STREAMING LISTENING AS A NEW MODEL OF MUSICAL CULTURE

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to conceptualize streaming listening not merely as an audio-transmission technology or a distribution channel, but as a new model of musical culture that reorganizes access to recorded music, its ordering, everyday use, and symbolic appropriation. The study is centered on the introductory chapter to David Hesmondhalgh’s open-access edited volume “Music Streaming around the World” (2025), which interprets the global spread of streaming through the interaction of platformization, datafication, cultural inequality, change, and continuity. The methodology combines cultural and platform-studies perspectives, conceptual analysis, a critical synthesis of openaccess scholarship, and comparison of the technological, institutional, and everyday levels of listening. The scientific novelty lies in defining streaming listening as a recursive cultural model structured by the cycle access – interface selection – listening action – data – recommendation. Five interrelated dimensions of this model are proposed: the shift from ownership of a carrier to conditional access; the dominance of playlists and interfaces as forms for organizing musical abundance; the hybridization of editorial and algorithmic curation; the spread of continuous, situational, and functional listening; and the transformation of the listener into a user, co-curator, and data source. Conclusions. Streaming listening is a dominant but non-total model: it does not abolish albums, collecting, attentive listening, or human mediation, but incorporates them into a new infrastructure of visibility and personalization. Its cultural effects therefore cannot be reduced either to democratized access or to algorithmic homogenization. The decisive feature is the asymmetrical feedback between listeners’ choices and the platform’s calculation of those choices. Agency persists, yet it is exercised within classifications, metrics, and commercial priorities that remain only partially visible to users. This approach makes it possible to describe streaming culture without technological determinism and to connect transformations in listening practices with the institutional power of platforms.