the breach stepped an invention from the previous decade–a pocket-sized “compact cassette” created by scientists and engineers from Philips, the Dutch electronics company. The cassette received little fanfare when it debuted in 1963 as a more convenient, easier to operate version of the reel-to-reel cassette players of that era. Within a decade, however, this cheap, portable and, to be fair, aurally mediocre tech had made itself enormously useful to groups of individuals and communities on the margins of society and, in doing so, changed the music industry forever. Hip-hop DJs in the Bronx were suddenly able to make a living selling dubbed copies of their live sets. Punk and hardcore acts, operating at the edge of what was then considered music, were able to connect with hungry international audiences via underground mail order catalogs. Metalheads discovered new music and made lifelong friends around the world through tape-trading networks.
And, more importantly, according to Rob Drew’s Unspooled: A History of How the Cassette Made Music Shareable, gatekeepers found themselves unable to keep the gates. Taste-making publications were deluged with “demo” tapes, audio cassettes of music by amateur artists, created with the most primitive recording technology available. Unspooled and High Bias have a fair amount of overlap, but High Bias finds more joy and value in the anecdotal, while Unspooled has more of an eye for the structural. Taken together, they tell a clear story: the cassette became so popular because it had immense utility for large groups of people whose needs were not being met elsewhere. Because of the utility, cassettes developed a mythos (for want of a better term). When the compact disc appeared on the scene, the cassette lost its utility, but the mythos remained. And that is what today’s cassette true believers–collectors, tape label proprietors, installation artists, dead media aficionados–are doing: valuing the mythos so much that the utility is irrelevant.
There is inevitable similarity between High Bias and Unspooled. Both carefully recount the cassette’s origin story, including the career of Lou Ottens, the Dutch engineer who led the team that brought it to life, and the team’s fateful decision to share the technology with Japanese competitors in exchange for standardization agreements. Careful readers will note the foreshadowing: the technology that would grow up to challenge the foundations of intellectual property rights as they apply to music began with a willful decision not to enforce patent protections.
The differences between Masters’ and Drew’s approaches are instructive as well. Drew takes mixtape-making (the act of dubbing carefully chosen collections of songs onto blank cassettes, augmenting them with hand-drawn art, and gifting them) as an organizing analytic, bringing Unspooled into dialogue with the work of contemporary media theorists. Both texts dwell heavily in the worlds of American (and, to a lesser extent, British) punk, indie and lo-fi music, but High Bias makes the more concerted effort to explore the great beyond. Unsurprisingly then, Masters is at his most thrilling when he heads overseas, tracing the extraordinary role that cassettes have played (and in some cases continue to play) in giving voice to the musical idioms of ethnic and regional minorities in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. In countries where, for decades, state censorship largely kept these sounds off the radio and out of record pressing plants, cheaply duplicated cassettes were simply irrepressible. Masters rolls these stories out through the eyes of tape “hunters”--often Americans with familial connections to the regions they explore–who scour bazaars and shops for cassettes that otherwise exist completely beyond the maw of the internet, academia, and whatever else you can name.
These cassettes were, of course, duplicated and sold with utter disregard for intellectual property rights and any attempt to make it otherwise would have obliterated the entire market and perhaps their attendant social movements. This is where Drew’s and Masters’ efforts can be brought into productive dialogue with Streaming Music, Streaming Capital. Both histories of the cassette make it very clear that, by the 1980s, the music industry viewed cassettes–home taping, specifically–as an existential threat. Indeed, much of the language used to articulate the evils of cassettes–and the tactics used to make it more difficult for consumers–was recycled in the early 2000s to oppose file-sharing, and is now used in reference to Spotify and other streaming platforms. Some of it even makes it into Streaming Music, Streaming Capital.
If the systemic upset caused by digital distribution technologies are a continuation of the systemic upset caused decades earlier by home taping technology, then it is difficult to sustain a narrative of pure vampiric exploitation. The thing that gave us Bad Brains, Grandmaster Flash, and Kurdish-language dance hits blaring from the streets of downtown Damascus (not to mention the ability to create and sustain human relationships through the folk art of mixtape-making) also permanently damaged the system of intellectual property rights that has nurtured musical artists since the nineteenth century. The thing that makes vast swathes of music history cheaply available to anyone with a Wi-Fi connection also surveils us to sell us things and, perhaps more alarmingly, would like to modify our behavior to make us easier to sell things to.
Whatever supplants streaming will likely offer us new gifts and hurt us in new ways. Whatever sense of loss we feel at the slow disappearance of the mediums of musical exchange we once knew is likely nothing compared to the sense of loss felt when the wireless and the gramophone supplanted the tradition of families and friends performing and singing music in their homes. The vessels that deliver music to us have changed and will change again. Music itself remains a vessel for the delivery of hope and joy. That seems unlikely to change.
Joel Harold Tannenbaum chairs the Humanities Department at Community College of Philadelphia. He occasionally finds time to write about the history of food and food science in journals like Gastronomica and Petit Propos Culinaires.
