Recap and Review of the 2010 Smythe Lecture

Review of the Graham Murdoch's 2010 Smythe Lecture. The Smythe Lecture is held annually at Simon Fraser University in honour of Dallas Smythe (1907-1992)

Background by Design:Listening in the Age of Streaming

By first revisiting the design of Amsterdam's famed 'Concertgebouw', this article reflects on the implications of streaming services on current and future cultures of listening, and on the agency and autonomy of practicing musicians

Performing Numbers:Musicians and their Metrics

This chapter explores the implications of performance metrics as a source of self-knowledge and self-presentation. It does so through the figure of the contemporary musician. As performers on-stage and online, musicians are constantly assessed and evaluated by industry actors, peers, music fans, and themselves. The impact of powerful modes of quantification on personal experiences, understandings, and practices of artistic creation provides insight into the wider role that metrics play in shaping how we see ourselves and others; and how we present ourselves to others. Through in-depth interviews with emerging musicians, this chapter thus uses the artist as a lens through which to understand everyday life within the “performance complex.

Locating Power in Platformization:Music Streaming Playlists and Curatorial Power

Where does the “power” of platformization reside? As is widely recognized, platforms are matchmakers which interface between different markets or “sides.” This article analyzes platform power dynamics through three of the most important markets that Spotify—the leading audio streaming platform—is embedded within: the music market; the advertising market; and the finance market. It does so through the lens of the playlist. Playlists can be seen as a central example of how platforms like Spotify employ curation or “curatorial power” to mediate markets in the attempt to advance their own interests. At the same time, playlists are an outcome of the conflicting pressures and tensions between these markets. As such, they provide a lens through which to view broader structural dynamics within the platform economy. As this case study of Spotify demonstrates, platform “power” is an always unstable and shifting outcome of the ongoing attempt to coordinate between various markets and actors

Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Music Streaming Spaces

This paper demonstrates how Henri Lefebvre's influential theory of the "production of space" can help generate a more critical understanding of transformations in digital music, and in particular, the emergence of data-driven and cloud-based music streaming services. Lefebvre distinguished between "social space" and what he calls "abstract space" - the space of capitalism. Music streaming services such as Spotify, Deezer, and Pandora, can be understood as the latest stage in the ongoing struggle to transform the "social space" of P2P file-sharing into "abstract space." By giving careful consideration to perceived, conceived and lived processes in the production of space - what Lefebvre called the "trialectics of space" - this paper illuminates the different ways music streaming services and their listeners produce new spaces of music consumption, helping us in turn to develop a more robust critique of abstract space in general