Behind the Music: How Labor Changed for Musicians through the Subscription Economy

In the last decade, many musicians have taken to digital platforms to share their music. The provision of users with low or no cost access to vast libraries of music initiated a decrease of the role of middlemen in the industry, such as record labels. This development comes with certain advantages for artists, but at the same time, they can no longer rely on revenue generated solely by their music, due to the pay-back model of these platforms. There is growing evidence of exploitation of the creative workers in the subscription economy. While the perspectives of music platforms, as well as record labels, have been covered extensively, the artist perspective is alarmingly sparse. We know little of musician's new forms of labor that enable them to capitalize on streaming services. Hence, this paper examines how the labor of artists in the music industry changed through the rise of streaming platforms, specifically in the context of Germany, the fourth largest music market in the world. To date, little research exists regarding the German music market and its digital growth. If we want to investigate the global implications of the subscription economy, it is essential to move beyond the usual suspects of the United States and the UK as chosen contexts for research. In this research, a qualitative analysis of the contemporary German music market from the artist perspective was carried out. In the course of this, thirteen semi-structured indepth interviews with German musicians were conducted to investigate how their labor changed due to the rise of streaming platforms. The findings show that artists no longer perceive their music as a product, but as a marketing tool for their brand. Further, the gradual elimination of the album as an artistic element and the enormous competition caused by subscription services pressures artists to produce solely hit singles. Other than that, the creative process is not extensively impacted through the datafication, facilitated through subscription services. The non-creative process and the perception of music as a commodity has changed tremendously. Thereby, artists leverage on the data that platforms provide to support their non-creative tasks. Further, new intermediaries in the market have emerged in the form of digital distributors, which enable artists to share their music for a small fee on all available digital platforms. Through the increased amount of time which is needed for noncreative tasks, the wish for an even broader intermediary network becomes obvious. It can be questioned whether this provides artists with more creative freedom or if they find themselves in an even more exploitive and precarious position. As expected, the perceptions of artists regarding their platform labor are double-edged. While they perceive a big pleasure and satisfaction through their work, they get burdened with new non-creative laboring due to these rising subscription services. To conclude, this paper adds to the conversations on the globalization of music platform’s labor and provides a basis for comparative analyses with other markets. It serves to reimagine the intersection between creativity and digital labor in the German music subscription industry and challenges current understandings on intermediaries in the music industry.