I don’t stream music. I fear that may sound sanctimonious or smug, but I
don’t mean it that way. I understand the value and utility of these
services, and I am glad for the pleasures that they offer to others. My
reasons for abstention are both boring and particular: I find the
interfaces clumsy and counterintuitive, the economic model makes me
queasy, and I’m restless and don’t like always being tethered to the
Internet. (There is also the lingering worry that whenever a person is
afforded everything for nothing, they’re surely making an illicit pact
with some dark and craven force—but, I mean, it’s probably fine?)
Because I still relish the experience of choosing and purchasing albums,
I’ve accrued enough that I never feel as if my listening options are in
any way circumscribed. If I want or need to hear music that I don’t own,
I might start scampering around on YouTube, but mostly, I prefer keeping
the whole routine off-line. Look, I’m already paralyzed enough by choice
in this world—that’s me, waving my cane from the top of my stoop and
hollering to the heavens, “Give me less!”

On Tuesday, Spotify—which has more than seventy million paid subscribers
and more than a hundred and fifty million users, and now claims to be
the most popular streaming service in the world—will begin selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s prospectus includes lofty goals: “Our mission is to unlock the potential of human
creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live
off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be
inspired by these creators.”

Of course, Spotify did not invent creation—nor the idea of making a
living as an artist (if anything, it’s merely complicated artistic existence), nor the activity of listening to music and feeling
inspired—but, since its launch, in 2008, it has changed the way we think
about all of those things. For a critic, the question of how listeners
acquire and consume new music can feel tangential or tedious—it’s far
more exciting, after all, to talk about the music itself—but the two
topics are once again becoming inextricably intertwined. Just as the
advent of the commercial recording industry (and, later, the evolution
of analog recording formats, from wax cylinders to 78-r.p.m. disks and
long-playing vinyl records) changed the way musicians write and produce
songs, so, too, has streaming. With everything now cleaved from its
original time and circumstance (and, it feels worth noting, its cultural
and historical context), young songwriters can cull influence from all
sorts of disparate sources and make work that feels, somehow, both new
and ancient.

The popularity of streaming has led to obvious changes in how music is being produced—in 2018, a pop song needs to sound excellent
piping out of a laptop’s tiny speakers and on
headphones—but
streaming has also resurrected the idea that the medium through which an
album or track is made available is as much an aesthetic choice as
anything else. This past fall, on the first day of an undergraduate
seminar I teach on musical subcultures, I asked my first-year students
what kind of music they liked. More than one answered “SoundCloud.” When
I wondered aloud if SoundCloud was actually just an online distribution
platform (like Spotify, it allows its users to stream millions of songs
for free) and not a genre in any traditional sense of the word, I
received only blank or vaguely pitying stares, as if I had just ordered
everyone to check their telegrams for news about the space race. Since
SoundCloud was founded, in 2007, it has slowly become synonymous with a
tender but scrappy style of rap music, as practiced by artists such as
Lil Pump, the late Lil Peep, and XXXTentacion. The sound is garbled and
sometimes anesthetized, but, mostly, its brazen laziness feels like a
corrective to overproduced and overconsidered mainstream hip-hop. That
these artists gathered on SoundCloud might be incidental to SoundCloud
itself (I think it would be hard to argue that the company deliberately
courted or curated them), but it nonetheless reminds me of when I was a
teen-ager, and we often casually referred to labels as genres: you liked
Dischord stuff, or Saddle Creek stuff, or Thrill Jockey stuff, and so
on. The method of distribution mattered.

Spotify has yet to foster a creative community in the same way. It’s far
too big to feel like anything other than an anonymous platform—its
library already seems terrifyingly boundless, and is only growing. Just
last week, Drag City Records, an erstwhile indie-rock label based out of
Chicago, and one of the few remaining Spotify holdouts, finally agreed
to share most of its catalogue online. (One notable exception is the
singer and harpist Joanna Newsom, who is signed to Drag City, but has
called Spotify a “villainous cabal.”) Even Taylor Swift, who once righteously
refused to allow her work to be streamed there, has given in. She
recently released an exclusive video of her new single, “Delicate,” to
the company’s users. A product that once seemed untenable, if not
immoral—all of this music, for free, and it’s legal?—is now mainstream.

The inherent optimism of Spotify lies in its founding belief that “music is universal and that streaming is a more robust and
seamless access model that benefits both artists and music fans.” The
company is essentially insisting that freer and easier access to music
is the only thing that matters; everything should be available to
everyone, because freedom of choice is an essential freedom. If your
options are limited, then you, too, are limited. Putting aside whether
this is true or not, and ignoring the significant question of
whether Spotify fairly compensates musicians for streams (I think most
artists, even the rich ones, would agree that it does not), the idea of
access equaling freedom is certainly appealing. Even if Spotify’s model
ends up devaluing songs, maybe value will accrue elsewhere. Perhaps,
even, for the company’s new stockholders: by the end of the first day of
Spotify’s public ownership, analysts anticipate that the company will be worth
twenty to twenty-five billion dollars.