BLOG POST: Craig Hamilton on ‘Popular Music Reception and Data’ part two

Popular Music Reception, Data, and Digital Technologies (continued)

by Craig Hamilton

Part two of two. For part one, click here

A starting point is Webster et al’s (2016) argument that a key function of automated recommendation in digital music interfaces is the leveraging of a competitive advantage in a crowded and undifferentiated marketplace. When all services offer the same (or largely the same) catalogues of music, at similar price points and in similar ways, one of the only competitive spaces that remains is the quality of listening experience delivered. As Vanderbilt (2016) shows, in the construction and iterative rationalisation of automated recommender systems, implicit feedback – which can be understood as data gathered about which songs are played, skipped, shared, or added to playlists – is often viewed as a more useful ‘raw’ material than the explicit feedback volunteered by users in the form of star ratings, purchases or reviews. It is here where complex and inter-related acts of cultural translation occur: from the reduction of an individual’s experience with a song to a data point, through the algorithmic processing of that data at scale, to the foregrounding of one type of music over another to publics via dynamic interfaces – whereupon the cycle repeats.

Tania Bucher’s concept of “the algorithmic imaginary” (2016) is a useful way of thinking through this. It allows us to understand both how data-processing impacts upon experience, but also how experience impacts upon the design, function and use of algorithms. The algorithmic imaginary can be observed in action through a consideration of automated music recommendation services in particular: data is gathered on listener activity from which abstracted inferences of taste are derived; leading to recommendations that can positively or negatively influence choice; which in turn creates data about listener tastes; and the process repeats. Interestingly the decision of a user to ignore a recommendation is equally important here because it too creates data that is used to tweak recommendation algorithms. It is important also because although ultimately listeners can choose whether or not to follow recommendations, they cannot chose whether or not their activities are recorded and subsequently used in the creation of recommendations. Our relationship with such systems is thus not entirely top-down, but rather one of co-production that is based on an unequal relationship. The conditions under which the user operates are not entirely known and are inescapable as long as the user continues to use Spotify, ultimately helping produce consequences in the form of recommendations and dynamic changes to the user interfaces that foreground or not particular content. It is in around these points where debates of the potential outcomes of relationships between cultural practices and digital monitoring find their foundation.

Tufekci (2015), for instance, highlights the negative reactions to Facebook’s emotional contagion study (Kramer et al., 2014), which measured the emotional effects on users of different types of content, and argues that questions around the potential harms/benefits of the algorithmic production of experience have moved “beyond hypotheticals” now that “algorithms act as de facto gatekeepers of consequence” (2015: 206). Claims of this kind have gained considerably more traction in light of recent developments around Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. In terms of popular music, however, this is not limited to the delivery of recorded music via digital interfaces. Bucher’s algorithmic imaginary is also at play in the foregrounding of media content and advertising through social media and news media platforms, and increasingly in the promotional and A&R activities of record companies (Thompson, 2014). These are all areas where algorithms, fuelled by consumer activity data and cultural content metadata, are deployed as subjective decision makers.

The irony amidst all this is that the systems and practices causing the concern are facilitated partly by users’ engagement with digital interfaces. As such, the users themselves are can also be viewed as the ‘agents’ facilitating the translation of a cultural form from one context to another. Spotify would not be able to offer Discover Weekly in its present form if people did not use their system to create playlists. Likewise, the recent debates around Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the implications for elections, would not exist without the users and their everyday use of the platforms concerned. Van Dijck (2014:1) argues that user data has become “a regular currency for citizens to pay for their communication services and security – a trade-off that has nestled into the comfort zone of most people.” This uneasy covenant has been described by Barnes (2006) as a “privacy paradox”, where people are uneasy about the information collected about them, which they know will be packaged and monetised, but nevertheless accept this as a condition of using certain services. As such, listeners, users, and publics have their roles, agencies and choices and are by degrees similarly implicated in the concerns raised by Bucher, van Dijck, Tufecki and others. It is in the tensions that exist between these relationships that I find the location for my own research into popular music reception, data and digital technologies.

