How do You Tube algorithms calculate value De Marchi

EVA London 2010: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts , 2010

The proliferation of artists, audiences, and participants who have the ability to create mirror copies of original digital media arts work challenges us to re-examine how value is assigned to digital media arts work. Historically, space and capital limitations restricted the public’s accessibility to artwork, but the growth of mass digital reproduction and alternative forms of art exhibition spaces is having a profound effect on the experience and valuation of digital media arts work. For example, the online distribution of digital media arts work across networks facilitates the circumvention of traditional valuation models. In this paper, I explore the background and challenges to assigning value to digital media arts work and investigate alternative models of exhibition and valuation of digital media arts work in the institutional, private, and public spheres.

2004

According to the music industry, Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella and other P2P -filesharing services have been responsible for a worldwide decline in CD-sales since the end of the nineties. According to the industry downloading music is not only illegal and un-ethical; it is also harmful for the economy and artists. It takes away the incentive to be creative and therefore it is a threat to cultural diversity. In this paper the validity of these economic and cultural claims will be questioned. It will be argued that there is little evidence that local musical cultures are becoming less diverse. Although it is not contested that the music industry suffers from declining CD-sales and that P2P -fileshari ng could be partly responsible, it will be argued that this does not mean that music is becoming less important or even that people spend less money on music. Music itself is still popular -but buying CDs is not. It will also be argued that the traditional business model with its focus on CD-sales is no longer the core model; shifts in consumer behavior make the traditional music industry less important in the manufacturing and distribution of music. Artists will switch to other business models and can gain more autonomy, and other (non-music) firms are getting more opportunities.

2013

In the last few decades, an enormous shift in several western countries’ economies was recognisable. While, over centuries, the economic power was based on manufacturing and agriculture, which produced haptic products and nourishments, the third sector meaning digital productions and service economy grew rapidly within the last years. (Gilmore/ Pine 1999) With this change from heavy industries to information or creative industries as economic might, new problems have to be solved and questions of worthiness have to be answered. First, when a digital product is nothing haptic which can be touched, how can its value be declared? I try to answer this question with economic thoughts of Karl Marx and his focus on labour time as value variable. Secondly, there is a big discussion on-going if music, film and software should be free cultural goods or if the creators should be secured by a strong copyright law. This question will be discussed related to the German Pirate Party and the dispute between the German royalty collecting society GEMA and YouTube. Additionally, a short view on relatively new alternatives like the streaming service Spotify will be taken. Last but not least, we have to ask ourselves how consumers in times of peer-to-peer networks and file sharing platforms can be motivated to pay for a cultural good. I try to answer this with the experience concept and the para-social interaction theory. To discuss these points, I will mainly use the example of popular music.

The Economics of the Digital Society, 2005

The music industry is currently subject to changes influenced by ongoing digitalisation and informatization that are unprecedented. Other sectors can expect to undergo in the near future what the media industry is going through now-the movie industry being a prime suspect. Each day, some 600,000 copies of movies are exchanged via the Internet, most of these in violation of the copyright laws. The disruptive nature of technological development makes that the market for entertainment products and other content undergoes fundamental changes. Where 'content' used to be exchanged attached to a physical carrier, increasingly it has the features of an information product. 5001-6182 Business 5546-5548.6 Office Organization and Management Library of Congress Classification (LCC) HF 5469.7 Markets M Business Administration and Business Economics M 10 L 2

In music streaming services like Spotify, discrete pieces of music no longer has a price, as has traditionally been the case in music retailing, both analog and digital. This article discusses the theoretical and practical implications of this shift towards subscriptions, starting from a critical review of recent literature dealing with the commodification of music. The findings have a relevance that is not limited to music or digital media, but also apply more broadly on the study of com-modification. At the theoretical level, the article compares two ways of defining the commodity, one structural (Marx), one situational (Appadurai, Kopytoff), arguing for the necessity of a theory that can distinguish commodities from all that which is not (yet) commodified. This is demonstrated by taking Spotify as a case, arguing that it does not sell millions of different commodities to its users, but only one: the subscription itself. This has broad economic and cultural implications, of which four are highlighted: (1) The user of Spotify has no economic incentive to limit music listening, because the price of a subscription is the same regardless of the quantity of music consumed. (2) For the same reason, Spotify as a company cannot raise its revenues by making existing customers consume more of the product, but only by raising the number of subscribers, or by raising the price of a subscription. (3) Within platforms like Spotify, it is not possible to use differential pricing of musical recordings, as has traditionally been the case in music retail. Accordingly, record companies or independent artists hence can no longer compete for listeners by offering their music at a discount. (4) Within the circuit of capital. Spotify may actually be better understood as a commodity producer than as a distributor, implying a less symbiotic relationship to the recorded music industry.

Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines, 2021

Media scholars studying online distribution often remain locked into a traditional understanding of content supply. This chapter proposes to move from an interest centered on how, to whom, and by whom media content is physically distributed, toward questions of how, why, and by whom value is attributed to content. Using streamed music, specifically Spotify, to elaborate on its proposition, the chapter invites readers to consider even seemingly marginal forms of valuation such as "fake plays" or "fake likes," as relevant for understanding current distribution practices. Drawing from current research on engagement industries providing such "fakes," as well as on market theory as developed within economic sociology, the chapter emphasizes the need for a processual perspective on online markets and for better integrating studies of media markets with studies of value and valuation practices. Full book at https://nyupress.org/9781479806782/digital-media-distribution/

The journal NAVIGATIONEN is published by Prof. Dr. Jens Schröter (together with Prof. Dr. Benjamin Beil, Cologne). The current issue, edited by Johannes Bennke and Mirjam Schaub has the topic »Media Cultures of Value« Values don’t just fall from the sky. They are shaped by media, infrastructure, and social practices. With new protocols and media objects—such as smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs—Web3 not only extends platform capitalism but also redefines value, labor, and community. While these technologies reinforce proprietary markets and corporate governance structures, they simultaneously open up alternative new ways of organizing life, challenging traditional economic and social models. This issue builds on the hybrid workshop “Digital Biedermeier—or Radical Democratic Utopia? NFTs as Interfaces of Cryptocurrencies”, organized by Johannes Bennke at the Humboldt University Berlin and Mirjam Schaub at University of Applied Sciences (HAW) Hamburg in October 2023. The issue brings together eight contributions by media scholars, artists, and curators who examine different media cultures of value—exploring protocols, infrastructures, labor, NFTs, art, and political stakes of Web3 governance.

2019

The Internet and modern-day technologies have changed the way people connect with the world around them. The music industry is one of the areas that is undoubtedly affected by the Internet. Music technologies have faced a drastic reorganization process due to the digital revolution that changed the way people consume, source, listen, purchase, discover, experience, produce, read and learn music. These technological advancements have induced great changes for artists, listeners, and producers. This study will attempt to investigate the business models of digital music that can be profitable in the future. As previous studies suggest (Arditi, 2017), with the introduction of the technological revolution the whole revenue mechanism has shifted. This study attempts to give insight into the changing revenue mechanism of how musicians, record labels, make money from digital music by analyzing the digital music business models from the perspective of the consumer, the record labels and the artists. The fundamental questions this study attempts to address are a) how technology has changed by presenting an overview of the music industry, b) what kind of digital music business models exist by analyzing their effects from the perspective of the listeners, artists and record labels, and c) what happens if the business model does not meet the demand of the users by explaining the ‘piracy’ phenomenon. The present research seeks to identify where digital music services in the contemporary era are heading, to investigate the effectiveness and operation of digital music services and to offer implications about what can be expected in the future. To answer the given research questions, the literature on related topics suggests that both a quantitative and a qualitative approach are considered as the necessary methods for the present study. In the first phase, drawing on relevant literature review qualitative analysis is used to present the theoretical background for the thesis. In the second phase quantitative analysis is utilized. The primary tool is the questionnaire, which contains three sections of questions. The first section focuses on the personal background of the participants, determining the type of the person under examination. The second section includes questions regarding music consumption habits. The last section analyzes listeners’ perception towards piracy phenomenon. As an artist, I will also myself make empirical analysis based on my observations and experiences during my work with Sony Music Turkey in 2015 in the conclusion.

2008

Last year I gave several lectures on 'Intelligence and the appreciation of music among animals.' Today I am going to speak about 'Intelligence and the appreciation of music among critics.' The subject is very similar... Eric Satie, quoted by Machlis (1979, p. 124).

This dissertation concentrates on the changing form of the music commodity over the last two decades. Specifically, it traces the transition from music on compact discs to music as a digital file on computers/mobile devices and the economic, industrial, aesthetic and cultural consequences this shift has for how we produce, present, and consume music. As computers became viable sources for the playback of popular music in the 1980s and 1990s, the roots of the digital music commodity took hold. Stripped of many of their previous attributes (i.e. album art, compressed sound, packaging, etc.), recordings as digital files were initially decontextualized commodities. On computers, music underwent an interface-lift, gradually getting redressed with new features (i.e. metadata, interfaces, digital “packaging”). This dissertation focuses on five technologies – Winamp, Metadata, Napster, iTunes and Cloud Computing – that were key to rehabilitating the music commodity in its digital environments. These technologies and the cultural practices that accompanied them gave music new paratexts and micromaterials that ultimately constituted the digital music commodity. Through case studies, archival research, and descriptive analysis, this study makes methodological and intellectual contributions to the field of communication and technology studies as well as to studies of new media and the cultural industries. By teasing out the differences between the commodity aspects of the CD and the digital file, this project offers fresh perspectives on materiality, aesthetics, labour and ownership in an era of digital goods. Digital music’s fluid and ubiquitous nature seems to subvert those who seek to profit from it. But while digital music offers the potential to disrupt the traditional ways of doing business in music, it also affords new forms of control and power. This has not stopped artists, hobbyists and users from carrying out creative experiments that call into question the codes and conventions of the digital music commodity. In doing so, they make visible the promise of digital music: to turn our attention to the commodification process and to force a reconsideration of the role music plays in the contemporary moment.