Streaming broke the hunter-collector psychology

Début 2020, période forcément chargée en analyse sur la décennie révolue. Ici, dans le Guardian, on parle musique, et plus particulièrement avènement du Streaming.

The shift between the first decade of the 21st century and the 2010s can be partly conveyed by the contrast between “torrents” and “streaming”. Both terms evoke the new liquidity of cultural products freed from solid form and turned into pure information. Visiting torrent sites or filesharing platforms was a purposeful activity, though – like going to an MP3 retailer such as iTunes except without a financial transaction taking place. Legal and illegal downloading alike was still tethered to the notion of music ownership, even if the collection was now infinitesimally inconspicuous, crammed into a hard drive or that antique object, the iPod.

Streaming seems less active, a steady state that turns music into a utility, something on tap – like water. Where obsessive accumulation of solid-form music or immaterial files involved passion and even an element of pathology, streaming breaks with the hunter-collector psychology. It’s like radio, except there’s little or no public dimension.

'Streaming has killed the mainstream': the decade that broke popular culture,

par Simon Reynolds dans the Guardian