#AoIR2024 Industry

Session Chair: Holly Kruse
 
Presentation 1
 
An algorithmic event: The celebration and critique of 'Spotify Wrapped'
Taylor Annabell⁽¹⁾, Nina Vindum Rasmussen⁽²⁾
1: Utrecht University; 2: London School of Economics and Political Science
 
Each year, Spotify encourages its users to share aesthetically pleasing data stories ‘wrapped’ and repackaged from their listening behaviour. We approach ‘Wrapped’ as an ‘algorithmic event’, defined as a moment in time in which there is a collective orientation towards a particular algorithmic system and associated data. To examine how people make sense of ‘Wrapped’ as an algorithmic event, we bring together ordinary Spotify users to explore datafication through a series of prompts and creative activities, including a modified version of the ‘walkthrough’ (Light et al., 2018) and a craft-based exercise. These exercises allow participants to tease out how normative assumptions are baked into ‘Wrapped’ and mobilise particular understandings of individuals, their habits, tastes and identities. Importantly, we position our participants as co-analysts, following the work of Robards and Lincoln (2017) and Markham (2021), and in our analysis highlight themes that arise from their contributions. Emerging findings allude to highly ambivalent feelings towards ‘Wrapped’ as an algorithmic event: Our participants both celebrate and critique how Spotify claims to ‘know’ them as individuals. They also contest the way ‘Wrapped’ is framed as revealing the ‘truth’ about music consumption and taste. As such, we argue that algorithmic events like ‘Wrapped’ are useful ways to think through data capture and algorithmic systems. The phenomenon of ‘wrappification’ – by which we mean the repackaging of behavioural data that captures a particular activity throughout the year and the responses to the belief that we can ‘know’ ourselves in this way – speaks to such impact.
 
 
Presentation 2
 
MUSIC CREATOR PERSPECTIVES ON DATAFICATION IN THE UK AND CHINA
D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, Zhongwei Li
University of Leeds, United Kingdom
 
This study investigates the datafication of music in the era of platforms through a critical, comparative analysis of music creators’ perspectives towards data in two countries: the UK and China. Drawing on 12 qualitative focus groups with music creators (n = 68), we explore the tactics, strategies, and compromises involving data deployed by music creators in these two distinctive music markets. Previous studies that explore datafication from music creators’ perspectives tend to heavily emphasize metrics, various user engagement statistics made available to creators by digital. We follow Julie Cohen to position metrics as a form of data double, templates for generating patterns and predictions created through iterative processes of refinement. Our paper extends beyond the focus on metrics or data doubles are used to learn more about creators’ perspectives towards datafication in a changing musical system by integrating additional concepts from critical data studies, namely data imaginaries, data relations, and data politics. Preliminary results indicate that creators in the UK positioned engagement with datafication practices as an inevitable next step to progress one’s music career further past a certain point. Creators in China expressed frustration that their user-uploaded music files had become platform curated data, indicative of broader shifts in the Chinese musical system in which musical metadata are transformed into assets for digital platforms and rightsholders. Further analysis will delve into what these perspectives reveal about the data politics of music production in the era of platforms.
 
 
Presentation 3
 
ENGINEERED INEQUALITY: MUSICAL TAXONOMIES AND STREAMING RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS
Raquel Campos Valverde
University of Leeds, United Kingdom
 
In the past five years, the music industry and streaming giants have embraced the success of Latin, Korean and Afrobeats music and heavily promoted their multicultural expertise and international expansion (Spotify 2021a, 2018b; Dredge 2022). However, despite academic efforts to understand streaming classification and recommendation (Seaver 2022; Maasø & Spilker 2022; Hesmondhalgh et al. 2023) it is still unclear which musical taxonomies are used by music streaming platforms. The publication of the DCMS report (2023) in the UK has brought to the fore the importance of understanding streaming software infrastructures, including how music is organised by platforms, and how recommendations and curation are automated. What kind of cultural visions, understandings, and taxonomies of music are currently hardwired into recommender systems? This paper analyses the taxonomies and the metadata standards used to code music catalogue into streaming services to argue that the current industry practices do not contribute to the international vision promoted. Using a mixed methods approach, this paper combines interface analysis of music streaming platforms, discourse analysis over PR industry materials and ethnographic fieldwork at industry conferences, and interviews with industry, public, and start-up stakeholders. In doing so, it contrasts the disparity between industry emphasis on automation, expertise and internationalisation with practices that reveal Western-centric, incoherent and error-prone approaches to catalogue. Following a postcolonial cultural economy framework (Saha 2021), I show how these underdeveloped software infrastructures contribute to the making and reproduction of culture and race, and more widely how they impact music cultures worldwide.
 
 
Presentation 4
 
WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND IT: BRAZILIAN USERS’ ALGORITHMIC IMAGINARIES OF SPOTIFY WRAPPED
Vanessa Amália Dalpizol Valiati⁽¹⁾, Ludmila Lupinacci⁽²⁾, Felipe Bonow Soares⁽³⁾
1: Feevale University; 2: University of Leeds; 3: University of the Arts London
 
‘Spotify Wrapped’ is a promotional initiative offered by the music platform consisting of a summary of each user’s yearly listening habits. Although Spotify is generally classified as a streaming service, initiatives such as Wrapped have a clear component of sociability (Hagen & Lüders 2017) – in this case, not only because they are based on the harvesting of users’ behavioural data but also because they are created to be shared on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter/X. Indeed, Spotify Wrapped has acquired its own role in digital popular culture, inciting anticipation and excitement from users worldwide and becoming an 'algorithmic event' (Annabell & Vindum Rasmussen 2023) in and of itself. In this paper, we propose to scrutinise how this algorithmic event is perceived and understood by Brazilian users, whilst also identifying and unpacking the platform affordances and algorithmic imaginaries (Bucher, 2017) that inform those interpretations and their associated performances of taste and identity (Airoldi, 2019, Prey, 2018). We explore in particular how users negotiate the tensions between algorithmic personalisation and individuation and the possibilities for shared experience to emerge during this event. Through a mixed-method approach, we argue that the 'eventness' (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2018) of Spotify Wrapped is distributed, clustered but sparsely connected, and marked by fleeting, fluid and ephemeral feelings of shared experience and recognition rather than by enduring communities, which in turn reflects and extends previous theorisations of affective publics (Papacharissi, 2014) and social media liveness (Lupinacci, 2021)