One of the key research findings from my doctoral analysis of the thousands of text-based reflections gathered by the Harkive Project indicated that respondents are developing intriguing new cultural practices based around their engagement with a variety of digital, online and data technologies. From this I have speculated on plans for post-doctoral work that will involve the creation of tools and interfaces that could enable us arrive at more meaningful, critical and reflexive relationships with the data technologies that are now so central to our everyday lives – in other words, for users to better understand the forms, processes, roles and agencies that are in play when cultural translation occurs during their everyday acts of music reception. My hope is that work in this area may contribute to wider debates around data literacy and critical data/algorithm studies, and I look forward to seeing what Harkive 2018 will tell me about this on Tuesday 17th July.

Craig Hamilton is a Research Fellow in the School of Media at Birmingham City University. His research explores contemporary popular music reception practices and the role of digital, data and Internet technologies on the business and cultural environments of music consumption. This research is built around the development of The Harkive Project (www.harkive.org), an online, crowd-sourced method of generating data from music consumers about their everyday relationships with music and technology. Craig is also the co-Managing Editor of Riffs: Experimental Research on Popular Music (www.riffsjournal.org)

Useful links

The Harkive Project website: www.harkive.org

Harkive on Twitter: https://twitter.com/harkive

Harkive on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/harkive/

Bibliography

Adorno, T.W., Simpson, G., 1942. On popular music. Institute of Social Research.

Barnes, S.B., 2006. A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States. First Monday 11.

Bourdieu, P., 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard University Press.

Bucher, T., 2016. The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Inf. Commun. Soc. 1–15.

Cohen, L., 2004. A consumers’ republic: The politics of mass consumption in postwar America. J. Consum. Res. 31, 236–239.

Kramer, A.D., Guillory, J.E., Hancock, J.T., 2014. Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 111, 8788–8790.

Lears, J., 1995. Fables of abundance: A cultural history of advertising in America. Basic Books.

McCourt, T., Rothenbuhler, E.W., 2004. Burnishing the brand: Todd Storz and the total station sound. Radio J. Int. Stud. Broadcast Audio Media 2, 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1386/rajo.2.1.3/0

Tufekci, Z., 2015. Algorithmic harms beyond Facebook and Google: Emergent challenges of computational agency. J Telecomm High Tech L 13, 203.

Vanderbilt, T., 2016. You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice. Knopf.

Van Dijck, J., 2014. Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Surveill. Soc. 12, 197.

Webster, J., Gibbins, N., Halford, S., Hracs, B.J., 2016. Towards a theoretical approach for analysing music recommender systems as sociotechnical cultural intermediaries, in: Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Web Science. ACM, pp. 137–145.

BLOG POST: Craig Hamilton on ‘Popular Music Reception and Data’

Popular Music Reception, Data, and Digital Technologies

by Craig Hamilton

Part one of two. For part two, click here

My research explores contemporary popular music reception practices through the development of The Harkive Project (www.harkive.org), an annual, online, crowd-sourced method of gathering text-based reflections and other data from people about the detail of their everyday engagement with popular music. Since 2013 the project has gathered over 10,000 stories, and will run again on Tuesday 17th July 2018.

The volume and complexity of the data gathered by the project, along with the experimental methodology I have developed in response, are a useful means by which to engage with BCMCR’s current research theme of cultural translation. The basic idea of a cultural form moving from one context to another, implying an agent (or agents) doing the moving, neatly encapsulates contemporary conditions of popular music reception.

This can be considered more fully in terms of acts of popular music reception – which Keith Negus’ (1997: 9) describes as ‘how people receive, interpret and use music as a cultural form while engaging in specific social activities’ – being understood as a cultural form that ‘move’ from the context of our everyday engagement, and into another – the abstracted realm of data points and statistical analyses. In my research I have employed similar data collection methods and computational analytical techniques to those used by key players in the digital music space, which has provided me with a means of not only exploring the data I had gathered, but to simultaneously offer a route towards a critical engagement with the role that such systems play in music reception once the results of analyses are deployed via dynamic interfaces. Harkive, in this sense, is simultaneously as agent in a process of a cultural translation, and also a means by which similar processes can be broken down and observed.

