Human curation has earned itself a permanent place in the streaming media world, though it wasn’t always clear whether or how that would happen. For a time, it seemed like tech didn’t want to justify the use of human labour if the future could be won without it. That time seems to have passed, and with handmade playlists and other editorial products, human curators have a unique ability to help the widest-ever audiences find great music. People from different backgrounds are more able now to hear each other’s sounds than ever before. Whether the streamlining of these services matters to a given user is wholly subjective, since the joy of discovering new music is often so inefficient and chaotic. It was never clear that this same sense of joy would make it into streaming products – for many of us, it cannot. And that’s okay. Services offer only what they can.

The chapter historicises the economics of music in the current age of technological automation – from the invention of intellectual property to the implementation of lock-down technologies at the turn of the twenty-first century. The first section sketches the basic characteristics of music’s technological, legal and political economies. By the late twentieth century, the precarious markets for music – enclosed within large-scale cycles of boom and bust in the nineteenth century – had morphed into a relatively stable set of intersecting industrial networks, including print, radio and phonograph. The second section sketches a transition period for the music industry in the context of distributed digital networks that emerged after the Cold War, producing a disjuncture between practice and policy. The third section traces the dialectics of intellectual property regimes pertaining to digital rights management, arguing that a covert allomorphism of the law effectively disabled both technical and legal functionalities pertaining to music.

This chapter considers current and future economies of music production, distribution and consumption, intersecting the question concerning technology – big data storage, distributed network technology, programmable artificial intelligence – with the question concerning contemporary markets – the merchandising of desire, taste and sensibility within a surveillant attention economy, and its concomitant labour ethics. The first section tracks changes in the music industry within the digitally networked environment in the first decade of the twenty-first century. A practice of P2P sharing and free downloading shifted toward a full-scale surveillance economy hitched to licensed music, raising questions concerning data privacy, data security, management of user data, and procedures for third-party requests for data and metadata. By investigating the economic, social, technical and legal dimensions of this shifting terrain, the chapter suggests that the impact on cultural labour practices in the digital age bear uncanny resemblance to a pre-technological one.