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Step 1: Formulate a question to research
How has streaming changed our relationship with music?

Step 1a: The Smaller Question
How do these changes differ between Gen X (born 1961 - 1981) and young Millennials/Gen Z (born 1991 - 1999)?

Step 2: Background
It was crucial that I understood the history of music consumption, from the gramophone to the iPod, to see how streaming came to be and ground my research. The first section of my thesis is a comprehensive look at this history, technical and societal.

Step 3: Literature Review
Before I could conduct my own research, I read as much as I could about the topic of how music streaming is changing the landscape of music consumption, journalism, and production. I ended up dividing my literature review into three sections:

1. Listening & Discovery habits: What had researchers found on listening habits of streaming users? Who uses platform-curated mood and activity-based playlists like "Afternoon Acoustic" and "Peaceful Piano", and for what purpose?

2. "Death" of the Album: I had read this phrase used by music and culture writers, lamenting the supposed death of the full album as playlists rise in power for certain users. How true is it?

3. Playlists as Tastemakers: Do platform-curated playlists with hundreds of thousands of followers have the power to propel artists to success with a single track? Where does the music journalist fit into this?

Step 4: Research Methods
Then it was time to conduct interviews of my own. Because my question asked about users’ relationships over time, I opted for live, one-on-one interviews instead of a widely-distributed survey to gain more specific, personal answers and insights. I chose the age ranges of Gen X and young Millennial/Gen Z to find interviewees familiar with streaming, but old enough to remember their listening habits, modes of discovery, and relationship with music before using streaming platforms to listen to music. I expected that individuals born after 2000 would not remember listening to music before streaming well enough to qualitatively describe their habits.

Questions were centered around how they listen to music, including if they purchase music (digitally or in physical form), what they like about the streaming platform they use, and if they listen to playlists, whether they be user-generated or platform-curated playlists.

Step 5: Interview Insights
After conducting ten, in-depth interviews, I reviewed my notes for any quotes that pointed to larger themes I had found in my research. The purpose of the interviews was not to come up with definitive answers for my research question(s), as it was not a large enough sample size. However, these interviews gave me personal insight into some of the trends I had researched.

Step 6: Analysis
The last section of the paper was to take all I had researched, listened to, and talked about thus far and tie it together. Using quotes and references from interviews, background information, and context from the research in the literature review, I divided up my analysis into three sections:

1. Communal versus private listening: One aspect of streaming that fascinates me is the ability, on some services, to broadcast your own live listening activity. This section explains how music consumption has always traveled between being a communal activity and a private act, and how streaming exists at the intersection of the two.

2. Projection of Music Consumption and Taste: Focusing on Spotify Wrapped, the platform's end-of-year cumulative, personalized listening report for users, I explored what makes this campaign so successful, and why users enjoy seeing it (and sharing it) so much.

3. Playlist Trends: Building off of the "Playlists as Tastemakers" section in the Literature Review, this section focuses on the generational divide among playlist users and why younger users are more likely to use streaming services for the purpose of discovering new music.