on the desire for the participatory
part one
There is a unique feeling that comes with listening to music created by someone you know. It’s an experience marked by intimacy, a kind of participatory involvement that draws you closer to the act of creation. Whether it’s a track produced by a friend or a song by an artist you’ve followed since before they got famous, the connection goes deeper than listening. You’re not just a consumer; you’re a witness, an accomplice, even, in some way, a spiritual collaborator. This sense of collectivity, of participation—however subtle it may be—is an anchor of my relationship to music. Yet, in an era dominated by algorithmic curation and globalized streaming platforms, this participatory dimension of music feels increasingly elusive. Instead, music consumption has been shaped into something spectatorial—an experience less about connection and more about passive reception.
I’ve been thinking about what we’ve lost in the way we listen to music—how the act of listening used to feel more grounded in communal experience, and how that’s shifted. This essay is my attempt to trace that change and ask what it would take to bring some of that participatory spirit back. I draw inspiration from Lauren Berlant’s idea of cruel optimism, and Dave Hickey’s thoughts on the difference between participatory and spectatorial audiences. I want to dig into the sense of disconnection baked into today’s music distribution systems while also recognizing what they’ve made possible, and from there, imagine what a more engaged way of listening might look like.
Affective Strategies in Music Listening
Lauren Berlant’s concept of "cruel optimism" describes a condition where attachments to certain objects, ideals, or systems persist despite their inability to fulfill our desires. In the context of music, the promise of endless discovery through streaming platforms is a register of this phenomenon. The algorithms that curate our listening habits offer the illusion of endless choice and personalization, yet they often lead to feelings of detachment and superficial engagement. The act of listening becomes less about relationality and more about consumption—an optimized feedback loop designed to maximize engagement metrics rather than real emotional connection. The the price we pay for ubiquity and free access, is a profound cheapening of experience.
Think about how music finds its way to us now. More often than not, it doesn’t arrive as a singular object to be sat with and absorbed, but as part of a larger stream of extra-musical content—TikTok dance challenges, Instagram reels, algorithmic playlists designed to hold our attention just long enough to keep us scrolling. These platforms, for all their ability to surface new music, also reshape how we engage with it, reducing songs to their most viral, easily digestible fragments. A track becomes less about its own internal logic—its emotional arc, its textures, its tensions—and more about how well it fits into the churn of content.
In the process, something fundamental is lost. Music’s ability to gather people, to create shared meaning and memory, is flattened into something passive, something spectatorial. Where we might once have experienced a song in the presence of others—at a show, in a friend’s car, over a cheap stereo at a party—we now encounter it as a fleeting moment in our personal feed, a piece of background noise for whatever else we’re doing. The participatory potential of music, the way it can pull us into something bigger than ourselves, is replaced with a kind of detached consumption, where we engage not by listening deeply but by clicking, liking, and moving on.
The promise of access to everything contains within it a flattening of sonic culture into micro-commodities with no value, except their ability to alter consumer behavior towards some other valuable product.
Participatory vs. Spectatorial Audiences
The origin of my longing for participation and belonging in music can be traced back to my teenage years immersed in various local punk and DIY music scenes. Punk shows were, at their core, about connection—a collective catharsis where amateurism was celebrated as both aesthetic and ethos. We thrashed, moshed, and built a vernacular connoisseurship that was entirely homegrown. These were spaces of world-building and release, where everyone present was both audience and participant. The lines between creator and consumer blurred in those rooms, and the culture we shared was one we constructed together, piece by piece. This formative experience shapes my critique of modern music consumption and my belief in the need to reclaim participatory spaces.
Dave Hickey's essay "Romancing the Looky-Loos" delves into the transformation of audiences from active participants to passive spectators, using his experiences with musician Waylon Jennings in the mid-1970s as a narrative backdrop.
Hickey begins by recounting a spring night in the mid-1970s, riding on Waylon Jennings' tour bus after a particularly chaotic concert in Atlanta. At this point, Jennings was navigating the turbulent waters of newfound fame, transitioning from performing in intimate clubs to commanding large, impersonal arenas. This shift brought about a change in the audience dynamic: from engaged listeners who shared a cultural and emotional connection with the artist, to "looky-loos"—spectators who observe without genuine engagement.
Jennings reflects on this change, noting that in small venues, he played for people who were like him, who sought out his music because they understood and resonated with it. These audiences provided immediate feedback, creating a reciprocal relationship between artist and listener. However, as his popularity grew, he found himself performing for crowds who wanted to be like him but lacked that foundational connection. This new audience, driven by a desire for association rather than understanding, offered adulation without meaningful interaction, leading to a sense of alienation for the artist.
Hickey contrasts "participants"—those who actively engage and contribute to the cultural dialogue—with "spectators," who passively consume art as a commodity. Participants are invested, bringing energy and context to the art, thereby enhancing its value and meaning. Spectators, on the other hand, align with authority and seek validation through sanctioned experiences, often diluting the authenticity of the art. In today’s music culture, this transition is evident in the evolution from live, localized music scenes to the ubiquity of algorithm-driven distribution channels.
