Surveillance of and through Music

This chapter charts the history of surveillance in the music industry, as well as considering some more recent developments of the practice on platforms like Spotify and TikTok. The first part of the chapter provides a brief survey of efforts to track music use by copyright holders from the 1850s to the 2010s, focusing on the United States and western Europe, where globally dominant forms of copyright enforcement were first developed and implemented. The second part of the chapter turns from the surveillance of music to consider surveillance conducted by means of music, focusing on how online platforms exploit the listening patterns of users to infer details about their selves, their states of mind, and their activities. The conclusion to the chapter considers how music surveillance might be used not to squeeze more data and revenue out of people for the goal of private accumulation, but to promote the public good instead.