Post-physical music industry pivoted from audiences to data-generating users

Evidence

A core paradigm shift emphasized by big data is the turn away from thinking about audiences, which aligned with a physical-product-based music industry, to considering users, as befits a rising softwareand service-based music industry in a world of ubiquitous networks. Without the mass-produced physical good for the industry to orient and organize around, an instability permeates through the industry amid a plethora of new revenue streams. Big data eases that instability by harnessing, structuring, and exploiting the user’s engagement. Rather than a passive audience to unidirectionally sell product to, the user is an active participant in a database-driven system and an integral part of the design and architecture of new media ecosystems. As Tim Anderson notes, “the surveyed and exchanged end user has become the basic unit of analysis, of the many sites and services that are part of the new music business ecosystem.” Just by accessing and interacting with media, users provide their unpaid data-labor that continually generates information to improve the design of the system. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 220

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Dallas Smythe’s audience-commodity thesis in Marxist media theory; the shift from audience-as-commodity to user-data-labor parallels ‘The Bias of Communication’ claims about media technology shaping social relations. — connects to: Popular music scenes depend on discrete physical spaces and temporal occasion that cyberspace erodes — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1264
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: at what exact point does ownership structure (Big 3 equity stakes, label catalog ownership) drive the algorithmic push toward users-as-data versus users-as-customers — is user monetization a financing imperative or a platform choice?