Platform Power and Musical Labour: Creativity, Visibility, and Precarity in the Streaming Era

Abstract

Digital streaming platforms have transformed the infrastructures through which music is produced, circulated, evaluated, and sustained. Algorithms, playlists, metrics, and data infrastructures increasingly shape cultural visibility, mediate relationships between creators and audiences, and establish new conditions under which musical value is recognized and measured. These transformations have made platform power integral to the organization of contemporary musical labour.

This article examines the restructuring of musical labour in the streaming era through a dialogue among critical political economy, platform studies, and médiologie. It develops a multi-level framework connecting political-economic structures, technological governance, and transformations in the material and temporal organization of musical culture. At the political-economic level, the study investigates the distribution of value, risk, and infrastructural power within platform economies. At the level of technological governance, it examines how algorithmic recommendation, playlisting, metrics, and datafication regulate visibility and incorporate practices of continuous optimization into creative labour. A médiological perspective further situates these developments within longer histories of cultural transmission, tracing how the movement from relatively stable musical objects toward continuous digital circulation reshapes the materiality, temporality, and authority of music.

The article pays particular attention to the uneven ways in which creators negotiate platform infrastructures. Culturally embedded musical practices, industrialized production systems, and platform-native forms of creativity occupy distinct positions within shared regimes of circulation and visibility, producing different forms of constraint, adaptation, and agency. By connecting the structural operations of platform power with situated creative practices, this study develops a differentiated account of musical labour, creative agency, and cultural inequality under conditions of platformization.