The Streaming Identity
How does music streaming shape identity? In this essay, I situate music’s political role and describe how digital streaming services shape our politics.
Introduction
Streaming services are singularly important in the realm of music listening today. They represent the greatest economic activity in the music industry (Autio 2019). In 2018, eighty-six percent of music consumers listened to music through online streaming (Consumer Insight Report 2018). That same year, “streaming revenues [grew] 41.1% to become [the] largest revenue source” within the music industries (IFPI Global Music Report 2018). Streaming services continue to grow today, seeking competition in new markets as they reach 100% market saturation in Europe and North America (Alan Bargfrede, Verifi Media (personal conversation)). In common-sense beliefs, music has power over social actions and orderings. Recent music scholarship, since Adorno, has devoted much attention to the music-society nexus (DeNora 2003). During the radical transformation of music listening in the last fifteen years, I attempt to confront the effects of music streaming services on its ‘users.’
How does music streaming shape identity? In this essay, I weave together a variety of theories in positing the relationship between music and identity. I take the heavily-contested term ‘identity’ as an umbrella of discourse, practices, and analytical tools through which I explore music’s socializing abilities. The paper takes goes through rounds of specification. Initially, I begin by charting a path through increasingly-deconstructive theories of identity. Along the way, I gather a set conceptual tools (definitions) which inform the rest of this discussion. Second, I place these definitions in the context of musical sociality. I look at the mechanisms for the coproduction and (ritual) reification of subjectivities and locales (scenes). Finally, I select a specific musical setting to which I apply these theories: the individual streaming environment.
Theorizing Identity
Arguments around identity necessitate the deconstruction of theoretical distinctions. In this section, I review the deconstruction of ‘identity’ in order to arrive at a workable set of tools for describing social, self-other interactions. Through the writing of Stuart Hall, I take the term “identity” as a processual act of unity between self and some other. Next, Grossberg decomposes the ‘self’ into three planes: subject, agent, self (materialized as identity). With these distinctions, I turn to the analysis of processes of individualization. Brubaker and Cooper present three analytical tools: identification, self-understanding, and groupness. Finally, I consult the post-modern feminist account of the processes of distinction and unification; the process of generating meaning.
In the opening to the Questions of Identity, Stuart Hall writes about the deconstruction of identity. Identity, in this way, becomes a “process of becoming rather than being: … what we might become” and “how we might represent ourselves” (ibid. 3). Identifications, in this way, “are phantasmatic efforts of alignment, loyalty, ambiguous and cross-corporeal cohabitations, they unsettle the I” (ibid., 11). Hall stresses a suturing of discourses and practices which speak to the subject together with processes which enable the subject to to speak (4); in other words, the attempted suturing of subject and subject-position (5, drawing from Heath 1981) and the “the sedimentation of the ‘we’ in the constitution of any I” (ibid., 11). This attempt at unity is “constructed within the play of power and exclusion, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical, naturally-constituted unity” (ibid., 3). In short, any process of identification is the fabrication of unity between the self and some other.
Several chapters later, Lawrence Grossberg uses this notion in a critique of identity theory within cultural studies. Echoing Hall’s move towards processes of identification, Grossberg advocates for theories of identity articulation as a “‘transformative practice’, as a singular becoming of a community” (Grossberg 1996, 2). Grossberg’s main contribution is an untangling of modernism’s compression of three modes of individuation (and their particularities of power): subject, self/identity, and agent. Grossberg offers a spatial re-conception: “subjectivity as spatial is … that people experience the world from a particular position”; “the self, or identity more narrowly understood … as different modes or vectors of spatial existence“ (demobilized, constrained mobility, mobile, extraordinarily mobile); and “agency is the product of diagrams of mobility and placement which define or map the possibilities of where and how specific vectors of influence can stop and be placed” (ibid., 10). In other words, identity is better conceived of as three unique processes of individualization: the self as experience (subjectivity), the self as material embodiment of difference (identity), and the self as actor (agent).
Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper continue the attempt to disentangle “identity”. Questioning the analytical validity of the term usage, they ask why “what is routinely characterized as multiple, fragmented, and fluid should be conceptualized as ‘identity’ at all” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 6). Immediately after, the authors question Hall’s and Grossberg’s (above) loyalty to the term. The author’s critique of the term opens directions for alternative conceptual tools. The authors initially discern “strong” and “weak” conceptions of identity. The former, substantialist view places an “emphasis on sameness over time across persons.”(ibid., 10), entailing that identity is something all individuals and groups posses with strong homogeneity. By virtue of simply claiming the permanent existence of identity, this view begets a blatant straw-man fallacy. The soft conception of identity, arising in response to substantialist accusations, is “routinely packaged with standard qualifiers indicating that identity is multiple, stable, influx, contingent, fragmented, constructed, negotiated, and so on” (ibid., 11). However, this very attempt to avoid substantialism invites “weak conceptions of identity that may be too weak to do useful theoretical work”(ibid., 11). The authors’ primary contribution is to propose three decompositions of the term ‘identity’ in an attempt to address the range of analytical conceptions:
- - Identification: ““Identification” calls attention to complex (and often ambivalent) processes, while the term “identity,” designating a condition rather than a process” (ibid., 17). The first distinction is between two modes of identification: relational webs (e.g. kinship, friendship, mentorship, etc.) or categorical membership (e.g. race, ethnicity, language, nationality, citizenship, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). Simultaneously, identification is differentiable into is differentiable again into a pair: self-identification and identification. The latter determines “realized, codified, objectified systems of categorization developed by powerful, authoritative institutions”(ibid., 15). This draws attention to the specific agents who are doing the work. The goal of this elaboration is to “emphasize the hard work and long struggles of identification as well as the uncertain outcomes of such struggles”(ibid., 16).
- - Self-understanding and social location: While the latter term covers approaches action within “putatively universal, structurally determined interests,” self-understanding constitutes “one’s sense of who one is, of one’s social location, and how (given the first two) one is prepared to act” (ibid., 17). Self-understanding may exist independently of discourse (though certainly influenced and/or overridden) whereas self-representation/-identification relate to the above category of identification. In contrast to identity, which “implies sameness across time or person“ (1ibid., 8), self-understanding is not predisposed to sameness or difference.
- Commonality, Connectedness, Groupness: The reverse of the internal, nebulous ‘self-understanding’ is a “[felt] belonging to a distinctive, bounded group, involving both a felt solidarity or oneness with fellow group members and a felt difference from or even antipathy to specified outsiders“ (ibid., 19). This term reconfigures categorical and relational commonality to move towards an analysis of the effects of strong grouping structures (nations, religions, etc.).
The authors conclude with: “it is now time to go beyond “identity” — not in the name of an imagined universalism, but in the name of conceptual clarity required for social analysis and political understanding alike.” (ibid., 36). I heed their advice, selecting my conceptual tools specifically, as I depart from the umbrella term “identity.”
Finally, I complete the deconstruction of the modernist approach to identity by introducing Karen Barad’s notion of agential realism. Writing at the nexus of feminist theory and theoretical physics Karen Barad describes the epistemic development from Newtonian-Cartesian representationalism, “the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent“ (Barad 2007, 46). Apffel-Marglin, writing from Barad, notes that “the act of representation — whether of time and space, or of a cultural phenomenon — is a form of knowing entailed by the modernist ontology” (Apffel-Marglin 2012, 149–150). The advent of quantum mechanics ushered a radical challenge “not only to Newtonian physics but also to Cartesian epistemology and its representationalist triadic structure of words, knowers, and things” (Barad 2007, 138). Niels Bohr’s realization that measurement participates in the construction of a phenomenon (via experiments wave-particle duality) invalidates the notion of “individually determinate entities … the hallmark of atomistic metaphysics” (ibid., 137). The dogma of inherent separation collapses, and with it, so do anthropocentric binaries of culture vs. nature, subject vs. object, mind vs. body, epistemology vs. ontology, individual vs. structure, etc.
Instead of pre-given, discoverable properties, material distinctions are co-produced in what Barad terms intra-action, the recognition that “determinate entities emerge from their intra-action … in recognition of their ontological inseparability” (128). Now, it is “through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the components of phenomena become determinate and that particular concepts … become meaningful” (ibid., 139). Specific material apparatuses suggest unique “boundary-making practices that are formative of matter and meaning, productive of, and part of, the phenomena produced” (146). Reiterated through Grossberg’s concept of agency, matter suggests possibilities for distinction therefore coproduce reality. As I will elaborate below, power, too, is conceived of post-humanly (chapter 6). Moving forward, discursive distinction/identification and their materialization will be taken simultaneously.
Music in the Process of Subjectivity
In this section, I translate these theories into the realm of music. I begin by explicating the parallel between Barad’s agential realism and Tia DeNora’s grounded theory of the music-and-society nexus. DeNora elaborates on the processes in which musical artifacts enact processes of sociality and subjecitivization. With an understanding of these generative processes, I arrive at Georgina Born’s paper, Music and the Materialization of Identities, a systematic amalgamation of the socio-musical theories (scene, genre, affect, embodiment). Within the evaporation of “identity” into a range of analytic tools, Georgina Born re-condenses identity as an analytic framework. In this way, I bring the collection of theoretical tools from the previous section into the realm of music.
