The metaphors we stream by: Making sense of music streaming

Hagen, Anja Nylund

doi:10.5210/fm.v0i0.6005

Cited by 9 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…We can see from the above that is often the choices and uses of technology that mark out this granularity, this uniqueness of cultural practice, as it is any of the other potentially measureable characteristics of individuals’ activities – their age, gender or their choices of particular types of music. What is interesting in terms of next steps is that the technological elements of respondent narratives highlight unique facets of their choices that simultaneously replicate – in the metaphorical sense described by Hagen (2016) – and challenge the progressive narratives that have emerged around digital technologies of listening.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given, then, the growing importance of streaming services operating such systems, understanding the contemporary conditions of music reception presents the problem of exploring the consequences of systems we presently lack sufficient access to, or else the technical knowledge and skills required to sufficiently understand (see Boyd and Crawford, 2012; Savage and Burrows, 2007). Recent work by Hagen (2015, 2016), Nowak (2014), Prey (2015, 2016) and Webster et al (2016) has made progress in this regard, with each to varying degrees demonstrating that recommender systems ‘take part in shaping our individual experiences and acquire meaning through their embedding in everyday life’ (Hagen and Lüders, 2017: 228). Each also attempts to peer under the hood of contemporary conditions to help develop our understanding of how, as previous studies of everyday listening (DeNora, 2000; Hesmondhalgh, 2002) and personal digital listening devices (see Bull, 2000, 2006) demonstrate, music listening and technology play a role in the management of self and environment.…”

Section: Streaming Services Data Collection and Automated Recommendamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An example of this can be seen clearly in the language used by Spotify in their unveiling of Discover Weekly, which they described as being akin to a best friend’s mixtape. We might expect then, if we combine these observations with Hagen’s (2016) suggestion that producers’ metaphors are often repeated by users, to find examples within the Harkive corpus of either socially derived recommendation, discovery through agency afforded by technology or combinations of the two. This is indeed the case.…”

Section: Streaming Discovery and Recommendationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Popular music, digital technologies and data analysis: New methods and questions

Hamilton

2019

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Med

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This article explores how respondents to The Harkive Project ( www.harkive.org ) are enfolding streaming services and automated recommendation systems into their everyday music reception practices. Harkive is an online project running annually on a single day in July that invites people to provide detail and reflection on their experiences with music. Since the project first ran in 2013, it has gathered over 10,000 individual entries. It is conceived as an ongoing experiment in research methodology that attempts to produce an online social space that encourages reflection from respondents about the detail of their music reception practice, while simultaneously acting as a place able to replicate commercial practices around data collection and analysis. This article will demonstrate how such a research process can produce rich descriptive data from respondents who provide a useful snapshot of contemporary music reception practice. The article begins with an overview of how streaming services, data collection from numerous online channels and automated recommendation systems interrelate, and how together they raise questions around how people engage in acts of music reception. It then describes how Harkive is based on similar types of computational/algorithmic processing to those used by key players in the digital music space. The analysis that follows shows that although respondents are engaging in everyday use of streaming services and dynamic recommendations, this engagement tends to be spread across a variety of online channels used in differing combinations, and that it is often recommendations from ‘traditional’ routes, such as media outlets (newspapers, radio stations) and users’ own social groups, that feature prominently in respondent descriptions. Indeed, what Nowak (2016) calls the ‘affective’ element of recommendation appears to be rooted in existing practices that are still in the process of being transposed to the relatively recently emerged digital platforms, rather than – and sometimes in spite of – the rhetorical framing of those platforms as key sites for recommendation and discovery by the companies who operate them. Through a discussion of those findings, and based on an update of Michael Bull’s concept of ‘auditory nostalgia’ (2009), it is then suggested that examining how listeners are enfolding the new technologies of music reception into their everyday routines and routes to meaning-making may be a useful direction for future research. The article then suggests that a mode of working where scholars attempt to reflexively harness data-derived processes may be useful in producing that work, and that experimental and practice-led approaches could enable popular music scholars and listeners alike to develop better epistemic responses to the data-related technologies that have recently helped bring about such huge changes in our everyday music reception practice.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Streaming Services Data Collection and Automated Recommendamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Streaming Discovery and Recommendationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Popular music, digital technologies and data analysis: New methods and questions

