Slow Listening: Streaming Services, the Attention Economy, and Conscious Music Consumption

Abstract

In the contemporary capitalist society, speed is a driving force for many production and consumption processes. Take for instance technological developments in factories that often have as their aim to be more time-efficient, or fast-food restaurants for a time-efficient consumption of an (often unhealthy) meal. This inclination to constantly speed up everyday life is criticized by slow movements such as slow food, slow travel, and slow media. These movements have as their aim to slow down daily life by making conscious choices in terms of consuming in moderation to maintain your own health as well as taking environmental issues into consideration. But what about music consumption? Music streaming services such as Spotify offer an enormous library of songs that can be accessed in an instant, which can make it overwhelming for listeners to make choices. Spotify offers listeners guidance in this, by recommending music and automatically generated playlists. However, this results in situations where listeners are unaware of the music that they are listening to and consuming music without paying attention.

In this thesis, I take the concerns of slow movements as my starting point and examine how users of streaming services can listen to music consciously – that is, to what extent listeners can make healthy and mindful choices in music consumption. The attention economy is an important factor in this, as this causes the necessity for artists and streaming services to develop themselves in order to keep the attention of listeners and to stand out. Through an examination of these changes and the way that users of streaming services listen to music, I ultimately argue that slow listening to music on streaming services is a multifaceted mode of listening that depends on the deliberate choices that the user makes and the context in which the music is consumed.