In the first chapter of Music in Everyday Life, Tia DeNora introduces a shared assertion in ethnomusicology, that ”music is a ‘force’ in social life, a building material of consciousness and social structure.” This view is permanently marooned by a lack of theory on “how music’s organizing properties come to be decanted into society”
(DeNora 2000, 3). With a grounded theoretical approach, DeNora begins by critiquing the musicological, constructivist approach to semiotic analysis. Such analysts substitute their own ”understanding of music’s social meanings for an empirical investigation of how music is actually read and pressed into use by others.”(31) Semiotics is a system of representations; recall that the separation between music’s representation and its performance (embodied by musical semioticians) constitutes the inept modernist dualisms. Similarly to strong conceptions of identity as “permanent” and “discoverable”, musicologists suggest that “semiotic properties and its affects ‘pre-exist’ analysis, that they are ‘out there’, waiting to be perceived or uncovered” (ibid., 28).
Instead, DeNora looks to observe “music appropriation in situ because, as described above, music’s semiotic force cannot be derived from the music itself”(ibid., 31). Similarly to Barad’s claims of material coproduction (material intra-action), DeNora asserts that “forms of social relations … are prestructured by material culture” (ibid., 34). Elaborating from Latour’s actor-network theory (chapter 2), “artefacts ‘prescribe’ behaviour (Latour 1991) and ‘configure’ users”(ibid., 35). To show this more precisely, DeNora calls upon theories of musical entrainment (chapter 4), the “regularizing and/or modifying physiological states … behaviour … the temporal parameters of mood and feeling… and social role and action style” (ibid., 79). Entrainment functions on two interconnected levels (drawing on Middleton 1990): types of movement and emotionality and its connotative level through which “music affords subject positions” (ibid., 93). In the most explicit foreshadowing of Barad’s material agency, DeNora refers to music as “a prosthetic technology of the body because it provides a resource for configuring motivation and entrainment … [and] that music profiles may lead actors to identify, work-up and modulate emotional and motivational states” (ibid., 107).
For music to afford subjectivities, and thus to have agency, means it has power (chapter 6). If “music can affect the shape of social agency, then control over music in social settings is a source of social power; it is an opportunity to structure the parameters of action” (20). Parallel to Brubaker and Cooper’s assertion that processes of identification must focus on the specific agents, those who wield music thus exert power: “control over the distribution of the musical resources in and through which we are configured as agents is increasingly politicized and the movements“ (162). This conception of artifact — as having its own agency — anticipates Barad’s agentive apparatus.
With this understanding of how social meaning materializes through music, I now situate the myriad theories of ‘identity’ within music. Georgina Born explicitly asks “how [in what ways] does music materialize identities?” and offers a “framework for understanding the generative nature of the imbrication of musical formations and social formations“(Born 2011, 377). After reiterating music’s agency, it’s diffuse objects (assemblage), it’s ability to condition (afford) subjectivities (ibid., 377–378),
Born identifies four planes of ‘social mediation’. First, music produces its own diverse social relations in performance; second, music conjures imagined aesthetic communities; third, wider social identity formations traverse music; fourth, social and institutional structures facilitate music creation/recreation. The first two arise from music, which produces “its own affective and aggregative identity effects … while also responding to and transforming pre-existing social formations” of the latter two (ibid., 382). It is the “mutual modulation of four planes of social mediation proposed in this article … that enables us to understand how music materializes identities” (ibid., 379).
I outline a set of relationships which will serve the next section of this paper.
- 1 & 2: scene theory, the mutual mediation of the ‘socialites of music performance’ and ’imagined communities’, where ”the socialities of performance catalyse music’s imagined communities, just as those imagined communities imbue the socialities of performance with collective emotion” (ibid., 382).
- 1 & 3: reification/transformation, motion between in-situ musical socialites (1) and broader social relations (3), through “performance socialities … work either to reinforce or to reconfigure social norms and social antagonisms.”(380)
- - 1 & 4: neoliberal capitalism, the direct interaction between institutions (4) and individuals (1). I elaborate on this in the following section in the context of digital surveillance;
- - 2 & 3: genre and affect theory, “where genre is taken to be the primary mechanism for the mutual articulation of musically imagined communities and social identities” (383). This link is made through reference to affect theory and entrainment.
A word on “scene” is necessary. A musical scene “is that cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization” (Straw 1991, 373). Before moving onto the following section, I review notions of scene in the context of the upcoming case-study of virtual musical performance: streaming services. The to scene in the context of streaming services would seem to fit perfectly: Andy Bennett (2004) extends the notion of scene to virtual/digital realm (recognized in Born 2011, 378); Straw confirms that “music scenes ground their distinctiveness in an ethics of cultural consumption (Straw 2006, 256). Born states that “Straw’s concept of scene thus invokes all four planes of sociality“ (Born 2011, 382). It is here that criticism arises against the term “scene”. Writing in the context of popular music studies, Hesmondhalgh (2005) critiques the notion scenes are used “in too many different and imprecise ways” (Hesmondhalgh 2005, 30). Decomposing the notion of scene, “instead, we need an eclectic array of theoretical tools to investigate the difficult questions towards which the terms subcultures, scenes and tribes direct our attention“ (Hesmondhalgh 2005, 32). Hesmondhalgh references Toynbee (2000) when decomposing scenes into two alternatives: genre and affect (quoting Hall 1996). Both genre and affect, however, form Born’s “2 & 3” relationship (above). The decomposition of scene (as the link between performed and imagined socialites; 1 & 2) into to genre/affect (the link between imagined and societal socialities 2 & 3) perhaps reiterates the weakness within scene: the compression of the particular. I move forward without the notion of scene, rather finding recourse in a commitment to concrete description.
