INNOVAZIONE E DIFFERENZIAZIONE CULTURALE NELL’ECOLOGIA DEI MEDIA ALGORITMICI. TRE STUDI SULLA RECORDING INDUSTRY

Algorithmic media constitute an increasingly global, digital communication environment. The symbolic power of these technologies to interact with our everyday actions and desires has been a concern of scholars from various disciplines for years. Such interest has resulted in a proliferation of reflections that soon turned to the changed functions of cultural production and consumption, now primarily mediated by the devices of digital capitalism, whose meteoric rise has been accompanied by a progressive reconfiguration of how cultural content is produced, disseminated and enjoyed. The present doctoral thesis aims at understanding whether the configuration of the current media ecology – within which we find streaming services, social media, communication technologies and, obviously, users – contributes to making cultural reality more differentiated and open to innovation. Our research focuses on a specific cultural sector, the recorded music industry. The recording industry is the cultural sector that has proved most permeable to the innovations introduced by digital technology. It has been dramatically reconfigured by platformisation, which transformed it from a product-based to an access-based industry. The traditional system controlled by inherently cultural companies has been gradually supplanted, over a decade, by a system in which the circulation of its products is predominantly dependent on the interest of information technology companies that mediate between multiple markets, generating network effects, including cultural externalities. Nevertheless, while the industry has witnessed tremendous innovation in its ‘apparatuses’ (technologies, business models, work organisation), there is a widespread sentiment among many insiders (critics, musicians, fans) of the musical art world that in terms of innovation and differentiation of cultural content, recorded music is drifting regressively. This research seeks to understand how some key actors involved in the music production-consumption dialectic make sense of platforms and algorithmic media, attempting to build a theory on cultural innovation and differentiation from an analysis of these perceptions. Three independent qualitative studies were conducted to answer the research question. Each study targets a different category of actors (industry business professionals, songwriters/producers, and competent users). Two studies utilise qualitative interview analysis; the third employs interview analysis, reflective diary analysis and analysis of metadata obtained from Spotify’s API call. The purpose of this study as a whole was to provide an overview of the perceptions of some key players in the recorded music production-consumption circuit. Previous studies have argued that platform capitalism, contrary to digital optimists’ claims, has not democratised media industries, having strengthened power structures, created new entry barriers, maintained a few-to-many system and undermined the economic conditions of artists outside the mainstream. This study partially confirmed these assumptions. By combining the analysis of phenomena with the study of the perceptions of subjects who participated in the research, we have learned that the platform system has accelerated, legitimised or decisively influenced a number of long-lasting processes. These are not processes generated by the platforms but produced over time due to broader social, political and economic changes. We can identify, in particular, one piece of finding that has surfaced, which in turn encompasses a surprising multiplicity of further critical insights: in the context of recorded music, the configuration of the algorithmic media ecology discourages cultural innovation and differentiation.