Papers by Massimiliano Raffa
Gli Spazi della Musica, 2025
Connessioni Remote, 2025
Contemporary surveillance regimes no longer rely on concealment but operate through hypervisibili... more Contemporary surveillance regimes no longer rely on concealment but operate through hypervisibility, subsuming subjects into networks of algorithmic governance where exposure functions as a mode of control. The present article interrogates the aesthetic and political stakes of artistic resistance to platform capitalism’s algorithmic governance, examining the shift from critical complicity – where artists tactically repurpose surveillance technologies from within – to radical exteriority, an aesthetic strategy that seeks to evade incorporation into surveillance systems altogether. Drawing on media theory, digital aesthetics, and platform studies, the contribution discusses how contemporary artistic interventions engage, subvert, or evade algorithmic governance. It includes a discussion of works by Hito Steyerl, Paolo Cirio, Trevor Paglen, James Bridle, and Holly Herndon, and explores whether counter-surveillance aesthetics can generate true resistance or risk assimilation into predictive systems, arguing that while artistic subversion often reinforces surveillance capitalism’s logics, emergent strategies – tactical illegibility, algorithmic obfuscation, and infrastructural reconfiguration – may offer new avenues of resistance. Ultimately, the paper situates counter-surveillance art within a broader critique of digital capitalism, questioning whether contemporary aesthetics can carve out zones beyond algorithmic capture or remain ensnared in the infrastructures they seek to contest. The future of artistic resistance, it contends, hinges not on critique alone, but on the speculative construction of post-surveillance paradigms.
Popular Music, 2025
Music streaming platforms are complex socio-technical infrastructures that co-construct cultural ... more Music streaming platforms are complex socio-technical infrastructures that co-construct cultural production, distribution, and reception. Different contributions have highlighted that artists, producers, and operators may implement optimisation processes, based on their algorithmic imaginaries, to align their music to the modes of listening and categorisation imposed by algorithmic media. Drawing on thirty-nine semi-structured interviews with producers, songwriters, recording industry professionals, and listeners who are heavy users of streaming platforms, this paper reconstructs the social life of a platform-optimised song. Bridging perspectives from science and technology studies and media studies, we investigate the network of relations between human and non-human actors that contribute to the circulation of a platform-optimised song during a four-phase life cycle: creation, industry mediation, platform mediation, and reception. The findings highlight multiple forms of power asymmetries at each stage, recursive dynamics, the erosion of artistic autonomy, and the collaboration of humans and non-human agents to transform music tracks into datafied products.
Popular Music, 2025
Music streaming platforms are complex socio-technical infrastructures that co-construct cultural ... more Music streaming platforms are complex socio-technical infrastructures that co-construct cultural production, distribution, and reception. Different contributions have highlighted that artists, producers, and operators may implement optimisation processes, based on their algorithmic imaginaries, to align their music to the modes of listening and categorisation imposed by algorithmic media. Drawing on thirty-nine semi-structured interviews with producers, songwriters, recording industry professionals, and listeners who are heavy users of streaming platforms, this paper reconstructs the social life of a platform-optimised song. Bridging perspectives from science and technology studies and media studies, we investigate the network of relations between human and non-human actors that contribute to the circulation of a platform-optimised song during a four-phase life cycle: creation, industry mediation, platform mediation, and reception. The findings highlight multiple forms of power asymmetries at each stage, recursive dynamics, the erosion of artistic autonomy, and the collaboration of humans and non-human agents to transform music tracks into datafied products.
Frontiers in Communication, 2025
Introduction: This study examines how cultural producers perceive and interpret the UNESCO Creati... more Introduction: This study examines how cultural producers perceive and interpret the UNESCO Creative City designation, focusing on Como, Italy, following its 2021 inclusion in the network. Anchored in critical urban theory and cultural sociology, the research investigates how institutional narratives of creativity intersect with the interpretive frameworks through which cultural actors understand their work. Methods: The research employed ethnographic methods, including semistructured interviews with diverse cultural producers (theatrical practitioners, visual artists, craftspeople, musicians, filmmakers, venue operators), participant observation at cultural events, and document analysis. Data were analyzed using constructivist grounded theory principles. Results: Findings reveal three interrelated disjunctures: (1) institutional disconnection, expressed through parallel cultural worlds governed by conflicting evaluative logics; (2) spatial constraints, exacerbated by tourism intensification, that undermine conditions for creative practice; and (3) network fragmentation, which cultural producers seek to overcome through emergent forms of solidarity. The study demonstrate these tensions exist alongside the potential for virtuous relationships between Creative City designations and cultural tourism development, while also reflecting how local cultural forms are transformed into symbolic capital within broader urban development projects. Discussion: The study highlights significant tensions between top-down policy frameworks and bottom-up cultural labor, showing how local creative communities actively reinterpret, resist, and reshape institutional discourses. By centering cultural producers' meaning-making practices, the research contributes to debates on culture's instrumentalization in urban governance and offers insights for more inclusive, sustainable, and dialogic cultural policy approaches.
