THE passive acceptance OF streaming’s dominance

If an album isn’t on Spotify, or if a TV series isn’t on Netflix, does it really exist at all? Calum Marsh

of a work of art I used to cherish if it happens not to exist on any of the streaming services I most often use. The effect is disconcerting: if an album couldn’t be streamed, it was expunged from my immediate consciousness. Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle was no more.

This problem of availability and extinction is not unique to music. It was a half-decade ago now that pop culture academic Anne Helen Petersen described the phenomenon of the Netflix Canon: when teaching modern undergraduate students about television, Petersen found that a totalizing “reliance on Netflix” had created a youth culture entirely ignorant of major cable staples not available to stream. “I’ve seen a new television pantheon begin to take form,” she wrote. “There’s what’s streaming on Netflix, and then there’s everything else.” Her students were uniformly familiar with Arrested Development and Mad Men and Pretty Little Liars. All of those are on Netflix. “Things they haven’t watched? The Wire. Deadwood. Veronica Mars, Rome, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos. Even Sex and the City.”

For culture-savvy consumers in their mid30s, Petersen observes, the exploits of Tony Soprano and Larry David and Al Swearengen remain salient cultural touchstones, or what she calls “points of collective meaning” — because consumers in their 30s today would have experienced The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm and Deadwood either on HBO when they aired or, just as likely, as DVD box sets in the early 2000s. But Petersen’s students never bought box sets or even really had traditional cable. And, to be honest, most of us in 2018, whether we once enjoyed the fruits of DVD culture be brutally unfair in terms of compensation schemes and remuneration — Spotify in particular is much-loathed in the music industry for how little it pays out to labels and artists. It will naturally be more profitable for artists if their admirers bought their albums in record stores or watched their movies in cinemas rather than passively clicking to stream. On the other hand, holding out as a matter of principle only affects the artist, not the platform: Spotify hardly cares if Bill Callahan refuses to offer his music to them, but Bill Callahan’s refusal, as we’ve seen, certainly diminishes his influence on the popular imagination. In other words, the supremacy of streaming essentially forces creators to play ball.

Bill Callahan did cave, as a matter of fact — or in any case his label did. As of April 1st, Drag City reluctantly allowed its entire back catalog, which includes albums by Joanna Newsom, Ty Segall, and the Silver Jews, to be swallowed up by Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music. The first result for me was of course to listen to Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle — as wonderful as ever, by the way. But the concession to the giants of streaming did also strike me as vaguely sad.

It’s a cultural problem, not a technological one, that streaming has come to so extensively eclipse other forms of consumption for most of us that art seems to vanish from the public consciousness when it isn’t on Netflix or Spotify. And maybe the best way to oppose that type of dominance is to make an active effort to revert. For my part, I’ll be heading to the record store this weekend to pick up that Bill Callahan record on vinyl.