On the Redundancy of Music

This paper argues that recent transformations in the means of production and dissemination of recorded music have changed, not simply the ways in which music is consumed, but have also changed the way in which music can be understood, both epistemologically and ontologically. By epistemology in this case, I mean, not just what we know about music, but what we know through music. By ontology, I mean not just what music is, considered as content, but also what music is, considered as artefact. The essay will proceed in three sections. The first part, drawing on Adorno, will argue that music has, at least potentially, the ability to de-familiarise the world and our sense of our subjectivity and its limits. I argue further that this has – and must have – a critical function. The second part will argue that the advent of recorded music represented a significant ontological shift. The recording, as artefact and inscription, imported a fixity of exact timbral authority into musical types: put simply, in popular music, ‘the track’ replaces ‘the song’. My final section attempts an analysis of how both of the above considerations have shifted with the general replacement of physical instantiations of recording by streaming of remotely stored content. I conclude that: (1) streaming has decentred the notion of the ‘work’ that survived into the era of recording: (2) streaming has diminished the critical potential of popular music and, (3) that streaming and associated technologies have contributed to a potentially grievous ‘data-fication’ of subjectivity. The paper draws largely on Adorno and the more recent work of Robin James, as well as some empirical research into contemporary musical consumption practices.