4 Digital Music

Regional Lockout and Online Listening

At the end of 2013, Swedish streaming music platform Spotify launched an ad campaign for its free mobile service built around the refrain “Music for Everyone.” One such ad portrays Spotify as integral to a cosmopolitan life of global travel. Scored to “Elevate” by indie pop musician St. Lucia, it begins with two establishing shots of a forest before cutting to two shots of a young, bearded, backlit man pressing play on his Spotify mobile app. The rest of the minute-long clip portrays hip, attractive, young men and women traveling the globe, listening to Spotify, and having fun. We see them riding in the back of a taxicab, swimming in the ocean, diving into a river, riding a train, and riding a motorcycle in a tropical location—all presumably soundtracked to Spotify playlists. The ad alternates between these moments and beautifully composed shots of various landscapes signifying a general “globalness”—mountains, city streets, palm trees, rivers, jungles, and lakes. Over these images, we see a series of superimposed titles that proclaim, “Music for everyone. Now free everywhere. The perfect playlist. Your next favorite song. The artists you love. Play everywhere for free.” The final shot of the ad is a view of the Lower Manhattan skyline from a subway platform, superimposed with the hashtag “#freeyourmusic.”1

The ad is part of what Jeremy Morris and Devon Powers refer to as Spotify’s “branded musical experience,” the streaming platform’s holistic attempt to suggest to users that they are participating in something distinctive and special rather than just another corporate-run digital platform.2 As represented in this ad, the branded musical experience promises freedom, cosmopolitan mobility, and the agency to tailor a soundtrack to one’s global adventures. Spotify’s limited worldwide availability, however, gives the lie to this “Music for Everyone” aphorism. As of mid-2019, the platform is available in seventy-nine countries, mostly throughout Europe, Latin America, North America, the Middle East, Oceania, and Southeast Asia, leaving much of Africa, South Asia, and a smattering of other countries geoblocked. Especially in 2013, when the ad was released and the platform was available in far fewer places, its hip, urbane global travelers would likely encounter trouble when trying to listen to their Spotify libraries during their travels—inability to access the platform, running into “This song is not available in your country” messages, and so forth. As Morris and Powers point out, streaming platforms’ branded musical experiences often promise ease of use and fluidity that mask tiered access and imperceptible systems of control.3 A service like Spotify trades on the contemporary associations between music and mobility in order to paper over such inconsistencies. Streaming music platforms sell a listening experience to users that is at once hyper-individualized and unbounded—tailored to one’s specific tastes yet mobile and potentially globally connective. However, as this chapter argues, such promises conflate localized, experiential mobility (i.e., the ability to listen to music on the go, during a commute, etc.) with larger-scale, transborder travel. This conflation smooths over a seeming contradiction: that the techno-cultural systems enabling the creation of an individually tailored soundtrack to one’s mobile life—data tracking, surveillance—are the same that impose traditional, large-scale geographic borders through geoblocking. Furthermore, because streaming platforms base their recommended and promoted music on mounds of user information, the compilation of this data from a limited segment of the world perpetuates and even deepens a familiar haves-and-have-nots dynamic within the global music industry. This chapter explores this contradiction through a history of regional lockout in music and a closer reading of Spotify.

In his writing on streaming music platforms, Eric Harvey captures a central tension of this chapter when he asks, “Are we living in a technological golden age of creative possibility, cross-cultural communication, and sheer abundance, or a surveillance state controlled by privately-held brands promising endless access at the expense of imperceptible control?”4 The truth is that streaming music platforms are built on technological systems that enable both. Geoblocking is a good example of this—the technology of geolocation can be used to, say, recommend certain songs based on the current weather in a listener’s city, but it is also used to block people in certain countries from accessing the platform and to present different libraries based on a song or artist’s territorial licensing agreements. This seeming paradox is part of what makes the historical trajectory of geoblocking in music distinct from movies, TV, and games: as music became increasingly mobile, the geographic contours of its distribution became more stringent. Records, cassettes, and CDs contained no rights-managing regional restrictions, so regional lockout represents a relatively new phenomenon in global music. Contrast this against the DVD region code’s attempts to retain segmented windows for film distribution and streaming video platforms’ use of geoblocking in order to do the same. For film and TV distributors, regional lockout is a way to maintain distribution practices that existed long before the digital age, whereas for music distributors it is a solution to a relatively recent problem caused by digitally networked technologies. In streaming platforms, the music industry discovered a way to further encourage associations between music, mobility, and freedom (in multiple senses of the word) while building systems that could more tightly control its distribution.

