“Music is back,” declared the BBC as music sales hit a twenty-year high in 2024. Well, not really: there is only one way music is coming back, and that’s from the dead. Since the new millennium, there has been a marked correlation between the rise of streaming services (which comprise most of the boom in demand) and the decline of good popular music. In that time, music has lost its character. What, after all, is the sound of the 2020s? A quarter of the way into the century, pop music could not be more contrived: the same artists dominate the charts, producing anodyne music using generic themes and simplistic, overly repeated structures and harmonic progressions.

Everything is homogenising—but why? The selling point of capitalism is supposedly the opposite: free and open competition drives ingenuity and advancement. Something has gone terribly wrong. As it is, the music streaming industry looks a lot like what the economist Yanis Varoufakis has called “technofeudalism,” a new stage of capitalism in which the digital economy (Spotify, Apple, Amazon) satisfies consumers’ demands at the increasing exploitation of workers. On average, an artist needs around one million monthly listeners on Spotify to receive the equivalent of a typical hourly wage. While consumers benefit from endless choice, musicians, with the exception of an elite few, are practically reduced to serfdom. This is incomparable to the previous era of record label predominance when artists would produce music which they could sell through a middle party, receiving the benefits directly. This represented something more akin to dynamic capitalism, but it is rapidly disappearing: over 85% of music is now consumed through streaming.

This creates two problems. The first concerns mobility; small artists, or anyone trying to enter the music industry, face the prospect of receiving effectively no income from their work. Such high barriers to entry do no favours for competition and quality of production. While record labels were never a completely equalising force, their constant scouting for the next pop star did at least create some level of mobility. Now, nascent artists must derive an income from performing or selling hard products (typically CDs), both of which face falling demand.

The second point extends from the first. The lack of mobility, and with it competition and dynamism, created by streaming services relaxes the incentives for successful artists to produce genuinely innovative and creative music. This is evidenced by the downwards musical trajectory of artists like Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, and Taylor Swift who dominated the previous decade. An algorithmically driven system ensures that the same formula works for the same big artists. Therefore, it is not only the largely insipid up-and-coming artists who denote the rejection of experimentation and sophistication in the music industry, but also those who have the freedom to take risks yet refuse to do so.

In a similar vein, streaming has contributed to the decline of the album. This process began in the 2000s with the introduction of iTunes and the ability to download songs individually. When people were limited to one album, in the form of a CD or a vinyl, the artist and their lyrics, sound, and meaning could be conveyed and developed holistically. Adele captured artists’ frustration at the loss of this relationship with listeners when she suggested Spotify should remove the ability to play albums on shuffle: “Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended.” Shifting focus towards individual songs separates the artist’s vision from the music, commodifying their work and ultimately detracting from its creative potential.

The combination of the death of the album and the decline in competition and dynamism in the music industry has not only homogenised mainstream music to an unprecedented degree; it has also engendered the pursuit of utterly meaningless plastic pop. Theodor Adorno’s “culture industry” is alive and kicking. The charts remain dominated by hits recalling fictitious relationships or reinforcing self-obsession in the form of ‘main character’ crap. Nowadays, movements like the 1960s’ “make love, not war” are completely off the agenda; perish the thought that popular music now could foster a culture of anti-violence and student activism. What we are left with is a quiet form of oppression, made all the more acute by the fact that our consumption renders it possible.

One way of combatting this has been to look to the past. We have ‘70s bops and Britpop-themed parties; some lament being ‘born in the wrong era’. But the devising of these fictitious realities is also facilitated by streaming. Moreover, this kind of reconstruction is not only once removed from reality (we do not live in the 1970s), it is twice removed: by distinguishing past decades as our preferred genres for a good party, we demonstrate a certain unknowing about the present, about what it is to live, dress, and dance in the 2020s. Music (and everything associated with it) is often meant as a form of escapism. But if we abstract it from the past in this manner then it derives no relationship with the present and so cannot be used as a meaningful flight from it. The loss of this process—popular art as a reaction to the contemporary—is what has been so damaging.

And once more, none of this would be possible without the consumer-centred model of streaming, which not only enables us to listen to anything at any time, but also to transform that process of selection into one that can transcend generations and eras—one which removes the constraint of time altogether. Such possibilities, rather than engendering a synthesis of sub-cultures into something contemporary, modern, and sweeping, have disabled any such development of culture through music.

We will continue this way, nevertheless, because it offers the most immediate reward (what would I do without my Spotify playlists?). But as consumers, this system of music production and distribution depends on us—we still­ have some leverage. What we choose to listen to, as well as how we listen to it, is a political decision. Thus, listening to music can become more than just a pleasure-seeking exercise; it can challenge and unsettle, igniting the limits of the imagination. Demanding these things—not merely the intellectualisation of music, but a genuine engagement with it—is essential. In this pursuit, it becomes possible to refute the commodification of music as some product to serve the profit motive of a few big organisations. So, buy a CD, go to a gig, and for god’s sake don’t listen to Spotify’s latest Hot Hits playlist.∎

Words by Jack Stone. Image courtesy of The futuristics via Flickr.