Cultural Sociology, 2025
While extensive scholarship has examined how platformisation has transformed music distribution a... more While extensive scholarship has examined how platformisation has transformed music distribution and consumption, relatively little attention has been paid to its impact on talent discovery and artist development processes. This study investigates how the increasing dominance of digital platforms as mediators of musical circulation has reconfigured talent-scouting practices across different market segments. A first round of interviews focusing on mainstream record labels has identified three predominant scouting paradigms that have emerged in response to platformisation: the 'platform strategy' (predicated on digital metric analysis), the 'preventive overexposure strategy' (leveraging traditional media for market testing), and the 'familistic strategy' (mobilising established industry networks). These findings evidenced a marked transition toward ex-post selection processes, wherein artist acquisition is predominantly contingent upon predetermined market validation through digital platforms or media exposure. Through a second round of interviews with 15 independent labels specialising in alternative music genres, the present study reveals that despite their distinct subcultural positioning, these enterprises largely conform to similar patterns of ex-post selection. While these labels maintain certain specificities, they demonstrate comparable reliance on pre-existing market validation. This alignment between independent and mainstream practices raises significant concerns about the industry's systematic disadvantaging of artists lacking digital proficiency, self-management capabilities, or self-branding skills. Even within purportedly alternative music sectors, the increasing prevalence of ex-post selection risks creating barriers for musicians who may struggle with platform visibility and digital marketing despite their creative output. This suggests a broader transformation of talent discovery practices that potentially limits access to recording opportunities based on artists' capacity to deal with digital environments rather than other aspects of their musical activity.
<i>Make-Do-With Listening</i>: Competence, Distinction, and Resignation on Music Streaming Platforms
Social media + society, 2024
Yvetta Kajanová, Musica rock. Suono, ritmo, affetto e l’invenzione della chitarra elettrica
Hudební věda, Dec 31, 2022
Re-Imagining Italian Cultural Tourism. Creative Economy in the Face of Crisis and the Case of Museums and Live Music
Creative economy, 2024
The present contribution aims at discussing the relevance for the cultural tourism sector of crea... more The present contribution aims at discussing the relevance for the cultural tourism sector of creating lasting strategic alliances with cultural and creative industries. We will be focusing on two key sectors in promoting and protecting the national cultural heritage, though today particularly impacted by the pandemic as venuebased: the museum and live music industries. Overall, the effects of the pandemic revealed some pre-existing structural fragilities of the national cultural production system and imposed a partial reconsideration of the business models of the Italian creative economy. However, while companies operating in the provision of venuebased cultural services-i. e., in the field of visual and performing arts, live concerts, preservation of artistic heritage, etc. continue to display clear signs of distress, other industries (those more properly &quot;creative&quot; than &quot;cultural&quot;) have, on the other hand, proved to have greater flexibility and more strategic skills to cope with an increased demand for home entertainment through digital content. For these reasons, industries traditionally linked to the cultural field, such as the visual and performing arts, now need new audience development policies, new strategic alliances and convergence with other sectors, new views of cultural space, new resources and knowledge. Thus, the chapter will provide an updated overview on Italian cultural and creative industries and how the involved companies are redesigning their strategies for building relationships with cultural audiences and consumers through digitisation, reinvention of the spaces of fruition, and diversification of labour. Indeed, much emphasis will be placed on the future perspectives and challenges ahead for two crucial industries such as museums and concerts in revitalising Italy&#39;s creative economy and stimulating other entrepreneurial areas to act creatively and successfully interpret the ongoing change.