Digital Music, Geography, and Control

Popular music’s digitization came at a time when the record industry intensified its embrace of global commercialization, conglomeration, and global expansion.5 Digital outlets like sell-through and streaming platforms have become increasingly central to the operations of the three dominant record companies—Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group—with the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry reporting a 41.1 percent increase in streaming revenues in 2017.6 The shift to digital formats has been accompanied by an intensified focus on “global markets,” or territories around the world that the multinational record corporations seek to exploit and keep distinct. Geoblocking manages and controls forays into these new markets by keeping them segmented. This is important for the music industry, which has long relied on both broadly scaled and fine-grained forms of segmentation and market research. For example, Keith Negus shows how record corporations employ “experts” on local territories that other arms of the corporation consult in order to better understand and exploit these territories as markets. As he suggests, the music industry’s market-segmentation initiatives are part of its broader practice of cultivating and promoting knowledge about music production and consumption in order to guide global business practices.7 Although Negus refers primarily to markets defined through genre, the broadly scaled national and regional markets that inform geoblocking operate according to a similar logic. Rather than mere rational economic decisions, markets are industrial organizations built around industry-constructed knowledge about people and places. All this knowledge is an attempt to respond to the speculation, uncertainty, and risk that saturate the global record industries. The music industry’s profits are driven by hits, which subsidize the less successful artists signed to a given label, and these hits are difficult to predict.8 The expansion of distribution operations around the world is a way of managing that risk. If a single, album, or artist can become successful around the world, it will bring in even more revenue, particularly because the cost of distributing a record to more markets is far less than the profit that can be made from it.9

As popular music migrated to digital forms of delivery throughout the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, the music industry encountered a problem that should by now be familiar to readers: the potential abundance of digital media clashed with the need to monetize product through carefully controlled distribution. Despite this, the two dominant digital formats for music listening before the streaming era—the CD and the MP3—were both free of regional restrictions. This period of relative geographic openness was not only surprising in relation to the early implementation of regional lockout in digital video and games, it also seems out of place within a regulatory environment that otherwise increasingly used intellectual property law as a mechanism to clamp down on the possible uses and affordances of digital music technologies. Thus, regional lockout is a relatively recent phenomenon in music consumption. Pre-digital forms of music delivery were all essentially compatible; a vinyl record could play on any turntable around the world, and a cassette could play on any tape player. The CD, product of a long series of experiments by various companies and an eventual standard-setting collaboration between Sony and Philips, contained no regional restrictions within its technical standards.10 These specifications, known informally as the Red Book due to the color of the document’s cover, indicate that a CD manufactured anywhere in the world must be playable on a CD player from anywhere in the world. This is not to say that the Red Book standard was unconcerned with issues of geography, as it also included metadata called the International Standard Recording Code, which contained, among other things, information about where the recording originated.11 However, these metadata were mainly for industry uses and had little bearing on the average listener’s experience with the CD.

It was due to the economics of international distribution in the record industry that CDs did not include region codes. Recall that, in contrast, DVDs contained region codes primarily to protect the windowing operations of the film industries (and particularly Hollywood) at a time when films were released on a staggered schedule. While records were routinely released at different times in different territorial markets, the multistep windowing process familiar to film distribution—that is, first-run theaters, second-run theaters, home video, television—did not exist in the recording industries. At the time of the CD’s development, the issue of parallel imports was not as pressing for the recording industries as it was for the home video industries (again, because they did not have to abide by these same windowing agreements). Furthermore, at the time of the CD’s adoption, the major record labels did not anticipate the potential for the format to be copied.12 As Barry Kernfeld points out in his history of music piracy, the manufacture of compact discs was at first a specialized process (even more so than manufacturing vinyl records) and copies could generally only be made through illicit access to CD manufacturing plants.13 Therefore, the inability to foresee the potential for unauthorized copies to not only be made but also distributed meant that CDs did not have the content- and region-protection forms of encryption that later disc formats would. Eventually, however, the development of digital ripping software enabled relatively easy copying and, in turn, transgression of the geographic borders determined by those in control of global market segmentation. Much of this took place within informal and bootleg media networks, but even sectors in some ways connected to formal media economies engaged in unauthorized copying. For instance, many CD manufacturing plants were based in territories like Taiwan, far from the surveying watch of North America and Europe’s major record companies, and these plants would occasionally “accept illicit orders” for pirated discs.14

The problem of controlling music’s global circulation became even more apparent for the record industry after the development of the MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) format. On its own, the MP3 is not obviously central to a history of regional lockout in the music industry since, like the CD, its technical standards do not contain such mechanisms.15 However, the easily shareable nature of the MP3 as well as other region-free audio container formats like WAV and FLAC—alongside the rise of file-sharing services like Napster and the Pirate Bay—led the record industry to encourage digital distribution platforms that promised greater degrees of control. Specifically, major and independent record labels began partnerships with tech companies to sell individual songs and albums via online sell-through outlets like the iTunes Music Store (launched by Apple in 2003) and Amazon Music (launched in 2007). Bowing to pressure from the record industry, many of these platforms encoded the digital files they sold with forms of DRM, ensuring that users could only play them on certain platforms, on certain computers, or in certain parts of the world. Indeed, in addition to locking down users’ files through DRM, many of these platforms were also geoblocked. With the implementation of DRM on digital music files, distributors could more easily route music’s global circulation (at least in legal consumption practices).

