Using online networks to analyse the value of electronic music

2012

This article aims to contribute to a greater understanding of the development of new opportunities for the creation of value within the music economy. The underly‐ ing proposition is that the current transformation of recorded music culture into a networked on‐demand music culture, one where new digital networked media al‐ low more artists and consumers to act as producers, distributers, publishers, critics etc. is comparable to previous fundamental transformations where new media be‐ came the dominant means of production, allocation, perception and use of music. The concluding part of article examines how the new media impacted and chal‐ lenged the music business' economic value chain.

AI & society, 2023

Digital systems are reshaping how we engage with music as a sounding dimension of cultural life that is capable of being transformed into a commodity. At the same time, as we increasingly engage through digital media with each other and with virtual others, attributes of music that underpin our capacity to interact communicatively are disregarded or overlooked within those media. Even before the advent of technologies of music reproduction, music was susceptible to assimilation into economic acts of exchange. What is new in the digital world is the way in which modes of engagement with music are themselves being absorbed into an economy built on the datafication of virtual acts and the digital shadows of casual preferences. But music is more than just sounds that are culturally sanctioned as musical. Music is manifested as behaviours, and in interactive behaviour. Music is participatory as well as presentational, and in the participatory mode-involving collective, non-specialist, interactive real-time music-making-has significant individual and social consequences. Yet music as realtime participation is largely absent from the virtual world, with potential social costs that remain to be understood. Moreover, our everyday, face-to-face communicative-conversational-interactions are imbued with patterns between interlocutors that are musical, in that they share features with what we are happy to describe as "music". These features are presently lacking in digital systems designed to subserve communicative functions, and this paper will consider the significant implications for our interactions with machines to which their successful incorporation into voice-user interfaces would give rise.

2019

This is a case study of Spotify's related artist network of Dutch drum and bass artist Noisia, incorporating a critical perspective of data and streaming platforms, it argues that network theory can help deal with the deluge of online data by showing artists and music business professionals how to see relationships instead of mere isolated events. The case study applies network theory and methods within a datacritical context. Three core measures are employed to determine different kinds of powerful actors (as in artists on Spotify) in a particular network. The analysis uncovers how each actor is embedded in networked structures of relationships that provide opportunities, constraints, coalitions, and workarounds. The consequence of the network being algorithm-generated is also considered, as it was found that this creates a situation that differs from regular social networks.

This article uses the concept of social network markets to analyze the problem of uncertainty in the music industry. On the basis of empirical data, the article puts forward the argument that to understand the preferences of listeners, a music company must be embedded in social networks. This embeddedness has always been an asset, as is indicated by the successes of independent record companies. However, nowadays it has become easier due to the ever-widening spread of social networking sites. We demonstrate that a company that communicates with its consumers via a Facebook profile or a YouTube channel on a regular basis gains the opportunity to analyze this communication, which, along with other data obtained via the internet, can help in reaching music repertoire decisions. At the same time, these practices may lead to the infringement of recipients' privacy and the commodification of all actions undertaken by listeners online. It has been widely accepted that one of the distinguishing features of creative industries is their inability to foresee which products will become popular. Uncertainty is an inherent feature of every business activity, but in the case of cultural production, the problem is deeper. It is associated with the difficulties surrounding market research. On one hand, these difficulties arise out of the inadequacy of traditional research methods in the study of cultural products. On the other hand, these difficulties are inherent in the specific features of these products, that is, compared with other industries, in terms of product testing, a producer needs to invest a disproportionately large sum of money relative to the percentage of costs of the final release. 2 Richard Caves describes these phenomena as such: " [t]he pro-ducer's intimate knowledge of the good's production process still leaves him in the dark about whether consumers will like it: nobody knows " 3 (emphasis in original). The increasing availability of " big data " raises the question of whether the " nobody knows " principle can be overcome by the creative industries. One might question whether the availability of more data will automatically translate to a higher success ratio for the creative industries. Nonetheless, we believe that more research is necessary to understand how cultural producers make use of the information gathered on the internet. It can be assumed that

2019

This is a case study of Spotify's related artist network of Dutch drum and bass artist Noisia, incorporating a critical perspective of data and streaming platforms, it argues that network theory can help deal with the deluge of online data by showing artists and music business professionals how to see relationships instead of mere isolated events. The case study applies network theory and methods within a datacritical context. Three core measures are employed to determine different kinds of powerful actors (as in artists on Spotify) in a particular network. The analysis uncovers how each actor is embedded in networked structures of relationships that provide opportunities, constraints, coalitions, and workarounds. The consequence of the network being algorithm-generated is also considered, as it was found that this creates a situation that differs from regular social networks.

Journal of Economy Culture and Society, 2018

This study examines the relations between the music and entertainment world by considering the social capital theory. A great number of actors such as musicians, singers, record labels, managers, radio programmers, formal institutions, and sponsors, collaborate with each other in the music business. How do relations develop in music and media sectors, in which many different actors are involved? This paper specifically aims to present the form of relations between musician, audience and industry. In doing so, changes in the new media era have been reinterpreted. Approximately 50 artists, employers, and employees of music and media industries have been interviewed. 200 followers were surveyed to understand their usage of social media. Some of the audiences have been interviewed and participant observation has been made on social networking websites. The role and importance of trust, reciprocity, and socialization, as norms of social capital, has been indicated. The effects of social capital on the music world has been explained via examples in terms of sociological and economic aspects. How has new media changed the relations between these actors?

Working Paper

Music and Letters

Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies - C&T '09, 2009

We present findings from our study of a music sharing and remixing community in an effort to quantify and understand the structural characteristics of commons-based peer production for products of aesthetic/cultural or entertainment value. We also provide a normative perspective on the strategies that such communities should employ with respect to the use of 'remixing contests', which are popular means of attracting new user-creators to the community and boosting its creative output. Until now research has shied away from the quantitative study of what lies at the heart of this 'remix culture', i.e. remixing, presumably because of the difficulties inherent in attaining relevant large datasets amenable to numerical analysis and an early focus of research efforts on communities whose products serve a more functional purpose (e.g., open source software), rather than aiming at entertainment or personal and artistic expression. This paper contributes to the literature of social network analysis of online communities, the literature on commons-based peer production, and the research agenda of cultural analytics.

From Music Scenes to Musicalized Networks : A Critical Perspective on Digitalization, 2020

Several notions have been developed in research currents studying popular music, to examine the geographic, social and economic dimensions of musical facts and their dynamics. These notions were jointly developed and mobilized by French and English-speaking researchers from cultural studies, political economy (or socio-economics of cultural industries), and the sociology of arts and culture. This article considers the possible divergences and articulations between three of these notions, the scene, the proto-market and the musicalized network, and discusses their respective heuristic potentials. Based on the example of musicians from various parts of France and the United Kingdom, we seek to show just how useful these notions can be to study the modalities of development of music projects, particularly to examine the musicians’ construction of the symbolic and economic value of their musical activities.