New model, same old stories? reproducing narratives of democratization in music streaming debates

At the turn of the 2020s, music is largely distributed and consumed via streaming services. This new "moment" in recorded music has attracted a lot of attention from scholars, with the aim of identifying the nature of transformations that are occurring at an economic and/or cultural level. This chapter critically assesses scholarly analyses of music production, distribution, and consumption in the age of streaming services. We note that accounts tend to work with specific assumptions underpinning the association between culture and technology, in particular in relation to the democratization of access. We argue in this chapter that music streaming services become a leitmotiv to anchor discourses about what music should ideally be, thus reproducing narratives that predate the emergence of music streaming.