The centrality of geoblocking in digital music—both functionally and in broader discourse—intensified with the arrival of streaming music. Such platforms, like Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, and Tidal, at once feed a broader cultural expectation of free, cheap, and/or à la carte entertainment while keeping content distribution controlled along geographic lines. These platforms are geoblocked for two primary reasons. First, like the streaming rights for a film or television program, music licenses function on a territorial basis. To make a recording available to consumers, the platform owners must negotiate distribution and licensing terms either with local rightsholders and record labels or with aggregators that make distribution deals with smaller, independent record labels. The ability to employ regional lockout as a way of regulating music’s global distribution is part of what makes streaming platforms appealing to the recording industries. Through a platform like Spotify, the labels can offer consumers free or subscription music along paths that align with the industry’s preferred organization of spatial distribution (as opposed to a practice like peer-to-peer file sharing, which transgresses these borders). Although record executives were initially concerned about free streaming services, labels now use them in part to discourage such peer-to-peer file sharing. A second reason for streaming platforms’ unavailability in certain territories is that they are careful not to expand too quickly. Music licensing is expensive, and moving into new territories means balancing revenues from new subscribers and local advertisers against the new licensing deals that will come with entering that area.16 Like many of the video-on-demand services discussed in the previous chapter, streaming music platforms balance a desire for global expansion and greater economies of scale with the dual requirements of contending with territorial licensing agreements and not expanding too fast.

Platforms can be geoblocked full stop, or they can employ “soft” geoblocking, where users have nominal access to the platform but with differences in price and content based on location. In a 2012 post that sparked a debate over Spotify’s geoblocked nature, one user converted the cost of Spotify Premium in different countries to US dollars, finding that the platform was, in fact, cheapest in the United States ($9.99/month) and most expensive in Norway ($17/month).17 Although differing prices between markets is hardly a new phenomenon, as prices are generally set by local market factors and dynamics of supply and demand, some users see them as less necessary or more artificial when the product is a subscription to a platform rather than a single commodity. This is compounded by the fact that major record companies have long been dogged by accusations of cartel price fixing.18 Even when platforms are made available, certain songs or albums may remain unlicensed in certain territories. Content libraries can be different from place to place, though Spotify has occasionally been cagey with journalists and tech writers on this issue.19 Spotify’s online message board is rife with examples of listeners lamenting their inability to access particular songs and artists, even if they do have access to the platform itself. Thus, much like the streaming video platforms discussed in the previous chapter, geoblocking is a multitiered system built on prohibiting access to platforms, particular content, and/or lower-priced access to the same content.

Geoblocked music is particularly complicated—for both users and industrial players—because of how services like Spotify are tied into other proprietary platforms and technologies. In the company’s early days, even before its introduction in the United States, speculation grew as to whether Spotify would be available on Apple’s iPhone. On the one hand, Spotify’s presence would potentially cut into Apple’s profits from the iTunes Music Store. On the other hand, Apple’s financial damage could be mitigated by the company’s revenue-sharing policy, wherein a percentage of Spotify’s in-app subscription purchases flows back to Apple. Spotify’s App Store availability could also help drive iPhone sales. This is relevant to issues of regional availability because even if a platform is technically available in a certain location, the technology allowing users to access it as well as particular forms of payment may not be readily accessible. As this suggests, Spotify must adjust its expectations of use from territory to territory based on common and available media practices. For instance, Spotify sees the potential for success in Asia because of the popularity of mobile phone use throughout the region.20 Similarly, the company has entered agreements with telecom companies throughout Latin America to provide Spotify subscriptions within mobile phone contracts so that users do not have to sign up using a credit card.21 These are basic business strategies, but they also indicate that a music platform’s relative ease of access is shaped by the quality of local broadband and mobile service.

Streaming music platforms can also be geoblocked because of internet radio’s licensing and royalty payment structure. One example: Pandora, an online streaming music platform only available in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, allows users to customize certain “stations,” which play music selected based on an algorithmic recommendation system called the Music Genome Project.22 Pandora’s payment mechanism is different from terrestrial radio, and the platform has found it difficult to negotiate licensing terms outside the three nations where it is currently available.23 Harvey explains, “Whereas broadcast radio stations pay royalties via ASCAP and BMI only to composers and publishers . . . Pandora is required to pay performers, who collect directly via the non-profit performance rights organization SoundExchange.”24 Consequently, Pandora has to pay far more in royalty fees than do terrestrial and satellite radio, with various quarterly reports showing that the company regularly shells out over half its revenue to SoundExchange.25 Some do not buy this line of reasoning, however, suggesting that the platform could still be lucrative around the world if it focused on expanding its operations. One tech reporter asks, “Instead of cashing out millions every month, shouldn’t Pandora executives put some of that money back into licensing? For the US, and beyond?”26 This is one version of a common and not entirely unreasonable argument against geoblocking—that through regional lockout, some platforms are ignoring the desires of their customers in order to collect higher profits from fewer territories. At the same time, Pandora shows how geoblocking is not always ethically and politically cut-and-dried. While many view the practice of locking out users from a platform based on their geographic location as discriminatory in ways that violate the principles of an open internet, those invested in the financial well-being of musicians in the twenty-first century might also desire music platforms that compensate artists fairly. If Pandora is geoblocked in part because its business model allows for somewhat fairer royalty payment (relative, at least, to a platform like Spotify), there are reasons behind its geoblocking other than ignorance or apathy toward some parts of the world.

