The music industry’s shift from physical products to services reframed audiences as data-producing 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

• DEFINE: Explains the audience-to-user paradigm shift that defines the streaming-era industry.
• QUESTION: Worth tracing how ‘unpaid data-labor’ — the user as raw material — maps onto financial-instrument extraction of value from listeners.