Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-21T22:43:08.911Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Music as a Technology of Surveillance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2018

ERIC A. DROTT
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores surveillance in cloud-based music streaming. Key catalysts in the transition from ownership- to access-based models of music distribution, services like Spotify, Pandora, or Deezer have positioned themselves as a means of reintegrating listeners into “digital enclosures” over which rights holders exercise greater control. Yet streaming's promise of remonetizing musical commodities demonetized by filesharing has been called into doubt by difficulties in converting users of advertising-based “freemium” services into paying subscribers. In need of alternative means of extracting value from users, streaming platforms have increasingly refashioned themselves as enterprises whose business extends beyond music-related services to encompass the collection, aggregation, and exchange of user data. In pursuing this strategy, streaming platforms place themselves in direct competition with other new media companies trading in user data. In order to distinguish themselves from such competitors, streaming platforms cast music as a particularly valuable source of data, offering privileged access to listeners’ innermost selves. But they also cast music as an ideal tracking device, accompanying individuals across a variety of social, physical and geographical spaces. In this way, the very attributes that make music so powerful a “technology of the self” facilitate its transformation into an equally powerful technology of surveillance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , August 2018 , pp. 233 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Periodicals, Blogs, and Online Sources

Ad ExchangerGoogle Scholar
Advertising AgeGoogle Scholar
BBC NewsGoogle Scholar
BillboardGoogle Scholar
BloombergGoogle Scholar
Business InsiderGoogle Scholar
Business WireGoogle Scholar
CNBCGoogle Scholar
ComplexGoogle Scholar
Digital TrendsGoogle Scholar
Financial TimesGoogle Scholar
ForbesGoogle Scholar
Music Business WorldwideGoogle Scholar
Music Industry BlogGoogle Scholar
NPR All Things ConsideredGoogle Scholar
Pandora for BrandsGoogle Scholar
PerceptiveGoogle Scholar
Spotify for BrandsGoogle Scholar
Spotify NewsGoogle Scholar
Spotify PressGoogle Scholar
Spotify Privacy PolicyGoogle Scholar
The BafflerGoogle Scholar
VeracodeGoogle Scholar
Wall Street JournalGoogle Scholar
WiredGoogle Scholar
Wired UKGoogle Scholar

