Imagining a Fairer Platform Economy for Musicians and Listeners

This panel brings together artists, fans, label managers, platform workers, and researchers to discuss the cultural and economic impacts of music streaming on musicians and listeners.

In the past ten years, music streaming subscriptions have grown tenfold into a $22 billion industry, with 2 in 3 people regularly using streaming services to access music. The convenience for listeners of having all the world’s recorded music instantly accessible is matched by the convenience for artists of having direct access to a global audience.

Accordingly, companies like Spotify, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp often claim that streaming has democratised the music industry by letting artists and listeners bypass traditional industry gatekeepers to produce and consume the music they want, when they want it. However, this apparent win-win is undermined each time a media scandal erupts about low artist pay, listener data tracking, algorithmic bias favouring major label releases, and the rise of machine-generated content which has been trained on the output of human musicians but now threatens to replace them.

Given that going back to a pre-streaming era is not possible (or perhaps desirable), this panel seeks to join forces with the music fans in the audience to collectively imagine what a fairer and more sustainable music ecosystem could look like.

Guest Speakers:

Katherine Bassett is a community manager, journalist, and strategist passionate about building and nurturing digital communities around music and technology. She helped build a community of 2k+ music/tech researchers and enthusiasts at Water & Music, has built audio wellness brands at Universal Music Group, and most recently co-authored a report into inequalities in the music streaming ecosystem for The Independent Music Companies Association (IMPALA). She is also an established freelance music journalist, and has covered music and internet culture for NME, Vice Media, Stereogum, Music Business Worldwide, Music Ally, and more.

Raquel Campos Valverde is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, covering aspects of the ERC-funded MUSICSTREAM project related to users, experiences, emotions, and pleasures. Before joining Leeds, she was a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King's College London. Her research interests lie at the intersection of popular music, platform studies, and ethnomusicology. Raquel’s current research deals with instances of cultural imperialism in streaming platform governance. Her latest publication is “Inequity by design: Music streaming taxonomies as ruinous infrastructure”, published by University of California Press.

Tom Sharkett is a producer from Manchester, now based in Todmorden. Having cut his teeth as a founding member of synth-wave band W. H. Lung and touring with Ghostly International folk artist Julie Byrne, Tom has gone on to forge his own path as an electronic artist with releases on Optimo Music, DFA, and a forthcoming release on Test Pressing. Outside of releasing and performing music, Tom works as a sound designer and composer, and is currently working with Scarborough Museum and Galleries and Cross Lane Mental Health Hospital on a collaborative project focusing on sound and mental health.

Julia Toppin is Senior Lecturer in Media, Music and Enterprise at the University of Westminster as well as an artist manager, writer, and independent EDM label manager. She writes critical histories of jungle music, facilitates sustainable creative careers, advocates for Black women and girls, is a core member of Westminster’s Black Music Research Unit, and consults on music cities and creative projects. Her research has been published in Organised Sound as well as edited collections with Bloomsbury and Liverpool University Press.

Maria Perevedentseva (Chair) is Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Salford, with research specialisms in timbre cognition and the analysis, history, and criticism of electronic, dance, and experimental musics. She has published in Dancecult, Sound Studies, and the Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies, and has chapters on timbre and online discourse forthcoming with Cambridge University Press and Routledge. She co-founded the Music and Online Cultures Research Network and is part of an international research project on ‘Music and Platformization: The Algorithmic Mediation of Taste and Streaming Consumption Practices’.