Spotify and the Promise of Unbounded Listening

Whatever the reasons for its existence, the sum effect of geoblocking for many listeners is that it imposes material geography on a medium often sold as borderless and immaterial. Of all the major streaming services, Spotify most visibly peddles a ubiquitously accessible listening experience. The platform came about in a moment marked by both excitement and fear about the internet’s effects on the spatial reaches of popular music distribution. Reflecting hopes for an ideally borderless internet, users and industries alike (though with vastly different motives) celebrated the fact that music seemed even more mobile and ethereal than ever before.27 Early writers on digital music and entertainment explored the possibilities of a more readily available stream of music. David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard’s 2005 book The Future of Music begins with a vision of music consumption set in 2015 wherein music would be “like water: ubiquitous and free flowing.”28 Even earlier, the promises of online music inspired discourses of a “celestial jukebox” that have circulated for the last couple of decades. Popularized by a 1994 book by Paul Goldstein, the celestial jukebox describes an idealized online marketplace or service where listeners can access virtually any song or album they like. As Patrick Burkart and Tom McCourt point out, the metaphor suggests that online music delivery embodies “heavenly attributes, a gift from God.”29 Such promises speak to the contradiction at the heart of geoblocked digital music platforms—they at once promise to reach, connect, and transport listeners across vast spaces while ensuring that music’s spatial dimensions are controlled and regulated.

Thus, the invocation of “celestial” points to a common mythology surrounding online music: that it is fundamentally deterritorialized, both in the sense that it is disruptive of dominant organizations of capital and in the more literal sense that it violates or transcends traditional relations of space and place. If digital music platforms remediate radio, they also remediate that medium’s familiar tug-of-war between a potentially broad spatial reach and the requirement that this reach be contained. Michele Hilmes points to this tension in early American radio, which promised to connect far-flung geographic spaces while simultaneously defining its audience within national borders.30 In the context of broadcasting, the immateriality of radio waves has long evoked spatial transgressions both dangerous and liberating. Thomas Streeter has shown how the history of early American broadcasting is marked by states, militaries, and corporations attempting to limit and control radio’s inherent “omnidirectionality” in favor of a more easily regulated point-to-point address.31 As Hilmes suggests, radio’s immateriality and possibility for connection across geographic space set conditions for forms of cross-cultural contact considered dangerous by the dominant and powerful.32 Reanimating battles over the spatial control of sound’s omnidirectionality and immateriality, geoblocking seeks to rein in aural cross-border flows that might be dangerous to the record industries’ carefully managed distribution routes.

The tensions among the inherent properties of a medium, cultural expectations for its ability to traverse borders, and the wills of those who would keep it from doing so are by now familiar to readers, but they are particularly pronounced in an art form as seemingly unrooted as contemporary music. As John Connell and Chris Gibson argue, music’s relationship to place is marked by a key tension between the art form’s “fixity” and its “fluidity.” Music’s fluidity is ontological (music as sound waves), cultural (music as part of traveling people and cultures), and economic (music as fundamental to “the desire of entertainment companies to capture dispersed markets and seek new sources of music”).33 While music as a globally distributed commodity indicates the form’s mobility, geoblocking shows how media institutions attempt to keep that mobility controlled. In geoblocking, music’s supposedly ontological fluidity butts up against its economic and geographic fixity—a fixity resulting in part from the art form’s commodification and incorporation into capitalist distribution. A platform like Spotify embodies this seeming paradox, which trades on a branded musical experience of fluidity in many senses but is actually marked by complex and often disjunctive infrastructures, business arrangements, tiered access, and mechanisms of back-end regulation.34 Harvey puts it bluntly: “The industry’s investment in today’s technology is designed in large part to wrench back control via unlimited access after a decade of ceding power to mp3-downloading fans.”35 As a result, the celestial jukebox is actually “a walled garden of closed networks with restricted access and tightly circumscribed activities,” in the words of Burkart and McCourt.36 Although they are writing about control and locked-down platforms in a broader sense, we can think about how regional lockout makes the “walled garden” an even more potent metaphor through its construction of digital barriers.

The realities of streaming platforms’ tightly controlled access clash with popular discourses of the agential listener flitting between places while listening to her curated playlists. For better or worse, a platform like Spotify prides itself on understanding and catering to its users with surgical, algorithmic precision. In that context geoblocking is a blunt instrument reminding us that our ability to soundtrack our lives is still shaped by the political economy of the global music industries. If, as streaming platforms seem to promise, music has become as easily accessible as a utility like water or air, containing it within national or regional borders would seem to contradict its naturally ubiquitous state. That these promises are couched within still-prevalent ideas about the internet as inherently globally connective (rather than segmented by geography) only intensify the irritations of geoblocking, as they did for those in the previous chapter who pushed back against geoblocked streaming video. Such arguments are characterized by the frustrations of one Spotify user upset about differential access and pricing between different national markets: “With digitally distributed, geo-IP locked content—you lose that ability to shop across markets. To me, it sends the wrong signals to charge one group of people one price, and another group of people another price for the mostly the same content when it’s available on the same global network . . . I guess it just grinds my gears that the price for the same 1s and 0s is higher.”37 Such comments are representative of an oft-repeated argument that the internet’s universal usability and global compatibility should supersede geography.

