The modern music industry is entirely dependent on our choices. Spotify’s emphasis on personalization—a seamless digital combination of predictive algorithms used for song recommendations and in-your-face marketing techniques—has turned us all into tastemakers and fate-deciders for labels, defeating the necessity for good music and supplanting it with the idea of “streamable music.” If you consider its impressive climb to being the most popular form of musical consumption, it is easy to understand why our collective amounts of streaming have brought in oceans of music to wade through and critique. Additionally, our consistent reliance on our phones for cultural verification and social validation have turned us into our most competitive selves, yet our craving for consistent stimulation in music has also created an oversaturated market. A macroscopic market where it can be difficult to choose which albums are worth the time invested, or rather which albums deserve to be treated as albums. Rich shareholders at Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group get richer while the artists become poorer, and since having music available for streaming has become the primary way of gaining exposure, they lose money either way. Given all this, I have to ask, regardless of how many choices we have and the convenience of it all, is too much of a good thing a bad thing?  

Since its early roots, the lifeline of the parasitic music industry has been an obstruction to allowing fair treatment and monetary viability for the artists it employed. After 1877, when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, recorded music began to captivate music listeners, and though its continued evolution brought the birth of popular music and labels, it also gave way to skepticism about the commodification, exploitation, and the financial stability underlying a power-dynamic between artists and the industry. Then came the album era, where the invention of the long-playing record and its opportunities for musical expansion enabled the industry to become a titanic force by engorging itself on the colossal amounts of revenue from vinyl sales. Countless musical innovations and the likes of MTV altered the facilitation of an artist’s work, and towards the end of the 20th century, the industry was changing; more labels were becoming independent because the major ones were valuing profit over culture. As the dawn of the internet and its hackable corners created peer-to-peer file sharing and piracy sites, music became unchained from its roots and easily accessible through a collection of online mediums. Now no one owns anything, and Spotify has become the greatest digital tool for both the industry by building its foundation from the same bricks of piracy left in Napster’s dismantlement.  

Establishing this revision of piracy enabled Spotify’s founder, Daniel Ek, to successfully unite the industry, the artist, and the consumer all into one huge hub, but a significant lack of fairness and equality is endemic to this relationship. The thing about Spotify is that, despite being the product of a nerdy, tech-wunderkind/billionaire, it wants to be the good guy. Ek’s objective to offer all the music in the world for a nominal subscription fee (or for free, if users opt for the ad-supported plan) was a move that forced the industry to change and evolve past a point of antiquity, and it resulted in the company not turning a profit until early this year—eight years after it launched in the U.S. Moreover, Spotify provoked controversy last year when they initiated plans to license content from independent artists—a move that directly went against their contractual obligations with Sony, Warner, and Universal—leading business analysts to predict a dystopian outlook for music streaming akin to the monopoly we’re now seeing with video streaming. Even though Ek’s name has some money behind it, Spotify doesn’t. The labels that Ek compromised with long ago are pulling all the strings, sometimes with the intention to beat Spotify at its own game.   

 However, even if Ek has successfully achieved a digital revision of this corporate-entrenched industry, multiple artists still aren’t being paid their due for vital contributions. It is simply not possible to survive on streaming—unless you’re Ariana Grande or Panic! At The Disco—but it’s even worse when you’re a smaller, lesser known artist. This is because the music industry is, and has always been, a contest, and streaming is keeping that competition alive. Spotify is playing the good guy by offering to equalize independent artists’ chances, while at the same time underhandedly pushing the streams of top-tier artists who can afford to pay their way to the top. Since the music industry’s establishment, only the biggest and most popular artists got significantly paid, and streaming’s dominance has fully outlined that discrepancy, as well as Spotify themselves in some cases. The era of genre/mood playlists and promoted albums has defined Spotify’s preferred music type: “streamable music”—the Drakes, the Cardi Bs, and the Ed Sheerans. Spotify wants to have its cake and eat it too by tailoring its platform towards musicians who want to be seen, as well as curating large playlists for listeners who want to discover more music, but the sugar turns sour once you realize that most listeners are only seeing the first layer of that cake.  

Yet, the rise of streaming has not caused the art of making and listening to albums to reach a point of no return. In fact, it is worth remembering that the way music is heard and produced is a direct result of it changing with the times. In 2008, one Mashable writer proclaimed the death of the album, citing the at-the-time radical .99¢ price point for every song on iTunes as an impermeable force that would trigger a musical revolution. Today, you can find a similar piece about playlists usurping the album. But the album will never die. People crave music in packages that involve stories and characters; a 2-minute single on a Rap playlist isn’t nearly as durable. What critics are actually touching on is the question of what makes an album these days, and for me, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a 27-track triple album or a 15-track album under 30 minutes, there’s bound to be something there that will impact me. In this modern age of music—an era where streaming integration and social stimulation can have a huge effect on the marketing of albums—artists have more methods for constructing exciting and divisive albums than ever before. Artists are able to tout music videos or promotional singles on their various social platforms with the intent of supporting their brand and creating hype for their projects. The delivery method for albums has changed too, with the trend of surprise albums fading and changing back to a traditional rollout process, which gives listeners time to prepare and acclimate before diving in.  