Cultural Heritage in Japan and Italy. Perspectives for Tourism and Community Development (Springer), 2024
The present contribution aims at discussing the relevance for the cultural tourism sector of crea... more The present contribution aims at discussing the relevance for the cultural tourism sector of creating lasting strategic alliances with cultural and creative industries. We will be focusing on two key sectors in promoting and protecting the national cultural heritage, though today particularly impacted by the pandemic as venuebased: the museum and live music industries. Overall, the effects of the pandemic revealed some pre-existing structural fragilities of the national cultural production system and imposed a partial reconsideration of the business models of the Italian creative economy. However, while companies operating in the provision of venuebased cultural services-i. e., in the field of visual and performing arts, live concerts, preservation of artistic heritage, etc. continue to display clear signs of distress, other industries (those more properly "creative" than "cultural") have, on the other hand, proved to have greater flexibility and more strategic skills to cope with an increased demand for home entertainment through digital content. For these reasons, industries traditionally linked to the cultural field, such as the visual and performing arts, now need new audience development policies, new strategic alliances and convergence with other sectors, new views of cultural space, new resources and knowledge. Thus, the chapter will provide an updated overview on Italian cultural and creative industries and how the involved companies are redesigning their strategies for building relationships with cultural audiences and consumers through digitisation, reinvention of the spaces of fruition, and diversification of labour. Indeed, much emphasis will be placed on the future perspectives and challenges ahead for two crucial industries such as museums and concerts in revitalising Italy's creative economy and stimulating other entrepreneurial areas to act creatively and successfully interpret the ongoing change.
Social Media + Society, 2024
In an age where music streaming platforms have become the primary media for music listening, the ... more In an age where music streaming platforms have become the primary media for music listening, the experiences of musically competent users are often overlooked. Employing a mix of research methods (semi-structured interviews, reflective diaries, and analysis of on-platform-activity metadata provided by Spotify's APIs), this contribution aims to explore the viewpoints of musically competent users from Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands regarding music streaming platforms. Through critical analysis, the study investigates both the subjective and objective aspects of their listening experience, as well as their interpretation of algorithmic mediation and platform affordances. The findings illustrate that competent users perceive the usage patterns afforded by streaming services to be insufficient in meeting their needs and the platforms to have been progressively diluting the quality of their listening experiences. Despite this, the study shows that streaming platforms lack alternatives to such an extent that even knowledgeable subjects prefer making do with this conditionthey consider appropriate to their current lifestyle-rather than striving to enhance their consumption experiences. Furthermore, hypotheses are posited, suggesting that adopting a "platform criticism" stance may be a distinction marker of competence status.
Paper presented at the 5th Biennal International Conference of the Progect Network for the Study ... more Paper presented at the 5th Biennal International Conference of the Progect Network for the Study of Progressive Rock, University of Oxford
For some years now, the platformization of cultural production and consumption has been a
The algorithmic imaginary of cultural producers. Towards platform-optimized music?
The prominent role played by algorithmic platforms in people’s everyday lives has in recent years... more The prominent role played by algorithmic platforms in people’s everyday lives has in recent years triggered a growing interest towards algorithmic imaginaries, intended as worlds of experience users make of the algorithmic media, thereby building up their own awareness of the platform and in turn moulding the algorithm itself through their performativity. Today, part of the construction of individual cultures takes place on streaming platforms, media environments where subjects access cultural materials and cultural exchanges occur. Platforms, such as Netflix or Spotify, have become privileged sites for studying the platformization of cultural production and the construction of algorithmic imaginaries by users and developers. Despite this, to date little has been discussed about cultural creators’ algorithmic imaginaries. This paper intends to discuss how to include algorithmic imaginaries in research regarding platforms and cultural production, by focusing on the case of music plat...
Bob Dylan: Narrazione dell''Umanesimo paranoide americano' = Bob Dylan: Narration of American paranoid Humanism
H-ermes: Journal of Communication, 2019
Aiming to review Bob Dylan’s poetics discussing it outside its traditional interpretative paths —... more Aiming to review Bob Dylan’s poetics discussing it outside its traditional interpretative paths — which use to interpret his poetry as a brilliant literary form of political commitment, the present video-essay argues that Dylan’s lyrical production has to be interpreted as individualistic and universalistic, rather than as communitarian and ideological. What is claimed is that in the twentieth century, in the United States, cultural conditions were created that were completely similar to those of Italian Renaissance humanism. However, what is here called ‘the Paranoid, American Humanism’, does not aspire to the harmony of forms, but to their corruption, determined by the paranoid influence of the religious precepts introduced by the Pilgrim Fathers. It will be argued that Dylan, as well as the greatest American narrators of the mid-twentieth century, have debunked the great American narratives through such groundbreaking form of pop humanism.
Quale afrofuturismo per l'etnomusicologia? Riflessioni sul metodo
Palaver, 2018
As late globalization, multiculturalism, migrations, multiple identities and complex networks hav... more As late globalization, multiculturalism, migrations, multiple identities and complex networks have redefined the ethnomusicological borders, a branch of researchers have consequently refocused their insterests towards the musical practices that minority subcultures experience in the context of large Western urban areas. The afrofuturistic cultural aesthetic — a literary sort of panafricanism from a political-technological-distopical perspective —, with its references to the afrodiasporic question, its reflections on the overwhelming role of information technologies on symbol production and its fabled imagery, captured the attention of anthropological observers. Nonetheless, despite some afrofuturism-related artists (such as Sun Ra or the Detroit techno pioneers) happen to have features that go far beyond a generalised journalistic interest, every kind of music conceived in the Western industrialised world inevitably connotes itself as popular music. Even when preserving symbolic cod...
