Even better, streaming changes the incentives for listeners. Paying for individual songs as downloads tore apart the album; getting a song legally for 99 cents was a commitment, one that limited the audience for the album cuts beyond radio-approved, video-promoted hits. Homemade or corporate-suggested playlists prize a song by itself, not as part of some broader work; it didn’t help, either, that so many pop albums have always been singles plus filler. Online music stores have also encouraged a winner-takes-all approach not that different from Top 20 radio: Grab the crowd-pleasing song at the top of the listings and ignore the rest. When “most popular” can be tabulated so easily, it’s more tempting than ever to accept that taste can be crowdsourced, especially since so many of us want to know what everyone else is listening to.

John Seabrook’s book “The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory” delved into the 21st-century pop that resulted from concentrating on single tracks: We got songs that were fabricated as masterpieces of instant gratification, full of technological sizzle and concocted by a surprisingly small clique of professionals for a highly competitive A-list of pop stars, who added some small personal garnish to the committee efforts. The same people write for (and with) Taylor Swift, the Weeknd and Adele; they knew the secrets of radio play, which is still seen as the best guarantee of mass success despite the occasional online breakout.

Image Anohni, a musician working on the edges of pop. Credit... Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Streaming, instead, encourages curiosity. With streaming rather than downloads, access replaces ownership and the commitment is of time, not money. That’s still significant, but it doesn’t feel so irrevocable. Where downloads and playlists favored the lone song, streaming gives the artist and the album a fighting chance again. Anyone interested in a particular artist, from die-hard fans to novelty seekers, can listen to a whole album repeatedly — not just song samples, not just YouTube choices — and let subtler material sink in. Musicians don’t need to think so exclusively about what sounds, beats and structures the radio gatekeepers will allow; they can get poetic, political, sonically weird or all of the above. While big and glossy still works, it’s just possible that odd and heartfelt will, too.

The stars themselves were getting a little bored with the hit factories anyway. In recent years, songwriting camps — the high-pressure, high-yield gatherings, convened by stars, that toss together songwriting pros in various permutations — have been inviting outliers like Grimes, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Romy Madley Croft of the xx and Tom Krell of How to Dress Well, deliberately introducing unconventional thinking. Star projects are often still committee efforts, but the committees and the stars are more daring. And a fan who lets an album stream from start to finish may well find something that feels quirky and intimate credited to half a dozen collaborators.

This is not yet, alas, the realization of “the long tail,” that utopian dream of online culture in which every artist, best-selling or esoteric, would reach every possible fan. Most of the experimenters who reached the Top 10 are already big names who established themselves with radio hits (or who were featured on hitmakers’ albums, like the sometime Mr. West collaborator Bon Iver). They don’t have to strive for recognition; they have fans eagerly awaiting whatever they do next, even if it’s Mr. Ocean’s album-length “Endless” video that shows him constructing a spiral staircase in a white room.

The career path is still precarious for unknowns who want to destabilize pop. Nobody’s typing their names into streaming-service search boxes yet. But maybe, optimistically, they have a little more hope in a streaming universe. Streaming services also pride themselves on their recommendation engines, and if the stars are allowing themselves to stray beyond pop’s comfort zones, they could point their listeners there, too, toward sources and fringes and subtleties. Musicians have already begun to understand that they can collect a sizable number of streaming listeners one by one, in a series of individual discoveries, rather than always pitching their music to a mass audience. They can make pop that’s not for everybody, and that doesn’t try to be.