Published in Fast Capitalism Vol. 21 issue 1.
People see rock’n’roll as youth culture,
and when youth culture becomes monopolized by big business,
what are the youthto do? Do you have any idea?
I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process
that is destroying youth culture.
(Thurston Moore in the documentary 1991: the year punk rock broke)
Having researched music file-sharing during its heydays in the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s (Skågeby, 2008), there is one thing that has, since the subsequent universal adoption of music streaming, fascinated me: how very quickly we come to the defense of our music streaming service of choice when it is, in any way, criticized. While admittedly anecdotal, it seems to me that any hint at “bogus capitalist processes” is immediately overlooked, and instead, arguments about the perceived ease of access to a ‘total supply’ of music are put forward; suggestions that algorithmic regimes (Jarke et al., 2024) or ‘software logistics’ (Eriksson, 2019) could be dictating the circulation of culture are not so much dismissed as accepted as ‘the way it is now’; and proposals that we have now even regressed from the supposedly ‘free and competitive’ markets of capitalism to digital feudalism (Arditi, 2023), where a few data siloed services are providing all our access to music, are perhaps met with a little more frustration, but ultimately also acceptance and internalized convenience.