Music Streaming as a Mediated Process: Algorithms and Assets

Online music streaming and the platforms that enable it are a relatively new phenomenon in music practice, at least when measured against the timescales of music history. They involve not only very specific and structurally decisive financial arrangements (multi-sided markets, financialization), but also depend deeply on technological affordances that did not exist in their current form less than a generation ago — most notably recommender systems. The two books at the centre of this review, Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation by Nick Seaver and Streaming Music, Streaming Capital by Eric Drott, together illuminate many non-obvious yet crucial structural conditions of contemporary music streaming as a networked, lived practice distributed across humans, technology, finance, and culture.