Streaming Identity
In this section, I discuss how processes of individualism (agency, subjectivity, self) operate within the assemblage of personal music streaming. My goal is to theorize a construction of individualization within global streaming services. Music streaming represents the most ubiquitous form of musical listening today. Subsequently, the experience of listening is largely limited to particular digital retailers (streaming services) and individual, headphone listening. The wealth of data of individuals consists of an extensive form of ethnography, albeit limited, from which to theorize. Finally, the actors/materials engaged in are engaged in one of the most powerful forms of social conditioning in today’s societies. The phenomenon of music streaming structures the listening experience in several basic ways: it necessitates an internet device, a speaker, a subscription to a streaming service; most listening is done individually, through headphones, accompanying other activities (citation). I begin by describing the process of materialization of identity internet usage (for an in-depth account of digital marketing, see Turow 2012).
Internet usage is ubiquitously tracked by host websites. Data is gathered on a variety of behaviors, and data-gathered from a ‘surveillance’ assemblage. In music streaming services, data gathered includes “which songs or artists are searched for, which are played, how often, for how long, which are added to playlists, … date and time tracks are added (or removed) from playlists, at what point in a track a user skips ahead, the cursor’s movement across the screen, the distribution of listening activity across different time-scales”(Drott 2018, 244). Haggerty and Ericson (2000) appropriate Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rhizome metaphor in conceiving of a surveillance assemblage characterized by “its phenomenal growth through expanding uses, and its leveling effect on hierarchies” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 614). Such information can be extremely intimate, quoting Spotify’s Head of Programmatic Solutions “‘maybe a little bit too personal sometimes’” (ibid., 260).
User information is sold to companies and marketers. What is being sold is the audience’s potential — the possibility that an audience will be receptive to discourse (advertisement/feed); the more information they sell, the more accurately markets can determine an audience’s potential. Within music streaming services, “music is transformed into an instrument by which listeners can themselves be more thoroughly commodified, their attention parceled out into evermore finely gradated segments to be auctioned off to advertisers, their personal data rendered evermore personal so it might command a higher price on the open market. “(CITATION). This process views “the body is itself, then, an assemblage comprised of myriad component parts and processes which are broken-down for purposes of observation.”(613)
Once this information has been collected, “the implicit disorder of data collected about an individual is organized, defined, and made valuable by algorithmically assigning meaning to user behavior”(Cheney-Lippold 2011, 170). Primarily, data-doubles exist in statistical relation to categories, as “categorization … tries to control the series of random events that can occur in a living mass” (ibid., 172). These categories constitute a form of bio political power by creating “what Foucault calls ‘caesuras’, or breaks in the biological continuum of characteristics of life” (Cheney-Lippold 2011, 173).” The act of interrupting bodily flows in order to represent them symbolically is a precondition to exercising power.
This data is then reconstructed into a digital representation of an individual, producing a new type of body called the data double” (Haggerty & Ericson 2000, 612). These data-doubles inform corporate decisions, whereby digital content (ads, songs, movies, etc.) adapts to align with user’s interests and maximize attention; “information derived from flows of the surveillant assemblage are reassembled and scrutinized in the hope of developing strategies of governance, commerce and control“ (613). What the user sees shapes their possibilities for action: “every listener is called upon to inhabit what might be described as a paradigmatically postmodern version of the musical self, one that is multiple, decentered, and fluid” (Drott, 247). Following, the repeat of this cycle is a process of reifying, a naturalization of social codes; “In this constant feedback loop we encounter a form of control.“(Cheney-Lippold, 168).
As a tool for user engagement, music materializes subjectivities — experiential positions with unique possibilities for action. Recalling DeNora’s Music as Technology of Self (chapter 3), music is not just a tool in data-gathering, but an active shaping of subjectivities. Playlists based on mood and activity are designed to anticipate a user’s habits, materializing identity by projecting data-double onto the user.
Conclusion
In this paper, I draw a line between theories of social ontologies and analytical tools down to the experience of music streaming. The next steps would be to develop an ethnography of how music streaming assemblages configure certain identities, and the potential impacts this will have on attempts at transnational expansion.
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