Curation by code: Infomediaries and the data mining of taste

Abstract

Automated recommendation systems now occupy a central position in the circulation of media and cultural products. Using music as a test case, this article examines the use of algorithms and data mining techniques for the presentation and representation of culture, and how these tools reconfigure the process of cultural intermediation. Expanding Bourdieu’s notion of cultural intermediaries to include technologies like algorithms, I argue that an emerging layer of companies – call them infomediaries – are increasingly responsible for shaping how audiences encounter and experience cultural content. Through a critical analysis of The Echo Nest, a music infomediary whose databases underpin many digital music services, I trace the shift from intermediation to infomediation and explore what is at stake at the intersection of data mining, taste making and audience manufacture. The new infomediary logics at work are computational forms of power that shape popular culture and highlight the social implications of curation by code.

Keywords

Algorithms big data cultural industries cultural intermediaries curation digitization infomediaries recommendation engines The Echo Nest

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anderson

(2012) The materiality of algorithms. Culture Digitally. Available at: http://culturedigitally.org/2012/11/the-materiality-of-algorithms/

Andrejevic

(2013) ‘Free Lunch’ in the digital era: Organization is the new content. In: Manzerolle

McGuigan

(eds) The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media. New York: Peter Lang, pp.25–30.

Anonymous (2013) The Echo Nest and TargetSpot partner to bring smarter advertising to online radio. PR Newswire, 21 November. Available at: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-echo-nest-and-targetspot-partner-to-bring-smarter-advertising-to-online-radio-232825671.html

Barocas

Hood

Ziewitz

(2013) Governing algorithms: A provocation piece. Governing Algorithms. Available at: http://governingalgorithms.org/

Beats (2014) We are Beats music. Available at: http://www.beatsmusic.com/about

Beer

(2009) Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. New Media & Society 11: 985–1002.

Bourdieu

(1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bucher

(2012) Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook. New Media & Society 14: 1164–1180.

Childress

(2012) Decision-making, market logic and the rating mindset: Negotiating BookScan in the field of US trade publishing. European Journal of Cultural Studies 15: 604–620.

10.

Crawford

(2013) The hidden biases in Big Data. Harvard Business Review, 1 April. Available at: https://hbr.org/2013/04/the-hidden-biases-in-big-data

11.

D’onfro

(2014) This man makes $23,000 posting music spam on Spotify and iTunes. Business Insider. Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/matt-farley-makes-23k-posting-music-spam-on-spotify-2014-1

12.

Echo Nest (2014a) Applications built on our platform. Available at: http://the.echonest.com/showcase/

13.

Echo Nest (2014b) Dynamic music data. Available at: http://the.echonest.com/solutions/musicdata/

14.

Echo Nest (2014c) Music audience understanding. Available at: http://corpcdn.echonest.com.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_private/2014/01/27/audience_understanding_finalx.pdf

15.

Echo Nest (2014d) Our company. Available at: http://the.echonest.com/company/

16.

Faraone

(2011) The most important music company on earth. The Boston Phoenix, 22 April, 18–19. Available at: http://thephoenix.com/boston/music/119592-echo-nest-is-ready-to-fly/

17.

Featherstone

(1987) Lifestyle and consumer culture. Theory, Culture & Society 4: 55–70.

18.

Flanaga

(2014) Spotify’s Ken Parks on an IPO, the Echo Nest Purchase (Q&A). Billboard. Available at: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/5930388/spotifys-ken-parks-on-an-ipo-the-echo-nest-purchase-qa

19.

Frere-Jones

(2010) You, the D.J.: Online music moves to the cloud. The New Yorker, 14 June. Available at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/06/14/you-the-d-j

20.

Gillespie

(2010) The politics of ‘Platforms’. New Media & Society 12: 347–364.

21.

Gillespie

(2014) The relevance of algorithms. In: Gillespie

Boczkowski

Foot

(eds) Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.167–193.

22.

Hagel

Singer

(1999) Private lives. McKinsey Quarterly 1: 7–15.

23.

Harvey

(2014) Station to station: The past, present and future of streaming music. Pitchfork. Available at: http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/9383-station-to-station-the-past-present-and-future-of-streaming-music/6/

24.

Hearn

(2010) Structuring feeling: Web 2.0, online ranking and rating, and the digital ‘Reputation’ economy. Ephemera 10(3/4): 421–438. Available at: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/structuring-feeling-web-20-online-ranking-and-rating-and-digital-%E2%80%98reputation%E2%80%99-economy

25.

Hennion

(1989) An intermediary between production and consumption: The producer of popular music. Science, Technology & Human Value 14: 400–424.