Spotify’s nominal ability to provide a free, massive, on-demand collection of popular music means that demand for the platform remains high in many countries where it has not been introduced. This was true in the United States until the platform was released there in 2011. Indeed, until that point, Spotify was the digital entertainment platform invoked most often and most intensely in American public discourse about regional lockout. Long negotiations with the major American record labels kept Spotify out of the United States. As one report from the platform’s launch noted, in hyperbolic prose that pointed to Spotify’s desirability, “For innumerable music lovers in America, the world changed on July 14.”38 Spotify’s arrival was greeted with excitement from American consumers and the tech press alike, and some writers even suggested that the platform could help take down the iTunes Music Store. Indeed, subsequent Nielsen numbers indicated that streaming music would begin to overtake digital downloads, leading Apple to respond with its own streaming platform, Apple Music, in 2015.39 Opportunities to sign up for Spotify were in high demand after its American introduction, and the platform used corporate partners to help grease the wheels even more by offering sign-up access codes on Coca-Cola and Sprite’s websites.40 The New York Times framed the service’s newly American presence as a win for global progress in the form of an inevitable march toward technological advancement, arguing that it represented “a great step forward toward the holy grail: free, legal, song-specific and convenient.”41 Finally, it seemed that the celestial jukebox was in reach for US listeners.

But of course the breathless celebrations over Spotify’s introduction to the States tended to ignore the fact that the platform was still unavailable in many countries—a condition further masked by the platform’s “everywhere” brand. The company’s PR often indicates that Spotify’s geoblocked condition is simply a temporary setback, suggesting that its eventual goal was to bring Spotify to the entire world.42 For instance, Spotify Asia’s director has said, simply, “We want to be everywhere.” CEO Daniel Ek has stated the company’s global goals in terms of content acquisition as well, saying, “We want all the African music, all the Asian music, all the South American music . . . Our goal really is to have all the world’s music.”43 Though the company’s business model is built increasingly on global expansion, moving into new territories is still expensive.44 It would therefore be too easy to suggest that simply because one platform begins to expand, the global media environment is moving farther and farther away from geoblocking as standard practice. Statements like Ek’s serve to hide the fact that regional restrictions and differences continue to exist even while platforms seek to offer their services to more users.

Spotify’s Borders and Boundaries

Such disjunctures are not immediately apparent in Spotify’s branded musical experience, which is characteristic of streaming music’s “promises of constant, fluid, and mobile access,” in the words of Morris and Powers.45 As a platform built around an increasingly global brand, Spotify sells what we might call an unbounded experience of listening. This unboundedness is at once highly individualized and yet potentially global. Its individual characteristics come from the ability to create personal playlists, listen on the go via mobile devices, and access tailored music (and advertisements) via tracked data and algorithmic recommendation systems. While this is not in itself unique to Spotify, the company has put forward the most consistent and thorough paratextual brand promoting this unboundedness as a distinct characteristic of online digital music. The “free your music” mantra is as much about freeing it from the grasp of linear radio broadcasting schedules and physical formats like CDs and cassettes as it is about unshackling it from geography. Spotify extrapolates this unboundedness to the experience of traveling through space and time, a now-common trope of mobile listening. One Spotify ad includes a single shot of a man looking wistfully out a bus window and listening to music on his headphones, all while voice-over narration explains that this song is transporting him back to “the place that made you and I us, for a moment.” While brief and rather abstract, the ad connotes the idea that music can be at once personal yet transformative—that Spotify has the power to move us figuratively to other places and times.

More to the concerns of this book, Spotify often articulates this experience of unbounded listening in distinctly global terms—as an experience not only unrestrained by geographic borders, but also one that can theoretically help us broaden our horizons as listeners. Through advertisements such as the one that began this chapter, as well as a number of interactive initiatives highlighting the platform’s international reach, Spotify’s promotional materials and PR rhetoric present the platform’s professed ethos of globally expansive and interconnected listening. One example is the 2015 launch of an interactive browser-based map titled “Musical Map: Cities of the World.”46 The map contains clusters of clickable dots representing various cities on the globe, each of which links to a Spotify playlist of the most “distinctively popular” songs in that particular city. Distinctively popular songs are those that people in one city listen to but that listeners in others do not. In a blog post, Spotify ties this product into their broader promotion of cosmopolitan, global experiences: “In our connected world, people everywhere tend to enjoy the same top hits, as we can tell by looking at the top song in each country. But when most travelers visit another place, they don’t seek out the same food they eat at home, even if they can find it. We travel to experience what makes a place different, and special, by sampling local specialties.” As some trade reports were quick to point out, however, the map perhaps unwittingly pointed to the massive gaps in the platform’s availability.47 A screenshot of the map from 2018 reveals Spotify’s unequal access, somewhat undercutting the platform’s exhibited mission of cataloging local taste around the world.