Books and Articles

Adomavicius, Gediminas, Mobasher, Bamshad, Ricci, Francesco, and Tuzhilin, Alex. “Context-Aware Recommendation Systems.” AI Magazine 32, no. 3 (2011): 67–80.Google Scholar
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Verso, 1970.Google Scholar
Anderson, Tim. Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy: Problems and Practices for an Emerging Service Industry. New York: Routledge, 2013.Google Scholar
Andrejevic, Mark. “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure.” The Communication Review 10, no. 4 (2007): 295–317.Google Scholar
Andrejevic, Mark. “Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-Generated Labor.” In The YouTube Reader, edited by Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, 406–23. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009.Google Scholar
Andrejevic, Mark. “Surveillance and Alienation in the Online Economy.” Surveillance and Society 8, no. 3 (2011): 278–87.Google Scholar
Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Arditi, David. “Disciplining the Consumer: File-Sharers under the Watchful Eye of the Music Industry.” In Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media, edited by Fuchs, Christian, Boersma, Kees, Albrechtsund, Anders and Sandoval, Marisol, 170–86. New York: Routledge, 2012.Google Scholar
Baym, Nancy, and Burnett, Robert. “Amateur Experts: International Fan Labor in Swedish Independent Music.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 12, no. 5 (2009): 433–49.Google Scholar
Born, Georgina. “Music and the Materialization of Identities.” Journal of Material Culture 16, no. 4 (2011): 376–88.Google Scholar
Brackett, David. Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Burkart, Patrick. “Music in the Cloud and the Digital Sublime.” Popular Music and Society 37, no. 4 (2014): 393–407.Google Scholar
Burkart, Patrick, and McCourt, Tom. Digital Music Wars: Ownership and Control of the Celestial Jukebox. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.Google Scholar
Buzzard, Karen. Tracking the Audience: The Ratings Industry from Analog to Digital. New York: Routledge, 2012.Google Scholar
Callon, Michel; Méadel, Cécile, and Rabeharisoa, Vololona. “The Economy of Qualities.” Economy and Society 31, no. 2 (2002): 194–217.Google Scholar
Celma, Oscar. Music Recommendation and Discovery: The Long Tail, the Long Fail, and Long Play in the Digital Music Space. Berlin: Springer, 2010.Google Scholar
Cheney-Lippold, John. “A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control,” Theory Culture & Society 28, no. 6 (2011): 164–81.Google Scholar
Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, Enriching Media Data: Quality is Key Requisite for Maximizing ROI, June 2015, http://cimm-us.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/CIMM_Enriching-Media-Data-Quality-is-Key-for-ROI_June-20151.pdf.Google Scholar
Cohen, Nicole. “The Valorization of Surveillance: Towards a Political Economy of Facebook.” Democratic Communiqué 22, no. 1 (2008): 5–22.Google Scholar
Cohen, Nicole. “Commodifying Free Labor Online: Social Media, Audiences, and Advertising.” In The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, edited by McAllister, Matthew and West, Emily, 177–91. New York: Routledge, 2013.Google Scholar
Crain, Matthew. “The Limits of Transparency: Data Brokers and Commodification.” New Media & Society (2016): 1–17.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 1–5.Google Scholar
DeNora, Tia. “Music as a Technology of the Self.” Poetics 27, no. 1 (1999): 31–56.Google Scholar
DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Frith, Simon. “Music and Identity.” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Hall, Stuart and Gay, Paul Du, 108–27. London: Sage, 1996.Google Scholar
Fuchs, Christian. Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage, 2014.Google Scholar
Gitelman, Lisa, and Jackson, Virginia. “Introduction.” In Raw Data Is an Oxymoron, edited by Gitelman, Lisa, 1–14. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 1958.Google Scholar
Goodman, David. “Distracted Listening: On Not Making Sound Choices in the 1930s.” In Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, edited by Suisman, David and Strasser, Susan, 15–46. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Gopinath, Sumanth. “‘Now You Can Finally Throw out That Rolex’: Unboxing the Digital Watch.” Unpublished paper presented at the University of Texas at Austin Music Theory Forum, April 22, 2016.Google Scholar
Gopinath, Sumanth, and Stanyek, Jason. “Tuning the Human Race: Athletic Capitalism and the Nike+ Sport Kit.” In Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, edited by Born, Georgina, 128–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Gopinath, Sumanth, and Stanyek, Jason. “Anytime, Anywhere? An Introduction to Devices, Markets and Theories of Mobile Music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music, vol. 1, edited by Gopinath, Sumanth and Stanyek, Janson, 1–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Haggerty, Kevin, and Ericson, Richard. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000): 605–22.Google Scholar
Hariri, Negar, Mobasher, Bamshad and Burke, Robin. “Context-Aware Music Recommendation Based on Latent Topic Sequential Patterns.” Proceedings of the Sixth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (2012): 131–38.Google Scholar
Jhally, Sut, and Livant, Bill. “Watching as Working: The Valorization of Audience Consciousness.” Journal of Communication 36, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 124–43.Google Scholar
