Music streaming, diversity, and cultural inequality

Music streaming, diversity, and cultural inequality
-

This is a past event

Join Dr Raquel Campos Valverde for the latest of our music research seminars.

The publication of the DCMS report on the impact of algorithmically driven recommendation systems on music consumption and production has brought to the fore the importance of understanding music streaming infrastructures. Millions of people access, consume, and distribute music via streaming services every day, but we know very little about how these systems internally work. How is music organised and classified by streaming platforms? There is also considerable international variation in terms of the popularity of streaming services, and on the role they represent in music consumption in different countries and scenes. However, a significant amount of the research has exclusively focused on the US or European markets. This seminar focuses on the preliminary results of the MUSICSTREAM project on music streaming and cultural diversity. It also provides an overview of my current research  within the project on music streaming taxonomies as an infrastructural element of streaming platforms. Focusing on both the technical and human elements involved in organising and editorialising music content for streaming, I discuss how music streaming platforms guide and shape music distribution, discovery, and consumption practices, and how they influence our musical experiences of diversity.

Dr Raquel Campos Valverde (she/her) is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow covering aspects of the MUSICSTREAM project related to users, experiences, emotions, and pleasures. Before joining the project, she was a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London. She obtained her PhD from London South Bank University in 2019 with a thesis entitled Understanding Musicking on Social Media: Music Sharing, Sociality, and Citizenship. Her first article Online musicking for humanity: the role of imagined listening and the moral economies of music sharing on social media has been recently published on Popular Music. Before graduating, she was awarded the 2019 Andrew Goodwin Memorial Postgraduate Prize by the UK and Ireland branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Popular Music, Ethnomusicology, and Internet Studies, particularly concerning the user experiences of digital music in online environments.

Speaker
Dr Raquel Campos Valverde
Venue
MacRobert Building, MR055
Contact

This seminar will also be available to attend via Microsoft Teams. Please contact Christina Ballico (christina.ballico@abdn.ac.uk) for the link to join via Microsoft Teams.