 Now, with all of this music jumping at us, it can be quite hard to consume it all or understand if it is worth consuming in the first place. I get a kind of headache when I think of all the stuff that I haven’t checked out yet. Sometimes I end up listening to the same Liked songs over and over again, giving weight to a lesser known irony regarding streaming: all the music in the world can sometimes be pushed aside when you choose to rely on the recommended songs in front of you. Streaming is inherently personal, which also means that it is inherently limited because we don’t always know what we want, so Spotify and Apple Music constructing a playlist based on our music history can have a counter-productive impact on listeners who choose to never venture out of their comfort zone. For Kendall Polidori, a writer for Honey Punch Magazine and The Columbia Chronicle, this is why finding new music on platforms like Spotify can be difficult. “I feel like it is hard to find new music from different genres because [streaming] is curating a playlist that suits your personal music trends. I find it difficult to consume and listen to absolutely every artist that I want to, and that's honestly because when I like something, I tend to stick with it. There are so many amazing artists out there that people do not know about because they do not venture out of their preferred music taste.”

I’m like Kendall. If I find something I like, it can be hard for me to move on. As a music writer/lover, this is my crux. Why listen to the latest pick for Pitchfork’s “Best New Music” when I can just listen to the same album by PUP over and over again? Listening to everything can be challenging because there’s a lot of content—some demanding your attention and some not so much—yet for Julian Balboa, a genre connoisseur and editor of his own music/food pairing blog called Taste Notes of Miami, this challenge is what makes the whole listening experience so interesting. 

“We pick and choose which songs to add to ‘x’ and ‘y’ playlists, but a lot of music listeners already go into an album saying, ‘there's no way I'm going to like every song’. The surprise would be if they do, just as it would if they don't like anything on an album or mixtape. If anything, making an album longer for the sake of increasing streaming numbers just makes the listening experience longer, but this leads to some interesting intricacies.” 

Julian brings up some great points—more songs mean more chances for artists to find a hit and for users to discover that artist and their music—and this is also proof that users like him have adjusted their listening habits to fit in with the changing landscape made for streaming. But I have to wonder if this focus on maximizing album duration and minimizing song length is more economical than anything. Are we forgetting to listen to albums as albums—meaning as vessels for stories and statements? Are we mitigating lyrical content and defeating the challenge of listening to music? I don’t think the album is dead—there are plenty of recent projects that support this argument—but I do think it is in flux. Another writer for Honey Punch Magazine, Isabella Vega, thinks that this lack of emphasizing lyrical content has enabled the album to become a commodity.

 “I try and analyze albums as much as possible, even lyrics that are looked over by most. It has become increasingly difficult, especially when streaming services seem to refuse to let you take the time to listen to a song without paying a premium in order to listen to an album how it is supposed to be and not to be bombarded with ads that take away from the experiences. I wish music was seen as an art and not a commodity.” 

Whether its padded with hokey advertisements or sponsored playlists, streaming is always going to feel corporate—after all, nothing can compare to listening to a brand new physical record fresh from its sleeve —but this lockdown between streaming and artist’s content might become inescapable now that companies like Spotify have made their future intentions more than clear. This is why there is such a divide between unsigned artists and the platforms they put their music on. Bypassing a label and releasing all your content on a free-to-play platform sounds great in theory, but it’s the lack of reciprocation and biased ownership guidelines from the platform itself that make this decision potentially problematic. Carli Acosta, of the Miami rock group Palomino Blond, says that this is precisely what makes artists wary of streaming’s sustainability.  

“Some streaming companies may be taking advantage of artists by not being transparent about how much money is made per stream. Also, when people download stuff to their library on Spotify, there is no royalty paid to the artist for playing a downloaded song as opposed to streaming. I think it is good in some ways though, because it allows indie acts a way to share their music without having to sign with a label.”

Carli’s statement highlights the unfair relationship between streaming and unsigned artists. For better or worse, exposure—not profit—is what a lot of these artists bank on when thy they allow users to stream their music. But, exposure doesn’t pay the bills, and even with the addition of live shows or merchandise sales, there are still hurdles to climb over. Conclusively, “the starving artist” trope is being kept alive by the industry’s refusal to change their ways, and even independent labels are unfortunately falling into the same trap. Aside from the logistics of streaming, much has been written about the problem with the music industry. Still, despite the many flaws of Spotify and streaming as a whole, the main problem is that the industry is circumventing an evolution necessary in creating a fair and equal playing ground for new and veteran artists.  

Truthfully, if we are to ever have peace and unity in the music industry, labels need to loosen their grip on artists’ profits. While there seems to be no sign of that happening, there is still hope looming on the horizon. Lately, music has been escaping the corporate trenches of Spotify and Apple Music so it can thrive through social outreach and support made possible by online applications like Twitter. The Streaming Age has melded with The Social Age, heralding a prominent intersection of culture and conversation that has birthed a diverse roster of intriguing young artists. This means Lil’ Nas X can become an overnight success from marketing viral memes with his music. It means that Megan Thee Stallion can develop a devoted fan-base by creating a linguistic cultural phenomenon that taps into ideas of Black girl power and sexual liberation. This artist-to-listener relationship is the new model of which musicianship is based on, and even though it can have some pretty caustic results, it has allowed better options for payment and has established a nexus for building a community of both musicians and fans alike. The industry is still a ruthless competition, but it is our choices that are leading to it being upgraded. Because of our choices, artistic barriers have gradually thinned out, and the canvas beyond those barriers is expanding past the point of its inception.