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Papers by Blake Durham

This chapter addresses some of the key debates and issues raised in relation to curatorial functi... more This chapter addresses some of the key debates and issues raised in relation to curatorial functions of digital sound cultures, with particular attention to curation on licensed music streaming services. It addresses three overlapping but distinct orders of curation: first, curation as individualized practices of recombinatory and reflexive consumption; second, curation as collaborative, archival, and educational projects carried out by distributed regimes of value; third, curation as the primary output of algorithmic cultures online, wherein cultural technologies are engaged in the automation of classification and presentation. The examples provided in this chapter demonstrate that each of these curatorial practices is mutually mediating, with each order of curationindividualistic, collaborative, and algorithmic-intersecting, informing, and shaping the other (Born 2011). Much in the same way that it is impossible to speak about the online curation of sound without considering the technical infrastructure that engenders digital socialities, we must also address the mutating forms of curatorial labor that are appropriated and instrumentalized in the production of automated curation. A rigorous analysis to the sociotechnical systems of curation online must address the agencies at work within these assemblages, parsing whose tastes and values are being performed, and to whose benefit these curatorial acts serve.

This thesis examines the transformations of music circulation and consumption brought about by ne... more This thesis examines the transformations of music circulation and consumption brought about by new media platforms. Specifically, it shows how the social and technical design of online music platforms link the consumption of music immanently to its circulation. The thesis makes contributions to ethnomusicology, media studies, and digital anthropology, as well as to the study of music's technical cultures. It is based on a comparative ethnographic study of music circulation and consumption within two field sites: the commercial streaming service Spotify and the extralegal, unlicensed peer to peer platform 'Jekyll'. Governance comes to the fore in both sites: the study shows how practices of music curation, collection and consumption are regulated by the technical design of these platforms. Surprisingly, music consumption and circulation on Jekyll generates a variety of social relations, including pronounced social hierarchies. This is far less apparent on Spotify, due to the platform's individuated mode of address. The subjectivities of online music consumers are mediated by both their personal histories and by the broader technical genealogies of the platforms they use. The thesis illuminates the mutual interdependencies of the licensed and extralegal spheres, two domains often portrayed as not only separate but antagonistic. It also provides insight into the hybrid modes of exchange that generate digital music platforms. Through examining the entailments of circulatory participation, the study offers new insights into digital polymedia and to labour, exchange and governmentality online, as well as providing nuanced understandings of the ownership and collection of music in digital environments. Moreover, it advances new concepts to identify core aspects of digital music cultures, namely 'circulatory maintenance' and 'circumvention technology'. The thesis shows overall how Spotify and Jekyll are not merely emblematic of emergent consumption practices engendered by new media, but are bound up in the mutual co-creation of culture, engendering novel musical subjectivities, practices, socialities and ideologies. The complex musical, technical and social assemblages formed around music circulation online point to the affective potentials of music itself, producing inalienable attachments to the objects through which music is formatted, experienced, and circulated.

What roles can genre be said to perform within networks of musical circulation, and what forms of... more What roles can genre be said to perform within networks of musical circulation, and what forms of musical knowledge do individuals bring to their personal practices of consumption and collection? This paper draws upon comparative ethnographic research within a private BitTorrent tracker community and users of the streaming service Spotify to analyze the processes of musical classification and individual contribution within strictly regulated networks of musical exchange. Examining how consumers of music make use of notions of genre points to the interplay between the aesthetic and social dimensions of music, as well as the mechanisms by which circulatory systems are constructed by individual contributions. However, it also draws attention to the ways in which these technical systems configure the user, refiguring and governing the relations between musical objects and individuals. Georgina Born’s model of the intersecting planes of social mediation (Born 2010; 2012) underlies my understanding and depiction of the multiple manifestations of generic formations encountered during fieldwork: genre simultaneously draws together imagined communities, refracts macro-social formations, and encapsulates the micro-social creative actions of listeners. Lastly, the mutual mediation of genre and exchange is demonstrated through the limitations on acceptable formats for musical distribution. Digitally-circulated release formats not only participate in the historical lineages of music’s commodity forms, they are also bound up in the aesthetic and social conventions that often come to characterize and distinguish particular genres: musical form itself is implicated in the formats of digital music, and the prioritization of particular release formats speaks to the regimes of value deployed by circulatory systems.

"While it is appealing to imagine digital music circulation as an effortlessly fluid exchange bet... more "While it is appealing to imagine digital music circulation as an effortlessly fluid exchange between production, distribution, and consumption, file-sharing communities establish complex protocols governing musical contribution. In this paper I will draw upon ethnographic research within a private BitTorrent tracker community to analyze the processes of contributing to a strictly regulated file-sharing network and the procedures by which music is reconfigured into a circulatory object.