Elvis, il re nascosto del rock. Messianesimo, illusione rivoluzionaria e nuovi feticismi pop = Elvis, the hidden king of rock and roll. Messianism, revolutionary delusion and birth of new pop fetishisms
Elvis, the hidden king of rock and roll. Messianism, revolutionary delusion and birth of new pop ... more Elvis, the hidden king of rock and roll. Messianism, revolutionary delusion and birth of new pop fetishisms. Taking inspiration from Simmel’s insight regarding the presence of hidden kings in every distinguished cultural epoch, this paper explores the forms through which pop culture has got to generate new models of power, capable to set new standards by means of intrisic capabilities of overcoming social distortions the political power could not overtake. Elvis Presley, its myth, and the fetishisms derived from his stardom, condensed a number of Western stereotypes, subsuming counterposed social consciousnesses. In Presley’s figure, social antinomies are smoothed out through the delusion of a revolutionary pledge, that eventually comes out to be socially reassuring and equitable with an epiphany.
H-ermes. Journal of Communication, 2021
The prominent role played by algorithmic platforms in people's everyday lives has in recent years... more The prominent role played by algorithmic platforms in people's everyday lives has in recent years triggered a growing interest towards algorithmic imaginaries, intended as worlds of experience users make of the algorithmic media, thereby building up their own awareness of the platform and in turn moulding the algorithm itself through their performativity. Today, part of the construction of individual cultures takes place on streaming platforms, media environments where subjects access cultural materials and cultural exchanges occur. Platforms, such as Netflix or Spotify, have become privileged sites for studying the platformization of cultural production and the construction of algorithmic imaginaries by users and developers. Despite this, to date little has been discussed about cultural creators' algorithmic imaginaries. This paper intends to discuss how to include algorithmic imaginaries in research regarding platforms and cultural production, by focusing on the case of music platforms. Specifically, the main goal of this contribution is to address the following issues in the light of existing literature: i) The role of algorithms as cultural gatekeepers and how they may affect the creative disposition of music producers, as well as their strategies to relate with the broader environment of cultural production and consumption. ii) The optimization of culture, i.e., how cultural producers may attempt to create platform-optimized products adapting their creative efforts to platforms' affordances, thus fostering processes of product homogenization. Finally, suggestions will be made for future investigations regarding how all the actors in the music industry relate to streaming platforms.
Lo Squaderno. Explorations in Space and Society , 2020
Western popular music is a field of creative production intrinsically tied to urban spatiality. T... more Western popular music is a field of creative production intrinsically tied to urban spatiality. The places where the historical forms of entertainment music originated were in most cases frightening areas, connoted by social marginality and cultural intermingling. This article aims to discuss how the spatial dimension of musical creativity is currently going through a moment of dramatic change, primarily triggered by the shift from the material creative environments of the cities to the immaterial environments of the network society, where human interaction is mediated by machines. In fact, a number of processes (starting from the emergence of the participatory culture of digital media all the way to the recent measures of interpersonal distancing imposed by the ongoing health crisis) seem to have contributed to the consolidation – in the environments where material culture is
expressed – of what it will be called 'haphephobia' -- the fear of physical contact. The article, through some specific examples, aims to stimulate a reflection on the centrality of human interaction and urban proxemics in the creative processes that define the popular arts, introducing some considerations about the alarming idea that such spaces may one day disappear permanently.
Journal Issues by Massimiliano Raffa
lo Squaderno, 2020
lo Squaderno no. 57 – November 2020 | Fear the city
a cura di / dossier coordonné par / edited b... more lo Squaderno no. 57 – November 2020 | Fear the city
a cura di / dossier coordonné par / edited by // Elisabetta Risi, Riccardo Pronzato & Cristina Mattiucci
Guest artist / artiste présenté / artista ospite // Tommaso Vaccarezza
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Papers by Massimiliano Raffa
expressed – of what it will be called 'haphephobia' -- the fear of physical contact. The article, through some specific examples, aims to stimulate a reflection on the centrality of human interaction and urban proxemics in the creative processes that define the popular arts, introducing some considerations about the alarming idea that such spaces may one day disappear permanently.
Journal Issues by Massimiliano Raffa
a cura di / dossier coordonné par / edited by // Elisabetta Risi, Riccardo Pronzato & Cristina Mattiucci
Guest artist / artiste présenté / artista ospite // Tommaso Vaccarezza