26.

Hesmondhalgh

(2006) Bourdieu, the media and cultural production. Media, Culture & Society 28: 211–231.

27.

Jacobson

(2013) How we resolve artists on the Internet. Available at: http://blog.echonest.com/post/52159005051/how-we-resolve-artists-on-the-internet

28.

Jehan

Lamere

Whitman

(2010) Music retrieval from everything. In: Proceedings of the international conference on multimedia information retrieval (MIR’10), 29–31 March 2010, Philadelphia, PA, USA. New York, NY: ACM.

29.

Katz

(2004) Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press.

30.

Kuipers

(2012) The cosmopolitan tribe of television buyers: Professional ethos, personal taste and cosmopolitan capital in transnational cultural mediation. European Journal of Cultural Studies 15: 581–603.

31.

Lamere

(2009) Paul’s music Wreckommender. Personal Blog. Available at: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/11/22/pauls-music-wreckommender/

32.

Latour

(1988) Mixing humans and nonhumans together: The sociology of a door-closer. Social Problems 35: 298–310.

33.

Levy

(2010) How Google’s algorithms rule the web. Wired. Available at: http://www.wired.com/2010/02/how-googles-algorithm-rules-the-web/

34.

McCourt

Rothenbuhler

(1997) Soundscan and the consolidation of control. Media, Culture & Society 19: 201–218.

35.

Madrigal

(2014) How Netflix reverse engineered Hollywood. The Atlantic. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/

36.

Miege

(1979) The cultural commodity. Media, Culture & Society 1: 297–311.

37.

Moor

(2012) Beyond cultural intermediaries? A socio-technical perspective on the market for social interventions. European Journal of Cultural Studies 15: 563–580.

38.

Morris

(2012) Making music behave: Metadata and the digital music commodity. New Media & Society 14: 850–866.

39.

Morris

(2015) Anti-market research: Piracy, new media metrics, and commodity communities. Popular Communication 13: 32–44.

40.

Napoli

(2013) The algorithm as institution: Toward a theoretical framework for automated media production and consumption. In: Media in transition 8 conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 3–5 May.

41.

Negus

(2002) The work of cultural intermediaries and the enduring distance between production and consumption. Cultural Studies 16: 501–515.

42.

Nixon

Gay

(2002) Who needs cultural intermediaries? Cultural Studies 16: 495–500.

43.

Ocejo

(2012) At your service: The meanings and practices of contemporary bartenders. European Journal of Cultural Studies 15: 642–658.

44.

Peters

(2008) The oldness of new media. In: 22nd Annual B: Aubrey Fisher Memorial Lecture, Department of Communication, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, 23 October.

45.

Platoni

(2006) Pandora’s Box: Can a company’s musicological data mining breathe new life into the music industry? East Bay Express, 11 January. Available at: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/pandoras-box/Content?oid=1080116

46.

Powers

(2014) Lost in the shuffle: Technology, history, and the idea of musical randomness. Critical Studies in Media Communication 31: 244–264.

47.

Powers

(2015) Intermediaries and intermediation. In: Bennett

Waksman

(eds) The Sage Handbook of Popular Music. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications Ltd, pp.120–134.

48.

Razlagova

(2013) The past and future of music listening: between freeform DJs and recommendation algorithms. In: Loviglio

Hilmes

(eds) Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era. New York: Routledge, pp.62–76.

49.

Seaver

(2013) Knowing algorithms. In: Media in transition 8 conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 3–5 May.

50.

Skov

(2002) Hong Kong fashion designers as cultural intermediaries: Out of global garment production. Cultural Studies 16: 553–569.

51.

Smith Maguire

Matthews

(2012) Are we all cultural intermediaries now? An introduction to cultural intermediaries in context. European Journal of Cultural Studies 15: 551–562.

52.

Smythe

(1981) On the audience commodity and its work. In: Durham

Kellner

(eds) Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 ed., pp.253–279.

53.

Soar

(2002) The first things first manifesto and the politics of culture jamming: towards a cultural economy of graphic design and advertising. Cultural Studies 16: 570–592.

54.

Steiner

(2012) Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World. New York: Penguin.

55.

Striphas

(2012) What is an Algorithm? Culture Digitally. Available at: http://culturedigitally.org/2012/02/what-is-an-algorithm/

56.

Uricchio

(2011) The algorithmic turn: Photosynth, augmented reality and the changing implications of the image. Visual Studies 26: 25–35.

57.

Whitman

(2012) How well does music predict your politics? Personal Blog. Available at: http://notes.variogr.am/post/26869688460/how-well-does-music-predict-your-politics