Johnson, James H. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Kassabian, Anahid. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. 2nd edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Kim, Youngmoo E., Schmidt, Erik M., Migneco, Raymond, Morton, Brandon G., Richardson, Patrick, Scott, Jeffrey, Speck, Jacquelin A., Turnbull, Douglas. “Music Emotion Recognition: A State of the Art Review.” ISMIR 2010 (2010): 255–66.Google Scholar
Manabe, Noriko. “A Tale of Two Countries: Online Radio in the United States and Japan.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music, vol. 1, edited by Gopinath, Sumanth and Stanyek, Jason, 456–95. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Marshall, Lee. “‘Let's Keep Music Special. F—Spotify’: On-Demand Streaming and the Controversy Over Artist Royalties.” Creative Industries Journal 8, no. 2 (2015): 177–89.Google Scholar
Mayer-Schönberger, Victor, and Cukier, Kenneth. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2013.Google Scholar
McCourt, Tom, and Rothenbuhler, Eric. “SoundScan and the Consolidation of Control in the Popular Music Industry.” Media Culture Society 19 (1997): 201–18.Google Scholar
Meehan, Eileen. “Ratings and the Institutional Approach: A Third Answer to the Commodity Question.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1, no. 2 (1984): 216–25.Google Scholar
Merzeau, Louise. “Du signe à la trace: L'information sur mesure,” Hermès 53, no. 1 (2009): 21–29.Google Scholar
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Morris, Jeremy Wade. “Artists as Entrepreneurs, Fans as Workers.” Popular Music and Society 37, no. 3 (2014): 273–90.Google Scholar
Morris, Jeremy Wade. Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Morris, Jeremy Wade. “Curation by Code: Infomediaries and the Data Mining of Taste.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18, nos. 4–5 (2015): 446–63.Google Scholar
Morris, Jeremy Wade, and Powers, Devon. “Control, Curation and Musical Experience in Streaming Music Services.” Creative Industries Journal 8, no. 2 (2015): 106–22.Google Scholar
Mosco, Vincent. The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal. London: Sage, 1996.Google Scholar
Moulier Boutang, Yann. Cognitive Capitalism. Translated by Ed Emery. Cambridge: Polity, 2011.Google Scholar
Parker, Geoffrey, Alstyne, Marshall Van, and Choudary, Sangeet Paul. Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You. New York: Norton: 2016.Google Scholar
Prey, Robert. “‘Now Playing. You’: Big Data and the Production of Music Streaming Space.” PhD diss., Simon Fraser University, 2015.Google Scholar
Raunig, Gerald. Dividuum: Machinic Temporality and Molecular Revolution. Vol. 1. Translated by Aileen Derieg. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2016.Google Scholar
Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Berns, Thomas. “Le nouveau pouvoir statistique.” Multitudes 40 (2010): 88–103.Google Scholar
Scholz, Trebor. “Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0.” First Monday 13, no. 3 (2008).Google Scholar
Simpson, Kim. Early 70s Radio: The American Format Revolution. London: Continuum, 2011.Google Scholar
Sinnreich, Aram. “Slicing the Pie: The Search for an Equitable Recorded Music Economy.” In Business Innovation and Disruption in the Music Industry, edited by Wikstrom, Peter and DeFillippi, Robert, 153–74. Cheltenham, UK: Elgar, 2016.Google Scholar
Smythe, Dallas W. “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1, no. 3 (1977): 1–27.Google Scholar
Smythe, Dallas W. Dependency Road. Norwood: Ablex, 1981.Google Scholar
Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.Google Scholar
Sterne, Jonathan. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Stockfelt, Ola. “Adequate Modes of Listening.” In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, edited by Schwarz, David, Kassabian, Anahid, Siegel, Lawrence, 129–46. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Stokes, Martin. “Music, Ethnicity, and Identity.” In Music, Ethnicity, and Identity: The Musical Construction of Place. London: Berg, 1994.Google Scholar
Taylor, Timothy. The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012.Google Scholar
Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 33–58.Google Scholar
Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Tzanetakis, George. “Audio Feature Extraction.” In Music Data Mining, edited by Li, Tao, Ogihara, Mitsunori, and Tzanetakis, George, 49–74. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2012.Google Scholar
van Dijck, José. “Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Data Between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology.” Surveillance & Society 12, no. 2 (2014): 197–208.Google Scholar
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.Google Scholar
Weber, William. “Did People Listen in the Eighteenth Century?” Early Music 25, no. 4 (November 1997): 678–91.Google Scholar
Weisbard, Eric. Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2014.Google Scholar
Whitman, Brian. “Learning the Meaning of Music.” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005.Google Scholar
Yang, Yi-Hsuan, and Chen, Yi-Hsuan. “Machine Recognition of Music Emotion: A Review.” ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology 3, no. 3 (2012): 1–15.Google Scholar

Video Sources

Jakovljevic, Jana. “Jana Jakovljevic, Head of Programmatic Solutions at Spotify, Discusses Cross-Platform Advertising.” Presentation at ATS New York 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDFDg-0Q1eI. ATS is short for “Ad Trading Summit.”Google Scholar
Lee, Danielle. “Man vs. Machine: Putting Humanity Back into the Marketing Mix.” Presentation at New York Advertising Week, September 27, 2016, http://newyork.advertisingweek.com/replay/#date=2016-09-27~video-id=80~venue=6.Google Scholar