Platformed! How Streaming, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence are Shaping Music Cultures
Technological University Dublin (Ireland)
Earlier this summer, Spotify’s CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek, led a €600 million investment into a start-up named Helsing, specialising in artificial intelligence military software. Deerhoof and a number of other indie bands withdrew their catalogue from the music streaming platform, baulking at having their music accessible via a platform who shares a CEO with a military startup. Deerhoof described the company as “creepy” and a “data-mining scam masquerading as a ‘music company’” (Green and Strauss 2025). In this now well established digital economy, Deerhoof point to the complexity of digital platforms such as Spotify’s business model—are they a music company, data broker, advertiser or something more sinister?
In Platformed!, a work by Tiziano Bonini and Paolo Maguadda, the authors seek to tease out the social factors and historical conditions that have allowed Spotify to become an almost monolithic presence in the mediation of music, the influence its having on contemporary music culture and the anxieties that come with a company using data profiling as a means to ascertain the taste of a listener. The story is complicated and brings with it hardline opinions on the effect streaming culture is having on music. The authors are attentive to such qualitative judgements; that streaming platforms have ruined the music experience of a younger generation by dematerialising the music product, that such platforms have encourage a disengaged listening curated by the machine rather than a human, or that musicians are now writing music tailored to the algorithm and its penchant for instant hooks. For the authors, such judgements afford streaming platforms such as Spotify too much agency, while at the same time, ignoring the impact that social practices had on the development of online music sharing, streaming and datafication prior to Spotify’s arrival.
Instead the authors, drawing from the work of Science and Technology scholars such as Latour, argue that the evolution of technologies do not follow “a single, coherent logic” (6) but respond to the distinct conjuncture of social, political and economic pressures—conditions that are informed by the agency of social actors, and not primarily by the technology itself. To illustrate such, the authors provide a historical account of music’s circulation as a commercial artefact, its transition from an analogue artefact to a digital one and the impact new online peer-to-peer networks had in the late 1990s on normalising the consumption of digital music. At each stop on this whirlwind tour of music’s evolution as a commercial product, driven by the demands of industry, there is a counterpoint proposed, the disruption by non-industry actors, early hackers such as Shawn Fanning of Napster, or music researchers such as Karlheinz Brandenburg and his work on developing the MP3 format and the anonymous role that hordes of music fans had in making use of new technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing in distributing music for free. By presenting the various technological breakthroughs that allowed for music streaming to come into existence, the authors are reminding the reader at each moment that technology is consistently implicated within its social moment. In other words, just because a technology exists, does not mean it will be adopted.
While the term “streaming” might now be predominantly associated with listening to music or watching videos on demand, streaming technology was not originally intended for such. Originally developed in the 1990s, during a period when transmitting sound on the web faced “almost insurmountable technological constraints” (24), streaming was explored as a means to mirror radio’s capacity for broadcasting live events, using the internet instead of the airwaves. Experiments with streaming technologies followed a “variety of different trajectories” (29), from internet radio experiments to webcasting of parliamentary debates, and through its myriad uses, often outside of dominant commercial industries, became normalised as a broadcasting tool. Yet it was only with the transition towards what Srnicek (2017) has termed “platform capitalism” that streaming became commercially viable. In chapter three, the authors provide an accessible overview of the rise of the platform society, detailing the multifaceted computational infrastructure they rely upon in order to operate; datafication of user behaviour, data analysis of music (in the case of music streaming platforms), algorithms for personalised recommendations, guiding the reader through the complicated industrial business practices of what can appear to be merely immaterial websites. It’s a necessary detour that situates Spotify’s business model within wider economic and technological trends and illustrates the structural shifts that have been impacting the cultural industries over the past decade or so.
Streaming technologies may have been with us for over three decades, yet it is their implication with algorithmic processes and artificial intelligences that are currently provoking the most unease. Whether it’s the development of artificial intelligence that can automatically produce a song in a sonic style according to various user prompts, or the increasing appearance of AI music in Spotify playlists, such transitions again inflame anxieties around the nature of human creativity and its replacement by machines. In chapters four, anxieties around the role that algorithms have in music selection are examined, particularly in the fear that the human curator has been sidelined by automated processes. The authors draw from Bonini’s own ethnographic research with Gandini (2019) on curating playlists to illustrate the continued presence of real live humans in the editorial offices of streaming platforms, even if the authors here warn that a small number of playlists are increasingly influential in determining the viability of a musician’s career.
Taking on such a large scope as the transformation of music cultures as a result of music streaming platforms means there will inevitably be a considerable amount of shifts left unaddressed in the work. While there is much focus on individual tactics of resistance, it would be interesting to understand more about how various music scenes and non-corporate streaming initiatives are enacting algorithmic resistance, a term the authors use for listeners who attempt to “circumvent, control, or mislead the data collection mechanisms enacted by platforms’ algorithms” (115). Despite this, Platformed! provides a valuable primer for anyone wishing to get their bearings in the ever-shifting landscape of music’s situatedness in digital media ecologies and a reminder of the power that artists and fans have in shaping music cultures.
Bonini, Tiziano and Alessandro Gandini. 2019. “‘First Week Is Editorial, Second Week Is Algorithmic’: Platform Gatekeepers and the Platformization of Music Curation”. Social Media + Society 5(4): 1–11. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006>.
Green, Walden and Matthew Strauss. 2025. “Deerhoof to Remove Music From Spotify”. Pitchfork. 30 June: <https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/>, (Accessed 1 August 2025).
Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity Press.