Spotify has a habit of accidentally highlighting its geoblocked condition within celebrations of its international reach. A piece of digital art that the company commissioned in 2014 unintentionally captures the contradiction between the platform’s brand of global interconnection and the disjointedness caused by geoblocking. Titled “Serendipity” and built from real-time listening data by “media artist in residence” Kyle McDonald, the work visualizes various, instantaneous cross-border relationships created between users of the platform.48 Whenever two people in different countries click the same track at the same second, the platform points out the locations of the two listeners on a map of the world and plays a snippet of the song. “Serendipity” suggests that these moments are endemic of a broader, cosmopolitan orientation toward the world—one built on connection and shared by the platform and its users. Indeed, the name and general idea of the platform unintentionally evoke Ethan Zuckerman’s understanding of serendipity as a fortuitous and surprising intercultural connection via digital media. The press release announcing the platform affirms this: “Although they might not speak the same languages, live in the same climates, or believe the same things, they’re playing the same song at the same time. We’ve always known that music brings people together—and now, we can see that togetherness in real time.”49 “Serendipity” extends the service’s “Music for Everyone” brand by showing how Spotify can help users embody a kind of cosmopolitan global engagement. These moments of serendipity show how music might forge transnational connections while also promoting Spotify as a fundamentally global platform.

“Serendipity” bears out its intended purpose only intermittently. Sometimes, the platform visualizes a connection across remarkable stretches of space, such as users in Quezon City and Bogotá listening to the same song. Just as often, however, the platform zooms into two users in the same country and, occasionally, the same city. Although such moments speak to the possibility that music can bind us at local and translocal levels, they also indicate that the transnational connections forged by Spotify are part of a branding strategy as much as they are accurate descriptions of the platform’s possibilities. This is underscored by the fact that Spotify is geoblocked in many countries around the world—a condition that “Serendipity” inadvertently highlights. Watching “Serendipity,” one begins to see the same handful of territories crop up, and it does not take long to realize that Africa and much of Asia in particular are not included in Spotify’s dictum that “this is what it looks like when the world listens together.”50 “The world” becomes shorthand for the handful of territories that are able to connect to the platform.

Spotify further underscored its professed distaste for borders in the summer of 2017 with a transmedia project titled “I’m with the Banned.” A protest against President Trump’s travel ban against six predominately Muslim countries, “I’m with the Banned” is a playlist and series of videos showcasing musicians from Iran, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia traveling to Toronto in order to collaborate with American musicians. The videos highlight the kinds of cross-cultural, transborder experiences of travel, collaboration, and empathy that Spotify seeks to associate with music as an art form. In one video, Iranian DJ Kasra V laments his inability to travel freely around the world, explaining, “I tend to fly a lot in my dreams for some reason. Just levitate and fly around. I wish I had that freedom in real life.” “I’m with the Banned” aligns this desire for a kind of existential freedom with transnational music experience. It connects music—both making and listening—to an unbounded life. In a video documenting his collaboration with Syrian singer Moh Flow, American rapper Pusha T makes the thesis of this project explicit: “Music is the ultimate connecter of people and it knows no boundaries.” Such ideas are underscored in another video by rapper Desiigner, who professes, “Music really has no language.” His collaborators, the Somali hip-hop collective Waayaha Cusub, explain that their god made humans “to know each other.” Boundaries of geography and culture are erased, here, in favor of common humanity and artistry.

While they do not touch on geoblocking directly, at times the videos make a case for the importance of trans-border media access. Kasra V talks about his experience growing up in Iran, illegally accessing MTV via satellite. Moh Flow points to the importance of American rap as he came of age in Syria. In another video, Sudanese music producer Sufyvn begins his collaboration with R & B singer BJ the Chicago Kid via Skype while stuck in Cairo waiting for a travel visa. Such anecdotes make a case for the power of media to connect across borders, both as a window into another world and as a literal mechanism of cross-cultural connection and collaboration. If geoblocking is not an explicit part of these conversations, the videos nonetheless speak to several of the concerns that hover around it: the cosmopolitan potential of accessing culture from another place, the hurdles that make such access challenging, the implied loss that accompanies an inability to access global media, and the necessity of violating legal and authorized practices in order to gain access. Whether “I’m with the Banned” is a commendable protest against an unjust policy or, as music journalist Liz Pelly puts it, “Spotify’s way of cynically deploying woke optics and commodified activism,” it is consistent with Spotify’s branded experience of seamless, global listening.51 This should not also suggest that the experiences of people who are marginalized and barred from travel are similar to the relatively mundane practice of bumping into a “This song is not available in your country” message. Rather, the initiative is another way that Spotify promotes its ethos of the importance of transnational cultural interaction. An unspoken irony, then, is that the requisite business practices of the global record industry ensure that policies remain in place to keep people from accessing the very platform promoting these artists.

