“Hit Me With Music” Techno-Fascist Resistance in the Age of Music Streaming

Whether one calls it techno-fascism, platform capitalism, or vectoralism, no one can deny that our political economy is evolving, and that data and the corporations that own it are playing an integral role in the emergence of this new system. Much like past economic transitions that have been spurred by the invention of new technologies, musicians are once again playing the role of canary in the coal mine when it comes to the exploitation of labor. At the center of this new testing ground lays Spotify, one of the most controversial streaming platforms to help usher in this new order. While many have begun to question the ethics of Spotify as an individual company, it is rare for people to disentangle the actions of the singular corporation from the intrinsic realities of the music streaming industry at large, and even rarer to question this nearly ubiquitous model of platform capitalism and its impacts on democracy. This paper analyzes both the popular critiques and affordances of Spotify, positions the platform in the wider context of our current techno-political moment, and ultimately argues that the exploitation of musicians normalized by Spotify represents a microcosm of our larger political economy. Following this contextualization and critique, the paper proposes alternative approaches to resist this encroachment in the form of Funkwhale as an alternative to music streaming platforms, and decentralization as a broader techno-political strategy.