The participatory act of engaging with a local band, attending a show, or sharing mixtapes has been replaced by curated Discover Weekly playlists and AI-generated recommendations. Streaming platforms have expanded access to music in unprecedented ways, but they’ve also contributed to the erosion of participatory connoisseurship. The audience becomes less a community and more a collection of isolated users, each engaging with music on highly individualized terms.
The Paradox of Democratization
Yes, of course, there are real communities in digital spaces—Discord, Patreon, and the like—where like minded people can share music and produce DIY extra-musical culture across geographical borders, and this is certainly a good thing. To critique the algorithmic age without acknowledging its democratizing effects would be shortsighted. Streaming platforms have lowered the barriers to entry for artists, enabling a greater diversity of voices to find an audience. Music-making itself has become more accessible, with tools like BandLab, Reaper and GarageBand democratizing production. Yet, the paradox remains: while these systems democratize access, they also homogenize experience. The participatory dimension of music—its ability to foster shared meaning and collective identity—is often sidelined in favor of scalability and efficiency.
This, like so many other things, is a matter of where attention already is (social media, which includes, at this point, DSPs like Spotify) and the incentives everyone has to monetize that attention. There is no reason not to use the available to everyone to find and audience for your creative work. The technology is, indeed, amazing. But I’m concerned that real creativity and deep thinking about music are getting deprioritized as everything approaches this flat singularity of “content.” It could be simply that what constitutes music might be undergoing a kind redefinition based on this acceleration of the means of its production. And I am totally open to that, especially if it means reclaiming “music” in service of deeper connection.
Rethinking the Participatory in Music
How, then, do we reclaim the participatory in music culture in an age where convenience reigns supreme? The frictionless, hyper-accessible world of algorithmic streaming has flattened our relationship with music, replacing deep engagement with ambient consumption. If participation is to be more than a nostalgic ideal, we need to think beyond the existing systems. My desire for the participatory is leading me to consider smaller scale models for artist/audience interaction, new social configurations, and yes, maybe new definitions of what music is.
If participation in music has been diminished, it hasn’t disappeared entirely. DIY shows still happen in basements and warehouses, secret-location raves spread through word-of-mouth, and platforms like NTS Radio, Mixcloud, and Beatport carve out space for deeper and more specific kinds of engagement. But I keep imagining ways to push this further—to create more places, online and off, where listening feels like a real act of participation, where music becomes something you step inside of rather than skim past.
Communal Works in Progress
I’m thinking about listening parties where people gather not just to play an album but to talk, annotate, and respond to it in real time. Or online spaces where musicians upload works-in-progress, not for passive streaming but for real dialogue—something between a demo drop and a live workshop. There are already glimmers of this in Discord communities, pirate radio streams, and late-night IG Live sessions. But what if there were more? More moments where listening felt communal, like showing up meant something?
Music You Have to Be There For
What if music wasn’t something you could take home? I’m thinking about a reorientation of electronic music—away from distribution, toward presence. Producer-DJ sets already gesture toward this, crafting music that exists for the dance floor, designed to be heard in a particular moment, at a particular place. But imagine pushing that model further. Music made only for live environments—custom sound systems, unique spatial mixes, arrangements that can’t be recorded because they change based on the room, the crowd, the energy. It’s not just anti-streaming; it’s anti-publishing, anti-ownership. The point isn’t to take the music with you but to experience it in a way that can’t be replicated. Sound as an event rather than a product. It could happen anywhere—warehouses, forests, galleries, parking garages—but the music wouldn’t live outside of those places. If you weren’t there, you missed it. And maybe that’s the point.
Rewilding Music Discovery
There’s something sterile about the way music reaches us now. It’s optimized, targeted, slotted neatly into genre tags and mood playlists. But I keep thinking about ways to disrupt that—to make discovery feel unpredictable again. Peer-to-peer recommendation networks that function outside of major platforms, live sets that change based on audience input, albums released only as physical objects you have to track down. Some of this is already happening: limited vinyl drops, USB sticks hidden in cities, artists leaking their own music under fake names. But what if these weren’t just exceptions? What if they were the norm? A way of making music feel less like a commodity and more like something wild, something alive?
I don’t think music culture is dead, or that participation has entirely vanished. But I do think the default experience—the passive, frictionless, always-on feed—flattens what music can be. And I wonder what it would take to make more space for something else: listening as a social act, discovery as a process, participation as something real.
The Desire for the Participatory
The desire for the participatory in music is ultimately a desire for connection—to others, to ourselves, to the cultures that shape us. While the current systems of music distribution have democratized access in valuable ways, they have also transformed listening into a largely spectatorial act. By rethinking how we engage with music and prioritizing participatory practices, we can begin to recover the sense of collectivity that makes music so deeply human.
Part of the purpose of Open Studio is to “open the studio”—to let the audience in on the thought process behind making music and to foster a space where we can think through the ideas of music creation together. To that end, I invite you to reply to these letters, share what you’d like me to write about, or suggest directions you’d like me to explore in my music. This is why I write, coach, and teach in addition to making music: to create opportunities for dialogue and collaboration that bring us closer to the participatory spirit of music. So, please, in whatever form you’d like, participate.