Even if “Serendipity” and “I’m with the Banned” do not explicitly engage geoblocking, they are part of a broader promotional push by Spotify to conceal its still internationally fragmented availability through signifiers of progressive, cosmopolitan global liberalism. A 2018 Rolling Stone piece on Jamaican dancehall music illustrates some of the pitfalls of streaming music’s limited geographic availability. Titled “Why Isn’t Jamaican Dancehall Bigger in the U.S.?” the article points out that streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music should be well suited to the promotion and discovery of international acts.52 After all, as the article’s author, Elias Leight, puts it, such platforms “have a proven record of sidestepping the language barrier when it comes to Spanish and Korean-language songs, and they enable artists to do an end-run around the conservative gatekeepers of terrestrial radio.” Leight goes on to point out that if anything, streaming is hurting dancehall due to these platforms’ lack of availability in Jamaica and Africa, where the genre enjoys immense popularity. Because Spotify’s listener data do not reflect global dancehall fandom, the platform fails to recommend the music to listeners who might not know about the genre but who may enjoy it. This is a problem beyond the level of geography. Pelly has written about the dominance of men on Spotify’s playlists, wondering if “streaming is creating a data-driven echo chamber where the most agreed-upon sounds rise to the top, subtly shifting us back toward a more homogenous and overtly masculine pop music culture.”53 This critique can be extrapolated to a broader concern about how limited options and availability reassert global hegemony through streaming.

This is where geoblocking becomes particularly insidious for global culture—not so much in users’ lack of access to the platform per se, but in how this lack of access threatens to produce a feedback loop reflecting traditional hierarchies of geographic access. Positing streaming platforms as more cosmopolitan and progressive in their accessibility and tastes ignores their own limitations. Spotify’s accidental evocation of Zuckerman’s use of the term “serendipity” is particularly ironic, here, as Zuckerman routinely argues that digital platforms should be designed in ways that encourage serendipity, rather than continuing to show us things that we already know and love.54 In part through their geoblocked nature, Spotify and other streaming platforms do just the opposite—they compile data from a vast yet still limited user base and then sell the ensuing catalog and recommendations as a globally cultivated music library. One consequence of geoblocking may not be a continued fragmentation of global streaming experience, as one might expect, but a reinforcement of dominant musicians and record labels.55 Spotify pushes against this idea rather explicitly through its aforementioned Musical Map, which purports to emphasize the diversity of music that is popular throughout various locales. But even in doing so, the company acknowledges that a survey of global artist popularity would likely yield rather uniform results. Furthermore, the gaps in the map highlight a platform-consumer relationship that works in tandem to reinforce the favorite products of the global music industry’s preferred markets.

If regional lockout serves to make the rich richer through its geoblocked data feedback loop, it masks such processes behind a brand that constantly evokes geography while refusing to pin down any coherent sense of the locative nature of the platform. For example, by making use of imagery regarding both global travel and individual transport, the Spotify branded experience effectively conflates unboundedness in an individual, mobile sense with a broader, cosmopolitan globality. By now, music’s experiential and ontological mobility—its ability to be taken on the go—is a familiar one. Mobile devices like MP3 players and iPhones have exacerbated music’s mobility in the twenty-first century, but the Sony Walkman (and later, the Discman), boom boxes, portable radios, car stereos, and a host of similar devices have long made listening an essentially nomadic experience.56 The Walkman in particular helped produce and popularize forms of listening that can move from place to place—what Shuhei Hosokawa calls musica mobilis.57 Thus, mobile music technologies are inflected with economic, technological, industrial, ontological, and experiential dynamics that traverse multiple scales: global, national, transnational, and local. Listeners who attempt to access a streaming platform only to find it geoblocked have an experience that is distinctly national. For those who do have access to the platform and listen to it on their iPhone on a walk or commute, the experience can be at once local (in the space traversed while walking or commuting), national (in that access to these platforms is informed by one’s national location), and transnational (in the use of platforms, devices, and perhaps even texts that come out of a variety of transnational industries). These various geographic scales collapse together in Spotify’s promotion of a global yet translocal experience that is nonetheless tied tightly to the category of the national.

However, Spotify’s conflation of mobility and unrestrained global listening ignores the fact that mobile devices are just as integrated into geolocative systems as other digital media, if not more so. As Florian Sprenger reminds us, because mobile devices are connected to cellular towers and have locative addresses, the same technological infrastructures that enable mobility also enable the consistent tracking of users’ locations.58 In other words, the technological systems that enable an experience of mobility as well as tailored playlists (i.e., back-end surveillance and geolocation) are also employed for the purposes of geoblocking. Intentionally or not, Spotify’s global image is produced from a sleight of hand that asks us to ignore the very real reasons digital technologies and the music industry keep the platform geoblocked. This is comparable to Patrick Vonderau’s argument that Spotify conceals its zeal for growth and complex technical and financial operations within an “aura of ‘Nordic cool’ and public benefit around its use of music.”59 Spotify’s financial dealings and technical infrastructures, which make the platform unavailable in many parts of the world, are ignored in favor of a cosmopolitan image. The ability to take one’s music on the go during a commute and the ability to carry it across a national border are not the same, something that Spotify’s branded experience of global listening fails to make clear.