It is worth pausing to consider, however, that in capturing, analysing and reflecting back individual and collective music taste and activities in the form of recommendations, companies such as Spotify are engaged in a practice that is not entirely new in terms of commerce (see: Cohen, 2004), the media industries (see: Lears, 1995) or indeed music specifically (see: McCourt and Rothenbuhler, 2004). However, the scale and degree of fine detail involved with the processes of creating machine-derived recommendation systems through digital interfaces, along with the relative novelty yet growing centrality of streaming as a mode of music reception, suggests that long-standing debates around individual choice and agency (Adorno and Simpson, 1942) and the role of the cultural intermediaries in terms of cultural goods (Bourdieu, 1984) ought to be revisited.

Continued here

SEMINAR SERIES: Screen Cultures – Special Session on Afrofuturism.

by Simon Crisp.

The Screen Cultures series of BCMCR research seminars kicked off with a special session which saw Juice Aleem and Erik Steinskog (University of Copenhagen) talking about the subject of Afrofuturism, its roots, what it is and can be, and why it is important.

I have to admit that going into this session my understanding of Afrofuturism was primarily based on having read a couple of post-Black Panther articles on the subject in the Sunday newspaper supplements. However, recognising these articles didn’t scratch the surface of the subject, let alone do it justice, I was keen to learn more about the concept beyond the idea of black people in space and superhero costumes, as the mainstream media often presents it. I was also eager to explore how Afrofuturism could be considered concerning cultural translation.

As such I was pleased when Juice set out to detail what Afrofuturism “is, isn’t, could be, should be, and used to be” as he put it, and began to talk about the roots of Afrofuturism, the history of its development and the practices of people including Sun Ra and Rammellzee. With this, it became clear the extent to which these key figures, and their Afrofuturism, drew on rich heritage and traditions to present potential futures which were not burdened by more recent histories.

In attempting to relate this to the theme of cultural translation, I initially considered the way in which Afrofuturism’s act of translation of culture was happening not across borders, but into these potential futures. However, Juice then showed us some of Sun Ra’s work, the graffiti of Rammellzee, and the way they lived the reality of their created myths, saying: “This was the reality, again, this is not simply a pop artist putting on a shiny silver hat, but people living it!”

With this, I realised there was also the added dimension of translation which saw these potential futures being lived, and resonating, in the present. Afrofuturism’s act of cultural translation could be seen as not merely taking something from the past and applying to now or to the future, but also be the act of applying that potential future into the now. In thinking about it in this way, it could be suggested that Afrofuturism becomes a multi-stage non-linear process of cultural translation.

In speaking about this practical and present Afrofuturism, Juice said while it was interesting that Black Panther was out and that this got people talking about Afrofuturism, this can be on a very surface level. He went on to talk about people like the ‘Ghetto Gardener’ who works in inner-city areas of LA to get young people planting and taking back their land, saying that this was again a case of myth becoming a reality, and an example of Afrofuturism.

Finally, something else which struck me was the seeming reluctance to adopt the term Afrofuturism. Juice spoke of how Rammellzee rejected the term, and then detailed his relationship with it saying: “The name isn’t important, as much as we are here for Afrofuturism, I’m personally not concerned with that name for a variety of reasons. But it’s something that’s been pointed at me for over a decade, so I’m eventually I’m like, Okay, I’ll do the job, I’ll put that cape on, I’ll put that mask on.”

Having formerly worked as a journalist, Simon Crisp is currently completing the MA in Media and Cultural Studies at BCU. He is interested in researching the role of media representations in creating modern yoga practices. He can be found on the web and on twitter