Eric Drott

Keynote Lecture, Friday, 15 April 2022, 08:00–09:00 (UTC+9)

In July 2014 the streaming platform Spotify added a new playlist category to its browse page. Alongside familiar genres like “Indie” or “R&B” was a tab featuring a minimalist image of a bed, with stars and a crescent moon overhead, bearing a one-word title: Sleep. The platform’s decision to promote music for sleeping was part of a broader shift then underway within the nascent streaming industry, one that increasingly defined music in terms of the moods, contexts, and activities it accompanies. But Spotify’s sleep playlists were symptomatic of other developments, taking place in the world beyond music platforms. Specifically, the promotion of sleep music by Spotify and other platforms can be understood as a response to a mounting contradiction that Jonathan Crary has identified, one that places sleep’s “profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity” increasingly at odds with the demands of 24/7 capitalism.

This paper interrogates how Sleep (as a playlist category) figures into the efforts of streaming platforms like Spotify to both mediate sleep (as a physiological process) and overcome its limits—above all those it places on capital accumulation. In particular, this paper reads Sleep and other contextual playlists as a symptom of how streaming platforms have sought to refashion music as a technology of social reproduction. Facilitating this change in music’s status is the partial decommodification it undergoes on streaming services, inasmuch as users don’t ever pay for music directly, only for access to the platform where it resides. This in turn makes streaming media particularly attractive as a resource in addressing the deepening crises of social reproduction, crises exacerbated by both the secular rise in the cost of care and the displacement of these social costs onto individuals and households in many parts of the world, thanks to neoliberal austerity politics. At the same time, however, this reframing of music as a resource for living has contributed to a crisis of reproduction specific to music, since cheap music, as a means of providing cheap care, depends in turn upon a systematic cheapening of musical labor.

Eric Drott is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Music and the Elusive Revolution: Political Culture and Cultural Politics in France, 1968–1981 (2011). Current projects include the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music, co-edited with Noriko Manabe, and a book on music streaming platforms, titled Streaming Music, Streaming Capital. In 2020, he received the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association.

Streaming, Sleep, and the Crises of Social Reproduction