Ultimately, in their simultaneous promotion of an individualized life soundtrack and the possibilities for unbounded living and connection, streaming music platforms attempt to ease concerns about the potentially isolating dimensions of mobile-media cocooning and algorithmic culture as well as the forms of geographic control promoted by geoblocking. In doing so, they mask the mechanisms of control on which streaming platforms are built as well as the ways geoblocking in fact perpetuates a wildly unequal global music industry. Harvey contrasts streaming music’s “hyper-personalized” project against radio’s earlier project of cultivating imagined communities. In doing so, he quotes Susan Douglas’s understanding of broadcasting’s charge to bring “diverse and unknown people together as an audience.”60 Spotify seeks to have it both ways—to make the listener feel catered to while asking her to imagine a life of global interconnection via music. However, geoblocking is too tightly integrated into the functional logics of many such platforms for us to ignore it.

“You Know What’s Cool? America”: Access and Capital

Although Spotify’s promotion of a global listening experience and its centrality in discourses of geoblocking in music make it a particularly rich case study, we can extrapolate its lessons to streaming music platforms more generally. While this chapter has emphasized how the branded musical experiences of streaming platforms paper over their ties to familiar, material geography, the previous chapters’ lessons on the relationship between geoblocking and geocultural capital are also germane. After all, streaming platforms offer vague promises of universal access but in fact tend to reinforce traditional lines of power and privilege in the global record industry. Digital music’s discourses of global accessibility and ubiquity smooth over the actual inequalities of geocultural capital between territories that have differential access to these music platforms. A satirical TechCrunch article highlighted how streaming music services illustrate broader, unequal relations of cultural status and value between territories. Posted on April Fools’ Day 2011, three months before Spotify announced its US launch, the article reported that Spotify would be ending its European operations in order to launch in the United States. It contained excerpts from a fake email from Ek to European users that stated, “America has always been the most important and lucrative market for web services, and so the decision to close down our European operations to fund a US launch was, frankly, a no-brainer.” Another fabricated quote from Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker, an early investor in Spotify, states, “Europe isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? America.”61 By satirizing the often-unquestioned characterization of the United States as a uniquely privileged, lucrative market, the article reveals some truths about regional lockout. Because American audiences have generally enjoyed the privilege that comes with living in a premier media market, US frustrations about geoblocked platforms reflect assumptions that Americans should have access to the cornucopia of streaming art and entertainment made available to those living in other parts of the world—an extension of American exceptionalism into the market logics of entertainment media. Therefore, Americans’ irritation over Spotify’s lack of availability was as much about the geocultural capital that comes with representing the peak of global media access and power as it was a political interest in fair and open digital media.

Spotify’s availability reflects relations of economic and (geo)cultural value within certain places. By invoking the notion of “cool,” the fake quotation from Parker shows how questions of cultural capital and social value have become wrapped up in geoblocking and transnational access to platforms. The joke that an entire country can be cool in fact highlights how a nation’s level of media access reflects its perceived value as a social and cultural entity, and not simply an economic one. A New York Times report on the US launch of Spotify likewise underlined how access feeds geocultural capital, suggesting that if you do not know or care about Spotify, “then you’re clearly out of touch with the Europeans.”62 Thus, geoblocking illustrates the relevance of geography to the links between music as an art form, expressions of cultural capital, and the ways engagement with music can grow out of certain class positions. These relationships are central to Pierre Bourdieu’s foundational work on cultural capital, which focused heavily on musical taste and included the argument that “nothing more clearly affirms one’s ‘class,’ nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.”63 When the abilities to accumulate knowledge about, and participate in, popular music cultures are closed off due to geographic restrictions, this can affect the degree to which a listener feels like she belongs to the wider conversation about a song, artist, or scene.

The discourses surrounding geoblocking in digital music represent a kind of global public debate over the appropriate relationships among music, technology, regulation, culture, and geography. Over the past fifteen years or so, music has bound listeners not just through the abstractions of cultural capital, taste cultures, and fan communities, but also literally through connections forged via social networks and online fan and torrenting communities. No wonder, then, that even if streaming music platforms are cutting down on illegal downloads and file sharing, for many the easiest way to get around a geoblock is still through informal means. As Patrick Burkart argues, listeners acting in opposition to the corporate controllers of the celestial jukebox “are trying to save a place for music as a zone for reproduction of ‘free culture,’ identity formation, and broad participation in making music and music scenes.”64 Geoblocking and its circumvention enable us to explore these dynamics across transnational media cultures. If, as I have argued, geoblocking’s nation-based contours contradict the popular vision of online music as at once transnationally fluid and individually customizable, differential levels of access have implications for understanding popular music as a form of cross-cultural art. Theoretically, then, circumventing regional lockout can encourage forms of media consumption that seek out artists and genres from different backgrounds. Either way, circumvention is an emerging, increasingly simple aspect of media consumption that enables its own cultures of users sharing tips and resources on how to get around geoblocks. Locked Out’s final chapter examines moments when consumers, distributors, and retailers alike have flouted regional lockout, instead consuming and trading media in ways that reject the cultural industries’ regional restrictions. Taking region-free DVD use in diasporic and cinephile communities as its case studies, chapter 5 explores the cultural and political-economic significance of region-free media as well as the practices and politics of rejecting regional lockout.