The advent of music streaming platforms in the 21st Century was certainly viewed as one of the most revolutionary changes in the music industry. It is celebrated by artists and listeners alike, as it promoted the independent music production and listening scene.
Before Soundcloud, social media and streaming platforms era, being signed by a record label was your golden ticket to a successful music career. This encouraged an unspoken filter for music that was distributed to the masses. To get your work out there, a label had to like it enough to invest in it. While this did enforce a sort of quality check on what music went out there, many could argue that it is against the very fundamental idea of art. What could be terrible music to one artist could be amazing to the other, and due to the existence of a middleman such as record labels, many potentially amazing works of art remain unheard.
Today, anybody who can make music can put it out on Spotify or Apple Music with little to no obstacles. This has increased the amount and variety of content we see in the world today. So the coming in of streaming platforms was obviously a blessing-wasn’t it? Something that most of the youth of today do not consider is how streaming platforms have drastically changed the way we consume musical content. Weekly playlists, playlists that are ‘made for you’ and ‘tailored’ to your tastes may actually be restricting the kind of music you expose yourself to in the long run.
A couple of decades ago, discovering new music meant really discovering new music. The culture of walking into a record store and buying a record based on the vibe you got from it was a process that led most listeners to get into music that was completely new to them. One may have loved or hated the music they bought, but there was only one way to find out.
With the recommendation algorithms of today’s time, it is likely that under the pretense of listening to new music based on our likes and dislikes, we are actually trapping ourselves in a bubble of familiarity. We are recommended songs based on what we like listening to, and this creates a sort of relentless cycle of listening to different songs that may end up being from the same genre or artist. While this is something that gives us a lot of short-term satisfaction, it takes away from the experience of finding all the new kinds of music we could potentially discover.
Furthermore, when skipping a song is as easy as just tapping a little button on your screen, the act of listening to entire albums is dying faster than we would have imagined. This has a huge impact on perception of music. Can we really understand what an artist is trying to tell us if we do not listen to the whole story? When was the last time you listened to an entire album? It is likely that it was ages ago.
At the end of the day, it is fair enough to say that even though the introduction of streaming platforms did wonders to push more people of the world to make music by making it more accessible in every way, it did bring about a huge shift in the dynamic of music consumption and the financial side of the industry. Our goal as musicians and listeners can only be, perhaps, to find that sweet spot with the best of both worlds.
Written by Crew Member Liza Mathew
Art work by Crew Member Sangeet Pandey
Chords & Co. 