Reconfiguring agency under platform governance: Baby Boomer and Generation X singers negotiating identity, algorithms, and monetization
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Introduction: Digital platforms have reconfigured the organization of music markets through algorithmic curation, metricized visibility, and increasingly formalized copyright regimes. Yet scholarship often centers digital-native artists, leaving less understood how senior musicians negotiate platformization in Global South contexts. This article examines how Indonesian Baby Boomer (1940-1964) and Generation X (1965-1980) singers enact agency within the platform music economy by negotiating generational/professional identity, algorithmic logics, and income-making practices. Methods: This qualitative study draws on narrative-biographical interviews with 12 informants, including senior singers and key industry stakeholders such as managers, label/publisher representatives, collective management bodies, and aggregators. The interviews were triangulated with public digital traces and policy documents and analyzed thematically using Atlas.ti. Results: The findings show that senior artists do not experience a linear decline of agency. Instead, agency is reconfigured into layered strategic, practical, and reflexive capacities operating across the structuration modalities of signification, domination, and legitimation. Metrics become a new language of success and decision-making, while control over resources expands through the consolidation of official channels as a digital home and the outsourcing of platform labor to micro-teams and family members. Copyright compliance is internalized as compliance by design, shaping content formats and channel choices alongside demands for more transparent rights governance. These dynamics are intertwined with Adaptation-Aggregation-Arbitrage strategies that stabilize and diversify income across streaming, advertising, licensing, and performance. Discussion: The study offers a generationally sensitive account of cultural labor under platform governance and highlights implications for industry policy and capacity-building programs in platformized music economies.
Source: Frontiers in Sociology
Authors: Ashanti Hastuti, Suko Widodo, Fendy Suhariadi
Institution: Universitas Airlangga
Language: English
Topic: Music History and Culture
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,418
OpenAlex ID: W7151428503