Platformed How Streaming Algorithms And Artificial Intelligence Are Shaping Music Cultures

Grounded in more than a decade of field research, this book uses empirical examples, quantitative data, and qualitative interviews with young music consumers as well as music industry professionals to understand how the platforms behind music production, distribution and listening work in our digital society. Bringing together the perspectives from science and technology studies, media studies, and the political economy of digital platforms, the book outlines the process of mutual construction between music digital platforms and the cultural value of music in today’s society, and also reflects on the complicated relationship between the power of platforms and the agency of listeners.

Dive into the transformative world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with this comprehensive guide, which demystifies AI for readers of all backgrounds. Whether you're a curious newcomer, a seasoned professional, or someone in between, this book offers a panoramic view of AI's significance in our modern world, its foundational concepts, technological advancements, and its profound impact on our future. "Exploring Artificial Intelligence: A Comprehensive Guide to AI's Impact and Future" begins with an engaging preface that sets the stage for a deep dive into AI's essence, starting with its basic concepts, historical milestones, and evolutionary journey. The book unravels the complex tapestry of AI technologies and tools, providing readers with a clear understanding of key developments that have shaped AI into the powerhouse it is today. Part I of the book lays the groundwork by elucidating AI's fundamental principles. It offers a detailed exploration of its origins and the pivotal technologies that drive AI development. From machine learning to neural networks, get acquainted with the building blocks of AI and the tools that bring AI applications to life. Part II shifts focus to AI in practice, showcasing real-world applications and the transformative potential of AI across various industries. From enhancing business operations to revolutionizing healthcare and beyond, this section illustrates how AI is integrated into daily life and making an indelible mark on society. Part III delves into AI's societal impacts, addressing rapid AI advancement's ethical and societal implications. It navigates AI's challenges and opportunities, fostering a critical understanding of how AI influences ethical considerations, privacy, employment, and social justice. Part IV looks ahead to the future, preparing readers for an AI-driven world. It discusses the skills, knowledge, and adaptations necessary to thrive in an increasingly automated society. This forward-looking section speculates on emerging trends and potential directions of AI technology, emphasizing the importance of ongoing research, ethical development, and policy-making. The book's conclusion offers a reflective summary and a call to action, encouraging readers to engage with AI technology thoughtfully and responsibly. It underscores the need for a collective effort to shape an AI-enhanced future that is inclusive, ethical, and beneficial for all. "Exploring Artificial Intelligence: A Comprehensive Guide to AI's Impact and Future" is not just a book; it's an invitation to participate in the ongoing conversation about AI. It provides the tools, knowledge, and perspective to navigate the AI landscape with confidence, curiosity, and a sense of responsibility. With this enlightening guide, embrace the journey into AI and prepare to be amazed by AI's possibilities for our future.

Digital technology has profoundly transformed almost all aspects of musical culture. This book explains how and why.

Streaming Musicexamines how the Internet has become integrated in contemporary music use, by focusing on streaming as a practice and a technology for music consumption. The backdrop to this enquiry is the digitization of society and culture, where the music industry has undergone profound disruptions, and where music streaming has altered listening modes and meanings of music in everyday life. The objective of Streaming Musicis to shed light on what these transformations mean for listeners, by looking at their adaptation in specific cultural contexts, but also by considering how online music platforms and streaming services guide music listeners in specific ways. Drawing on case studies from Moscow and Stockholm, and providing analysis of Spotify, VK and YouTube as popular but distinct sites for music, Streaming Musicdiscusses, through a qualitative, cross-cultural, study, questions around music and value, music sharing, modes of engaging with music, and the way that contemporary music listening is increasingly part of mobile, automated and computational processes. Offering a nuanced perspective on these issues, it adds to research about music and digital media, shedding new light on music cultures as they appear today. As such, this volume will appeal to scholars of media, sociology and music with interests in digital technologies.

A jaw-dropping exploration of everything that goes wrong when we build AI systems and the movement to fix them. Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us—and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole—and appear to assess Black and White defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes. And as autonomous vehicles share our streets, we are increasingly putting our lives in their hands. The mathematical and computational models driving these changes range in complexity from something that can fit on a spreadsheet to a complex system that might credibly be called “artificial intelligence.” They are steadily replacing both human judgment and explicitly programmed software. In best-selling author Brian Christian’s riveting account, we meet the alignment problem’s “first-responders,” and learn their ambitious plan to solve it before our hands are completely off the wheel. In a masterful blend of history and on-the ground reporting, Christian traces the explosive growth in the field of machine learning and surveys its current, sprawling frontier. Readers encounter a discipline finding its legs amid exhilarating and sometimes terrifying progress. Whether they—and we—succeed or fail in solving the alignment problem will be a defining human story. The Alignment Problem offers an unflinching reckoning with humanity’s biases and blind spots, our own unstated assumptions and often contradictory goals. A dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, it takes a hard look not only at our technology but at our culture—and finds a story by turns harrowing and hopeful.

Algorithms: Technology, Culture, Politics develops a relational, situated approach to algorithms. It takes a middle ground between theories that give the algorithm a singular and stable meaning in using it as a central analytic category for contemporary society and theories that dissolve the term into the details of empirical studies. The book discusses algorithms in relation to hardware and material conditions, code, data, and subjects such as users, programmers, but also “data doubles”. The individual chapters bridge critical discussions on bias, exclusion, or responsibility with the necessary detail on the contemporary state of information technology. The examples include state-of-the-art applications of machine learning, such as self-driving cars, and large language models such as GPT. The book will be of interest for everyone engaging critically with algorithms, particularly in the social sciences, media studies, STS, political theory, or philosophy. With its broad scope it can serve as a high-level introduction that picks up and builds on more than two decades of critical research on algorithms.

An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.

From the punch card calculating machine to the personal computer to the iPhone and more, this in-depth text offers a comprehensive introduction to digital media history for students and scholars across media and communication studies, providing an overview of the main turning points in digital media and highlighting the interactions between political, business, technical, social, and cultural elements throughout history. With a global scope and an intermedia focus, this book enables students and scholars alike to deepen their critical understanding of digital communication, adding an understudied historical layer to the examination of digital media and societies. Discussion questions, a timeline, and previously unpublished tables and maps are included to guide readers as they learn to contextualize and critically analyze the digital technologies we use every day.

The widespread uptake of digital platforms – from YouTube and Instagram to Twitch and TikTok – is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways. Longstanding media industries are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations – live-streaming, social media influencing, and podcasting, among others – are evolving at breakneck speed. Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy explore both the processes and the implications of platformization across the cultural industries, identifying key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. The authors foreground three particular industries – news, gaming, and social media creation – and also draw upon examples from music, advertising, and more. Diverse in its geographic scope, Platforms and Cultural Production builds on the latest research and accounts from across North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and China to reveal crucial differences and surprising parallels in the trajectories of platformization across the globe. Offering a novel conceptual framework grounded in illuminating case studies, this book is essential for students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are transforming – and what the stakes are for understanding platform power.

In the past two decades digital technologies have fundamentally changed the way we think about, make and use popular music. From the production of multimillion selling pop records to the ubiquitous remix that has become a marker of Web 2.0, the emergence of new music production technologies have had a transformative effect upon 21st Century digital culture. Sonic Technologies examines these issues with a specific focus upon the impact of digitization upon creativity; that is, what musicians, cultural producers and prosumers do. For many, music production has moved out of the professional recording studio and into the home. Using a broad range of examples ranging from experimental electronic music to more mainstream genres, the book examines how contemporary creative practice is shaped by the visual and sonic look and feel of recording technologies such as Digital Audio Workstations.