The New Digital Music Business Models and the Attention Economy

This article aims to analyse the music industry's strategies for economic integration within the digital environment, in particular the new, free, on-demand streaming services. It discusses the changing nature of commercial music - which is no longer marketed directly but developed as a behavioural marketing service - and how the prerequisites for this new model are, on the one hand, a mass of free music, but also the use of user navigation data and attention time. It concludes by examining how this new service in the recorded music market fosters the hegemony of the online attention economy and ubiquitous surveillance, and also helps expand closed spaces on the network geared to market values at the expense of free and open spaces.