You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music Highlight

But I think this question is not actually about geometry, it’s about love and time. It’s not idle actuarial curiosity. What we want to know is if we can be musicians, just because we want to, instead of getting some other job. If art is important, isn’t making art an important occupation? The social promise of the middle class isn’t just that it exists, it’s that you can reach it by earnest, unheroic effort. But if you want that, you want socialism. Not a partial simulation of socialism staged inside of the cash-flows of subscription music streaming. You want a Universal Basic Income so that everyone can choose how to spend their time, whether that’s writing songs or teaching middle-school history or growing raspberries. Neo-liberal capitalism doesn’t provide that. It doesn’t give music the economic support it humanely deserves, but that’s because it doesn’t make humane decisions. It makes market decisions, and those are not driven by social goals or moral truths, they’re driven by the unplanned and unforeseen interactions of micromotives and macrobehavior. A truly new economy could work any way we imagine. But we don’t have one yet. Streaming isn’t a new economy, it’s just a new market.