Chance the Rapper, Spotify, and Musical Categorization in the 2010s

Abstract

In early 2017 Chance the Rapper was on top of the world. He won three Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist, Best Rap Album, and Best Rap Performance, all for his freely distributed, independently released, stylistically eclectic mixtape, Coloring Book. Driven entirely by social media, touring, and streaming services, his wins seemed to embody the utopian potential of the music industry’s ever-increasing reliance on streaming to mediate popular music consumption. The Grammy website lauded Chance as the first “streaming-exclusive” artist to win an award, and his successes appeared to benefit from the liberational, decentralizing potential of novel digital distribution practices.1 This utopian vision was recently rearticulated by Daniel Ek, cofounder of Spotify, in an open letter accompanying the company’s official registration for public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Filed with Spotify’s SEC registration documents on February 28, 2018, Ek’s letter extols his company’s purported boundary-erasing capabilities for both listeners and musicians. “In this new world,” he proudly proclaims, “music has no borders. . . . We’re working to democratize the industry and connect all of us, across the world, in a shared culture that expands our horizons.”2 Concurrent public and critical discourses similarly note a dissolution of popular music’s generic borders, often reaching the seemingly logical conclusion that, in a time when so many musicians create