ABSTRACT
Streaming services have become a key player in the cultural industries in sharing media content with audiences. This chapter addresses how on-demand music-streaming services, the world’s most popular format for the distribution of recorded music, have driven new professional music industry practices that are affected by, and affect in turn, the ways in which music communicates. Based on insights from two larger projects focused upon the digitization of the music industry and empirical material from interviews with Norwegian popular music managers, this chapter explores the work and the strategy behind contemporary music distribution in the context of streaming-service logics. By addressing how the streaming format disrupts the “audience-media engine” in ways that radically impact the audience reach, approval, and action of music’s media presence, the chapter identifies new dynamics in the relationship between listeners and music. It then analyzes the ways in which these dynamics afford yet other distribution practices in the music industry, according to two communication patterns. These patterns have particular purposes and methods but share an alignment with the logics of distributed communication, either within or outside of the streaming services, where the struggle for audience attention is paramount. The chapter concludes with a discussion of streaming’s impact upon the negotiation of new practices in the music industry derived from the abundance and intangibility of those services, as well as their multiple options for music consumption. The chapter explains how the communication adapted to the streaming paradigm is characterized by content circulation among the layers and fragments of global networks and multiple platforms, linking artists, fans, music, and the industry in new, less predictable ways. The work of communication management hence grows in importance in a streaming-dominated music industry that might also be characterized as a communication industry in its own right.
