Swimming Upstream? Imagining a Fairer Platform Economy for Musicians and Listeners

Interactive panel discussion that brings together artists, fans, label managers, platform workers, and researchers to discuss the cultural and economic impacts of music streaming on musicians and listeners.

In the past ten years, music streaming subscriptions have grown tenfold into a $22 billion industry, with 2 in 3 people regularly using streaming services to access music. The convenience for listeners of having all the world’s recorded music instantly accessible is matched by the convenience for artists of having direct access to a global audience. Accordingly, companies like Spotify, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp often claim that streaming has democratised the music industry by letting artists and listeners bypass traditional industry gatekeepers to produce and consume the music they want, when they want it. However, this apparent win-win is undermined each time a media scandal erupts about low artist pay, listener data tracking, algorithmic bias favouring major label releases, and the rise of machine-generated content which has been trained on the output of human musicians but now threatens to replace them. Given that going back to a pre-streaming era is not possible (or perhaps desirable), this panel seeks to join forces with the music fans in the audience to collectively imagine what a fairer and more sustainable music ecosystem could look like.

Panellists include Katherine Bassett (Community Manager, Journalist, Strategist), Raquel Campos Valverde (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, MUSICSTREAM, University of Leeds), Tom Sharkett (Producer, Sound Designer, and Composer), Julia Toppin (Label Owner and Senior Lecturer in Media, Music and Enterprise at the University of Westminster), and Maria Perevedentseva (Panel Chair, Lecturer in Musicology, University of Salford).

Open to all

Music fans, artists, streaming platform users.

Doors open at 16.00, discussion begins at 16.30

Online booking closes 24 hours before event start with walk-ins admitted on a first-come, first-serve basis.