Music Streaming and Surveillance

Scholars argue that streaming platforms have turned music into a technology of surveillance. Thanks to music streaming, now more than ever before, music accompanies us as we move across the physical, social and geographical spaces that define our everyday lives. 

Music has been traditionally imagined as a means of self-expression. More often than not, it is used to channel our emotions and deal with our everyday lives. Music becomes a soundtrack to the routine, to the mundane, to the banal, but also of the special and most eventful moments of our lives. 

Today, with the help of our guest, we will start from this idea, but we will problematise it by outlining how streaming platforms use and commercialise the relationship between music and everyday life, collecting and selling behavioural data.

Concepts discussed: commodity, commodification, decommodification, consumer surveillance, social reproduction, crisis of social reproduction, self-care, protest music, resistance. 

Recommended Reading:

• Appadurai, A. (Ed.). (1986). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press
• Baumol, W.J. and W.G. Bowen. (1966). Performing Arts. The Economic Dilemma. A study of Problems common to Theater, Opera, Music and Dance. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund
• Drott, E. A. (2018). Music as a Technology of Surveillance. Journal of the Society for American Music, 12(3), 233–267
• Drott, E. (2019). Music in the Work of Social Reproduction. Cultural Politics, 15(2), 162–183
• Drott, E. (2024). Streaming Music, Streaming Capital. Duke University Press
• United Musicians and Allied Workers. (2026). Justice at Spotify