Streaming economy and music cultures: circulation strategies and digital music consumption practices.
After years of experimenting with new digital music business models, audio and video streaming services have become the predominant method of distributing digital music in virtually every market in the world. This centrality has brought with it a series of changes in the way that consumers listen to music, as well as musicians produce their works. On consumption side, the playlist format became the preferred one to listen to digital music and the automatic music recommendation systems gained prominence for access to digital catalogs. On the production side, the modus operandi of streaming services also changed the strategies for composing and releasing songs. Given the low monetary returns paid by digital platforms, many artists have adopted different tactics to conduct their careers: the album format has been abandoned in favor of singles in sequence, the band format has been reduced to the one-man band model, and new compositions follows the biases of the recommendation systems in order to be included in the most listened playlists. Finally, music produced by generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has already become a real threat to the music industry, raising several concerns: would GenAI be able to replace human artists? What is the aesthetics of music produced by GenAI? How will this new technology affect copyright laws? Is it possible to protect human composers and performers against this new technology?
This dossier invites researchers to submit papers that analyses and assess the digital music industry in its most diverse aspects: new music consumption practices, the effects of music recommendation systems, music production strategies, the digital music economy and its effects on the musicians practices, laws for the regulation of music streaming services, cultural policies aimed at fostering cultural diversity in the digital music market, especially those of the global south, the use of GenAI for music production and its practical effects on the music economy as well as on copyright laws, among other aspects that could help to understand what the music industry is, how it works and what will become in the years to come.
Deadlines:
Submission: 16th. June 2025
Publication: by September 2025
Invited editors: Leonardo De Marchi (UFRJ) and Gustavo Ferreira (Toronto University).