Hamilton

2019

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Med

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“…Conforme indicado por McFerran, Garrido e Saarikallio (2016), utilizamos uma abordagem iterativa para gerar uma sintetização crítica da literatura disponível. Alguns estudos abordam questões muito diferentes, como a relação entre música, sistemas de recomendação e educação (COX, 2007), as contradições entre sistemas gratuitos e pagos e suas consequências (MÄNTYMÄKI; ISLAM, 2015), a relação entre música, feminismo e espaço público (WERNER, 2012) e as possibilidades de intermediação cultural e criação de um significado social dos SR (HAGEN, 2016). Porém, identificamos quatro enfoques principais nos artigos: 1) O papel dos sistemas de recomendação na indústria fonográfica; 2) Impacto dos serviços de streaming no download de música; 3) Viés na classificação e recomendação de conteúdo; 4) Consumo de música como recurso social.…”

Section: Análise Dos Estudosunclassified

O impacto dos algoritmos no consumo de música

Santini

Salles

2020

Signos Consumo

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Os Sistemas de Recomendação (RS) são definidos como algoritmos que classificam e recomendam produtos culturais a partir de dados sobre as práticas e o comportamento dos usuários. O objetivo deste artigo é diagnosticar as consequências sociais e culturais dos algoritmos de recomendação de música como intermediários culturais on-line, examinando como e até que ponto eles afetam a percepção cultural, a classificação da música, a formação do gosto, o comportamento do ouvinte e a escolhas dos usuários. Realizamos uma revisão sistemática da literatura para identificar e discutir a produção científica sobre as implicações sociais e culturais de tais algoritmos nas práticas de consumo de música. Foram obtidos 311 artigos a partir de pesquisas bibliográficas em nove diferentes bases de dados científicos. Nossa análise crítica indicou quatro abordagens temáticas principais exploradas pela comunidade científica sobre esse tema entre 2000 e 2016: 1) O papel dos sistemas de recomendação na indústria fonográfica; 2) Impacto dos serviços de streaming no download de música; 3) Viés na classificação e recomendação de conteúdo; e 4) Consumo de música como recurso social. Os resultados revelam a lógica da intermediação cultural via sistemas de recomendação no mercado da música: esses algoritmos influenciam, modelam e mapeiam os gostos e hábitos dos usuários em um ambiente aparentemente livre, diversificado e ao mesmo tempo personalizado.

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“…Music platforms encourage this through contextual playlists (“Work out,” “Chill Sunday”…). These features are built to let “attention to drift” (Hagen, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Listening to music videos on YouTube. Digital consumption practices and the environmental impact of streaming

Beuscart

Coavoux

Garrocq

2022

Journal of Consumer Culture

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YouTube is currently the most widely used platform for music streaming. Users listen to music videos rather than watch them. This is environmentally suboptimal since video data require more energy than audio data to be hosted and transmitted. Why are consumers using a video platform to stream music? In this paper, we sketch a framework for analyzing digital practices as consumption practices and their transformation in the context of the ecological transition. We interviewed 29 online music consumers from varied backgrounds. Drawing on practice theory, we conceptualize online music use as a combination of sociotechnical configurations articulating listening devices, types of attention to music, and the social contexts of daily life. We analyze how different platforms, especially YouTube, are embedded in specific configurations. We first establish that configurations in which videos are actually watched are rare. Though users are aware of the carbon footprint of streaming, this representation does not inform their listening configurations. We describe three types of online music practices according to the role YouTube plays in, that correlate with music passion: YouTube can be framed as a free and open listening platform (especially to casual listeners), as an efficient soundtracking device in many contexts, as a useful complementary listening and music sharing device. The paper extends the literature on green consumption to digital consumption, analyzing relations to infrastructures in a regime of abundance, and contributes to the sociology of online music consumption, showing how platform choices are linked with music passion and embedded in social contexts.

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The metaphors we stream by: Making sense of music streaming

Cited by 9 publications

References 15 publications

Popular music, digital technologies and data analysis: New methods and questions

Popular music, digital technologies and data analysis: New methods and questions

O impacto dos algoritmos no consumo de música

Listening to music videos on YouTube. Digital consumption practices and the environmental impact of streaming

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