Abstract
This chapter addresses the question of how Australian-based music professionals perceived the changing role and function of music charts in the contemporary music economy following the epochal moment in 2017 when streaming was first included in the Australian Recording Industry Association charts. By investigating the impact of music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music on patterns of taste making in Australian popular music culture shortly following this historical moment, this chapter examines how music streaming services changed the cultural ecology of music in Australia at this time. In doing so, this chapter contributes to our understanding of the impact that northern hemisphere curated streaming service playlists have on Australia’s homegrown talent, and the country’s popular music industries more broadly. The research informing this chapter was conducted in 2018–19 and it is significant because at that time Spotify’s curation practices were mysterious to the music professionals we interviewed. This meant that they felt their livelihoods had come to depend on a service they did not know how to influence.
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Notes
- 1.
In order to understand the star system, it is useful to consider the operation of major record labels in the music industries. From the perspective of major record labels, 9 out of 10 artists fail (Frith, 2001, p. 35). But the 1 in 10 who is successful is so successful that they well and truly cover the losses incurred in signing the 9 who were unsuccessful (Frith, 2001). This means that record labels are essentially in the business of making ‘superstars’. Researchers such as Hesmondhalgh (2013), Elberse (2013), Mulligan (2014) and Nordgård (2018) have found that the streaming economy has exacerbated this.
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Acknowledgements
This chapter is an excerpt from a larger contract research report that was commissioned by William Morris Endeavor (WME). It has been made available here by kind permission of WME; we would like to thank Brett Murrihy and Jeanine Hamilton at WME for their support. Thank you also to Dr. Brian Long for assisting with converting the original report into this chapter version. We would also like to thank the two anonymous referees who peer reviewed this chapter and Kate Leeson for copyediting this chapter and all of the other chapters in this book.
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Morrow, G., Beckett, J. (2022). The Changing Role and Function of Music Charts in the Contemporary Music Economy. In: Morrow, G., Nordgård, D., Tschmuck, P. (eds) Rethinking the Music Business. Music Business Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09532-0_13
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