Trust without verification : users' perception of environmental and ethical responsibility in music streaming platforms
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Music streaming has become the dominant mode of recorded music consumption worldwide, displacing ownership-based formats within little more than a decade. The shift is often taken to be environmentally beneficial, since digital distribution does away with plastic, packaging and physical transport, yet it brings two externalities of its own. The infrastructure that keeps streaming running is energy-intensive, and the overall emissions of recorded music have climbed rather than declined. Alongside this, the pro-rata royalty model used by the dominant platforms concentrates revenue among the most-streamed artists and leaves the majority only marginally compensated. Direct observation of both externalities is challenging, if not impossible, for users. This study investigates whether users' perceptions of the ethical and environmental aspects of music streaming influence their choice of platform and level of trust. Stakeholder theory and Carroll's pyramid of corporate social responsibility are combined with three explanatory lenses in the theoretical framework: an established model of trustworthiness, the attitude–behaviour gap, and a three-stage model of internalisation. Throughout, the idea of credence attributes, qualities that remain unverifiable even after extended consumption, is crucial. Seven hypotheses were tested on 93 responses to a cross-sectional online questionnaire, which combined self-report items with objective knowledge items so that stated and actual understanding could be measured as distinct constructs. Analysis was conducted in IBM SPSS Statistics using descriptive and non-parametric procedures. Awareness of streaming's environmental impact turns out to be minimal, and understanding of how royalties are distributed is limited. Perceived fairness bears no relation to any objective grasp of the distribution mechanism, yet it is significantly tied to self-assessed familiarity: fairness judgements follow the sense of being informed rather than the fact of it. Even so, perceptions of fairness and environmental responsibility shape platform trust to a substantial degree, while having no discernible effect on which platform users choose. Trust in streaming platforms is therefore formed on unverifiable ground, and the stakeholder group best positioned to hold platforms accountable is structurally unequipped to do so. These perceptions take shape not in some placeless digital space but inside the heterogeneous institutional contexts across which the dominant platforms, as multinational firms, deliver one standardised service. Disclosure requirements and measures reducing switching costs are proposed as remedies.