I. Merging into the Stream

On-demand streaming music has been part of the collective imagination for more than a century. It can be traced back to the 1888 publication of Edward Bellamy’s million-selling science fiction novel Looking Backward, in which a man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000. Amidst the mind-blowing technological developments he encounters on his journey is a “music room,” in which 24-hour playlists are piped in to subscribers via phone lines. With no shortage of astonishment, the man proclaims that “an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will” is perhaps the pinnacle of human achievement.

The splashy, celebrity-laden debut of Beats Music earlier this year may not have been accompanied by such gobsmacked wonder, but at the same time, the smartphone-based music subscription service sponsored by AT&T is the latest iteration of Bellamy’s fantastic 19th century notion. Beginning with Pandora’s 2005 launch and dramatically ramping up with Spotify’s controversial 2011 debut, streaming has become the preeminent technological force driving digital music into the 21st century. Though the idea of streaming music pre-dates recordings, the industry’s investments in today’s technology is designed in large part to wrench back control via unlimited access after a decade of ceding power to mp3-downloading fans.

So far, it’s working. According to Nielsen SoundScan’s 2013 report, sales of single mp3 downloads declined 6 percent from 2012, while streaming activity increased by 32 percent. The Recording Industry Association of America’s own data reveals that sales of physical media declined 12.3 percent between 2012 and 2013 while paid subscriptions to streaming platforms increased 57 percent. CDs and mp3s won’t simply disappear—they’re still vital parts of digital music's ecology—but faced with streaming, they feel destined to become the digital equivalents of once-dominant analog predecessors like vinyl records and cassettes.

Though streaming platforms are very much a product of the digital-era presumption that all the world’s information should be accessible with a single click, their form and function derives from another early music medium. A few decades after Bellamy’s book captured the imagination of millions, and at the same time that the business of selling records was taking off, “music rooms” were manifested by broadcast radio. Nationwide, parlors were filled with sound by national radio networks like NBC and CBS, which interspersed music with periodic bursts of news, narrative programs, and advertising. From the 1920s forward, the business of selling and consuming music has been structured by a technological dialogue between programmed music streams and individual recordings.

If the recording industry has its way, music ownership will give way to a model completely based on access, but with an important shift. While radio broadcasts are based on a one-to-many model of transmission, streaming platforms aim to zero in on the tastes of the individual listener. Like many other modern industries, the recording industry is doubling down on big data, giving their catalogs to the coders, and betting on a future of distribution and discovery dictated by quantification. Behind the interfaces of streaming platforms are vast databases of songs coded with pinpoint metadata and matched with freely provided listener taste preferences, an infrastructure designed to execute the recording industry’s century-long mission: suggesting with mathematical detail what a listener wants to hear before they know they want to hear it. Combing through a huge corpus of ever-expanding data for each individual song can be a vastly different undertaking compared to older forms of music marketing and distribution. What used to be a question of persuasion has become a problem of prediction.

Pop music was born and nurtured on radio’s non-stop streams of ad-supported music—the most prominent ancestor of the feed-driven landscape that shapes 21st century digital streaming.

Listeners are well-served by streaming platforms, but for artists, they cast the question of compensation in a stark new light. While the value debates that dominated the mp3 moment pitted fans against artists, the emergent streaming era has so far seen the return of corporate exploitation, with a speculative twist: The rich or soon-to-be-rich build innovative products, convince an ailing recording industry to sign over their catalogs, acquiring the bricks-and-mortar of their operations—digitized recordings—for fractions of a penny on the dollar. These operations are mostly funded by venture capital, periodic rounds of investments, or as cogs in vast empires of information, and they can feel overwhelming for fans and artists alike.

At the same time, streaming encompasses much more than locked-down platforms. At the most basic level, accessing digital files stored on distant servers through an online player is a form of music distribution capable of being deployed in countless ways. While the biggest streaming players can swallow small artists whole, all is not lost for those with little interest in big data. For every Pandora and Spotify, there are upload-friendly, embeddable platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp—not to mention the embedded players omnipresent on countless music websites—which have proven incredibly useful for DIY-level promotion and retail.

Digital streaming’s predictive algorithms and on-demand capabilities can feel futuristic, but they are built from the fundamental ideas of several music ancestors. Remember, pop music itself was born and nurtured on radio’s non-stop streams of ad-supported music—the most prominent ancestor of the feed-driven Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr landscape that shapes 21st century digital streaming. When cultural critic Geoffrey O’Brien described a radio stream as "an artwork that manages the flow of information and music” within which “the thing coming up will always surpass what went before,” he could have been describing wading through a social media feed packed with audio embeds, letting YouTube sidebar recommendations guide a late-night deep-dive, or pruning a personal Pandora soundtrack designed to deliver the perfect songs, one after another. All new media inevitably bear traces of their forebears, if only metaphorically. Peel back the technological layers of streaming platforms and alongside databases, algorithms, wi-fi signals and smartphones, elements of radio broadcasts, jukeboxes, record changers, record stores, and telephone companies can be spotted amongst the sediments.

As streaming takes center stage for music commerce, questions with long histories must be reframed. In what ways are the non-stop interactions between databases and algorithms shaping our musical tastes? Do streaming platform business models inherently exploit artists when listener choice scales to infinity? Should speculative capitalism be the driving force for large-scale innovations in music technology, and is there a feasible alternative? Are we living in a technological golden age of creative possibility, cross-cultural communication, and sheer abundance, or a surveillance state controlled by privately-held brands promising endless access at the expense of imperceptible control? Answers to these questions are piloting digital music deep into the 21st century, but critically evaluating current technological developments means keeping an eye on the lessons of the past.

Next: Everyday Disc Jockeys: A History of Song Shuffling and Music Programming