While all users are required to share back recordings they have obtained, only a small percentage of community members upload new media to the swarm: these individuals can be conceptualized as tributaries, waterways who maintain the flow of new music amongst larger currents. Varying levels of technical aptitude, equipment, and time are invested in the ripping and encoding of physical media, with high-resolution rips of vinyl albums requiring the most investment and freely-available Internet-sourced music necessitating comparatively little. While the procedures differ for each source material, the documented genealogy of the ‘ripping’ process is necessary to prove the validity and quality of the upload, along with careful attention to tagging and metadata modifications. Drawing on insights from anthropological theories of exchange, studying circulatory practices draws out the social relations embedded in musical practices and illuminates the systems of value individuals bring to musical objects.
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"As music circulates through a multitude of platforms for exchange, understanding consumption as ... more "As music circulates through a multitude of platforms for exchange, understanding consumption as a metric tracked
through purchases, listens, impressions or downloads fail to capture the heterogeneity of musical behavior enacted
with digital technology. This paper proposes understanding consumption as multiple orders of musical behavior,
inclusive of acquisition, experience and remediation; additionally, it identifies the mediations of circulatory platforms
as productive points for inquiry, including their technical, social, historical and aesthetic arrangements. Drawing on
ethnographic research from a private BitTorrent tracker and the licensed streaming service Spotify, this paper will
consider two technical systems of music circulation and consumption, and how they condition musical discovery,
acquisition, and listening. While both systems are often characterized by their affordance of ‘free’, unconstrained musical access, the manner in which consumption and musical behavior are limited and permissioned contradicts notions of these platforms as truly open systems of exchange. Drawing on insights from anthropological theories of exchange, studying consumption practices can illuminate the systems of value individuals bring to musical objects."

The regulation of membership and access in private BitTorrent trackers, often justi=ied as a nece... more The regulation of membership and access in private BitTorrent trackers, often justi=ied as a necessary precaution against detection by industry enforcement agencies, is symptomatic of the complex, hierarchical social con=igurations of =ile--sharing communities and the contested borders between public and private spheres online. While the evolution of the BitTorrent model has been implicitly informed by the 'free culture' movement, which proclaims that the exclusive power of copyright holders to limit the circulation and modi=ication of intellectual property inevitably constrains creative expression, this paper will draw on ethnographic research within a private music BitTorrent tracker in arguing that its interview process and share ratio system contribute to the institution of free culture's negation, a 'permission culture': access to the community and the shared content is only granted after the demonstration of advanced technical knowledge, adequate understanding of the community's conventions, and a commitment to active participation through an extensive interview with a senior member of the community. Furthermore, the strict and immutable policing of the share ratio-except during designated 'freeleach' occasions, or through the gifting of unmetered download tokens by site administratorsengenders a structure of distribution whereby the power to grant or limit access to =iles is privately held by the tracker's administrators, not the imagined public of the community. In light of recent work on the economies of piracy, these =ile--sharing communities are demonstrated to represent not an inversion of capitalist culture industries but the formation of alternative but equally hierarchized inequalities of access.

Thesis Chapters by Blake Durham

This thesis examines the transformations of music circulation and consumption brought about by ne... more This thesis examines the transformations of music circulation and consumption brought about by new media platforms. Specifically, it shows how the social and technical design of online music platforms link the consumption of music immanently to its circulation. The thesis makes contributions to ethnomusicology, media studies, and digital anthropology, as well as to the study of music’s technical cultures. It is based on a comparative ethnographic study of music circulation and consumption within two field sites: the commercial streaming service Spotify and the extralegal, unlicensed peer to peer platform 'Jekyll’. Governance comes to the fore in both sites: the study shows how practices of music curation, collection and consumption are regulated by the technical design of these platforms. Surprisingly, music consumption and circulation on Jekyll generates a variety of social relations, including pronounced social hierarchies. This is far less apparent on Spotify, due to the platform's individuated mode of address. The subjectivities of online music consumers are mediated by both their personal histories and by the broader technical genealogies of the platforms they use. The thesis illuminates the mutual interdependencies of the licensed and extralegal spheres, two domains often portrayed as not only separate but antagonistic. It also provides insight into the hybrid modes of exchange that generate digital music platforms. Through examining the entailments of circulatory participation, the study offers new insights into digital polymedia and to labour, exchange and governmentality online, as well as providing nuanced understandings of the ownership and collection of music in digital environments. Moreover, it advances new concepts to identify core aspects of digital music cultures, namely ‘circulatory maintenance’ and ‘circumvention technology’. The thesis shows overall how Spotify and Jekyll are not merely emblematic of emergent consumption practices engendered by new media, but are bound up in the mutual co-creation of culture, engendering novel musical subjectivities, practices, socialities and ideologies. The complex musical, technical and social assemblages formed around music circulation online point to the affective potentials of music itself, producing inalienable attachments to the objects through which music is formatted, experienced, and circulated.