From Adorno to 50 Cent: Financialized platform capitalism, Spotify, and the culture industry in the twenty-first century

Abstract

Does music sound all the same nowadays? This article revives the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry by recontextualizing it within contemporary financialized platform capitalism. We argue that Digital Streaming Platforms (DSPs) like Spotify showcase the proliferation of the future-oriented asset logic inherent to both financialization and platformization. This process intensifies the standardization of music that was first recognized by Theodor Adorno. The playlist is the central device of this assetization of music, contributing to a noticeable decrease in sonic and stylistic diversity in music. We illustrate this novel development through a diachronic content analysis of hip-hop music, comparing Apple Music’s Hip-Hop/R&B Hits: 2002 playlist based on hip-hop charts from the pre-DSP era and Spotify’s largest in-house curated playlist RapCaviar (from 2022). Rather than democratizing the music market, as Spotify is often hailed to do, the twenty-first-century culture industry facilitates further homogenization of artistic expression. Our findings contribute to ongoing political economy debates about the effects of financialization, platformization, and assetization on music, culture, and the everyday.