Streaming, Sleep, and the Crises of Social Reproduction

In July 2014 the streaming platform Spotify added a new playlist category to its browse page. Alongside familiar genres like “Indie” or “R&B” was a tab featuring a minimalist image of abed, with stars and a crescent moon overhead, bearing a one-word title: Sleep. The platform’s decision to promote music for sleeping was part of a broader shift then underway within the nascent streaming industry, one that increasingly defined music in terms of the moods, contexts, and activities it accompanies. But Spotify’s sleep playlists were symptomatic of other developments, taking place in the world beyond music platforms. Specifically, the promotion of sleep music by Spotify and other platforms can be understood as a response to a mounting contradiction that Jonathan Crary has identified, one that places sleep’s “profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity” increasingly at odds with the demands of 24/7 capitalism.

This paper interrogates how Sleep (as a playlist category) figures into the efforts of streaming platforms like Spotify to both mediate sleep (as a physiological process) and overcome its limits—above all those it places on capital accumulation. In particular, this paper reads Sleep and other contextual playlists as a symptom of how streaming platforms have sought to refashion music as a technology of social reproduction. Facilitating this change in music’s status is the partial decommodification it undergoes on streaming services, inasmuch as users don’t ever pay for music directly, only for access to the platform where it resides. This in turn makes streaming media particularly attractive as a resource in addressing the deepening crises of social reproduction, crises exacerbated by both the secular rise in the cost of care and the displacement of these social costs onto individuals and households in many parts of the world, thanks to neoliberal austerity politics. At the same time, however, this reframing of music as a resource for living has contributed to a crisis of reproduction specific to music, since cheap music, as a means of providing cheap care, depends in turn upon a systematic cheapening of musical labor.

About Eric Drott
Eric Drott received his PhD from Yale University in 2001, where he taught prior to coming to the University of Texas at Austin. His research spans a number of subjects: contemporary music cultures, streaming music platforms, music and protest, genre theory, digital music, and the political economy of music. His first book, Music and the Elusive Revolution (University of California Press, 2011), examines music and politics in France after May ’68, in particular how different music communities (jazz, rock, contemporary music) responded to the upheavals of the period. He is currently finishing a second book, provisionally titled Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, which examines the material and psychic economies of music streaming platforms. He is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music with Noriko Manabe (Temple University).

Drott is a recipient of a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2020 he received the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association for his contributions to music research.

Punching Through the Liminality: GenX TV Youth Explore White Privilege

One of the throughlines in Dr. Ross’s current book project involves the ways in which GenX TV teens did or didn’t deal with issues related to race in the United States, while the world around them struggled to fully examine a steady stream of hate crimes and rising racial tensions across the 1980s and early 1990s. In this talk, Ross explores select GenX TV moments that touched on the concept of white privilege, even as none directly reference Peggy McIntosh’s work developing this framework in the late 1980s. She is interested in examining how the concept was presented and the ways that Michel Foucault’s ruminations on heterotopia and Victor Turner’s descriptions of liminality intersected with narratives regarding white privilege in the context of teen and young adulthood specifically. A major focus of her broader study is how GenX teen TV reveals patterns that persist today in how we in the U.S. deliberate social issues such as racism. Her journey through this topic highlights the first season of The Real World (1992) and how issues of race re-emerged in The Real World Homecoming nearly 30 years later (2021).

About Dr. Ross
Sharon Ross is Associate Professor in the School of Film and Television and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs at Columbia College Chicago; she teaches critical media studies, with a focus on television. She is the author of Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet and co-editor of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom. Dr. Ross has a PhD in Radio-TV-Film from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently in the final stages of publication for a book on GenX teens on TV.

A Shock! To Television: Horror Programming at the Turn of the Sixties draws from a larger dissertation project that explores the construction of the horror genre on television during the classic network era. This presentation focuses on a case study of boundary-pushing programming such as Thriller and ‘Way Out that emerged from the success of syndicated horror films on television like Dracula. Alex tracks changes in business press coverage to show how networks and intermediaries, which had generally shied from positioning programming explicitly as “horror,” constructed the genre’s turn to more macabre themes on prime-time airwaves as inevitable. For a moment during the late 1950s and early 1960s, television horror got weird—really weird—before mutating into safer species such as The Munsters and The Outer Limits. This presentation thus examines how cultural intermediaries, including programmers, critics, and advertisers, shaped discourses about horror on television and how horror programming itself challenged the limits of network era television.

About Alex Remington
Alex Remington is a doctoral candidate in Media Studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film. He received his BA in Art History from the University of Southern California and his MA in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication from the University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to graduate work, Alex worked in various areas of sales and marketing in arts and fashion industries.