‘It's mostly an accompaniment to something’: Music Streaming and the Hastening of Audio as Background

Music streaming services provide for the hastening of audio as background. As music is more likely to be mediated by music platforms and devices that allow users to incorporate it across everyday life, this coincides with how listening also now increasingly occurs alongside and is undertaken as a secondary activity. Streaming services help configure users to listen to music in the background, in addition to being identified as offering a convenient and ostensibly inexpensive way to help sort and organise recordings of music. Drawing on interviews with users of music streaming services I investigate the experiences of using music streaming technologies and examine how these platforms and the way users adopt them can inflect music as an increasingly secondary dimension. While some users indicate an ambivalence about the increased presence of music in the background, this capacity to place music as background is also understood as representing a considerable resource in managing everyday tasks and interactions.