Dissertation

MainStreaming Success. Neoliberal Success Narratives in Music and their Internalization among Adolescents

Music has long been considered an important medium for youth’s identities, signaling group affiliation, providing emotional support, and inspiring with its musical and narrative content. Music could be even more important for contemporary adolescents, experiencing increasingly higher levels of anxiety, depression, and performance pressure since the 1980s. In a music landscape ruled by streaming platforms and social media, adolescents have endless access to music content that could provide emotional solace and narrative inspiration to cope with the various challenges of this period. Music could therefore help adolescents in their developments, but it could also promote narratives that might endanger their well-being. In particular, popular music content could be at the forefront in the distribution and internalization of neoliberal success narratives, which have been argued to be at the root of such epidemic of mental ill-being. Neoliberal success narratives might foster feelings of anxiety and performance pressure by setting unrealistic ideals of success, rewarding individualistic values of materialism, fame, power, and merit. Such narratives have been also proposed to potentially empower adolescents, representing a view of the self as agentic and in control of one’s own life. The distribution of neoliberal success narratives through popular culture, such as through music products, could therefore have wide implications for the well-being of youth. In order to understand whether and how neoliberal success narratives in music influence the mental health of contemporary adolescents, a first necessary step requires to assess the presence of such narratives in popular music products and the process through which they are eventually internalized in the belief systems of contemporary adolescents. This PhD dissertation does so in six chapters.

Chapter 1 maps the music taste profiles (i.e., the expression of likes and dislikes for various music pieces or genres) of contemporary Flemish adolescents (n = 533, Mage = 15.2 [SD = 1.6], 61.2% girls, 80.9% Western-European). The advent of music streaming platforms (MSPs) has brought several changes in how youth consume music, for example by facilitating consumption and by broadening music choices. Moreover, MSPs are key actors in the contemporary music industry, directing the distribution and discovery of music through their recommendation algorithms and curated playlists. Chapter 1 summarizes the existing literature on music tastes in relation to three key determinants, namely the socio-cognitive (i.e., cosmopolitan, and meritocratic beliefs), social (i.e., gender, race, and socio-economic status), and digital (i.e., adoption, frequency, and quality of music listening on MSPs) characteristics of music audiences. By means of latent class analysis and logistic regression, this chapter finds three taste profiles, namely a refined, a practical, and a mainstream profile. These profiles indicate significant gender differences in the adoption of MSPs and show the ubiquity of an omnivore consumption pattern of music macrogenres on MSPs.

Chapters 2 and 3 chart the presence and prevalence of neoliberal success narratives in the content of songs (n = 4117) frequently streamed on Spotify in six highly individualistic countries (i.e., the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands) between 2016 and 2019. Chapter 2 focuses on status markers used to define “what” is success. It does so by combining a Bourdieusian approach to status, focused on forms of capital (i.e., economic, cultural, and social), with an intersectional focus on power relationships (i.e., sexual objectification) and on the social positionality of artists (i.e., in relation to their gender and racial-ethnic background). Chapter 3 focuses on narratives about “how” to reach success. It does so by centering meritocracy as the primary framework used in neoliberal narratives to define deservingness and worth. Chapters 2 and 3 show a wide depiction of neoliberal success narratives in music, with around 24% of the analyzed lyrics representing neoliberal markers of status and merit. Chapter 2 specifically indicates that status is commonly represented through markers of materialism, utilitarianism, conspicuous consumption, and sexual objectification. It further shows that, in mainstream music, these markers are typically represented by Black and Brown men. Chapter 3 further indicates that mainstream music typically represents status as legitimately acquired through five meritocratic frames, namely Rags-to-Riches, Control-the- Ship, Deservingness-Reward, Deservingness-Punishment, and No-Pain-No-Gain. By highlighting concepts of giftedness, perseverance, hard work, and resilience, these frames capture the essence of meritocratic narratives as represented in mainstream music.

After mapping the taste profiles and the distribution of neoliberal success narratives on MSPs, Chapters 4, 5, and 6 focus on the potential internalization of music narratives into audiences’ beliefs. Chapter 4 conducts a meta-analysis of existing literature studying music effects on beliefs, finding that exposure to music messages is related to the holding of message-consistent beliefs. In particular, such effects are mostly present in relation to song- specific messages (rather than genres or general levels of music exposure), concerning the topics of gender (e.g., sexual objectification) and race (e.g., racial stereotypes), and especially among youth (i.e., adolescents and young adults). Chapter 4 also shows that lyrics and videos have similar effects, that most studies are experimental, and that most literature focuses on populations from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries.

Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 specifically examine the internalization process of neoliberal success narratives around effort and performance as represented in adolescents’ favorite music products. They conduct among the first longitudinal studies of music effects, surveying a sample of Flemish adolescents (n = 405, Mage = 15.1 [SDage = 1.5], girls = 64%) across three waves between 2021 and 2022. Chapter 5 studies whether such internalization happens through the identification with adolescents’ favorite artist and whether a similarity of gender further promotes music effects. Chapter 6 additionally focuses on narrative transportation to study whether feeling transported into music narratives facilitates the internalization of neoliberal success narratives. It further explores whether the experience of hardships in adolescents’ lives facilitates the internalization of messages that center around overcoming life struggles. Contrary to the formulated hypotheses, Chapters 5 and 6 do not find evidence of internalization of neoliberal success narratives in the beliefs of a sample of Flemish adolescents from privileged backgrounds over a one-year period.

Overall, this PhD dissertation delves into the MainStreaming of Success, namely, the popularization of neoliberal success narratives through MSPs and the differential internalization (or lack thereof) of such narratives by adolescent music audiences. It shows that neoliberal success narratives are widely and variedly present on MSPs but that they are not internalized by a sample of Flemish adolescents from more privileged backgrounds. The results of this PhD dissertation set an agenda for future research on music effects. They prompt considering the fragmentation of music consumption and the segmentation of music audiences as central aspects in a music industry governed by MSPs and social media platforms. They further highlight the need to develop music-specific theoretical and methodological approaches that are better equipped to capture temporal and selection effects in a continuously changing music landscape. While music has long been considered as a central resource for the development of youth’s identities for its capacity to bring people together, MSPs might have long-lasting repercussions on the fragmentation of music audiences and their tastes. They might be fundamentally reshaping the capacity of music to function as a key socializing medium for contemporary and future generations of youth.