Robert Prey | University of Oxford (original) (raw)

Papers by Robert Prey

International Journal of Communication, 2024

This article examines how independent musicians in South Korea adapt to digital platforms. The Ko... more This article examines how independent musicians in South Korea adapt to digital platforms. The Korean music industry provides a valuable case study because platformization, vertical integration, and what we call “platform closure” occurred earlier and to a significantly greater degree than in the West. This has resulted in Korean indie musicians migrating from music streaming services to social media platforms and adapting
their practices to compete with content creators. While we detail the distinct characteristics of the Korean music and platform sector, we argue that Korea’s leading position in the global music industry makes the case of Korean indie musicians illustrative for musicians and creative artists adapting to platformization everywhere.

Big Data & Society, 2024

The voice biometrics industry is promised today as a new center of digital innovation. Tech compa... more The voice biometrics industry is promised today as a new center of digital innovation. Tech companies and state agencies are massively investing in speech recognition and analysis systems, pushed by the belief that the acoustics of voice contain unique individual characteristics to convert into information and value through artificial intelligence. This article responds to this current development by exploring the under-researched datafication of the auditory realm to reveal how the sound of voice is emerging as a site for identity construction by both states and corporations. To do so, we look at two different case studies. First, we examine a patent granted to the streaming service Spotify, which aims to improve the platform's music recommendation system by analyzing users’ speech. Second, we discuss the use of voice biometrics in German asylum procedures, where the country of origin of undocumented asylum seekers is determined through accent analysis. Through these seemingly distinct case studies, we identify not only the common assumptions behind the rationale for adopting voice biometrics, but also important differences in the way the private sector and the State determine identity through the analysis of the sounding voice. These two entities are rarely examined together and are often conflated when addressing practices of auditory surveillance. Thus, our comparative and contrastive approach contributes to existing scholarship that questions the claimed efficiency and ethics of voice biometrics’ extractive practices, further defining the operations and assumptions of the private sector and the State.

The Information Society, Nov 13, 2023

In this article we develop the concept of "algorithmic network imaginary" to un... more In this article we develop the concept of "algorithmic network imaginary" to understand how musicians imagine and relate to the networks of "related artists" they are algorithmically sorted into on Spotify. To address this question, we collected data on the related artist networks of 22 musicians constructed by Spotify's Fans Also Like feature and conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with each musician. We used the Qualitative Structural Analysis method for data analysis. Our findings provide insight into what musicians think Fans Also Like is and is for, and reveals how cultural creators understand and experience their algorithmic networks. More broadly, they provide insights into how social actors perceive, understand, and experience their algorithmically constructed peer networks.

The Performance Complex: Competition and Competitions in Social Life, Jul 9, 2020

This chapter explores the implications of performance metrics as a source of self-knowledge and s... more This chapter explores the implications of performance metrics as a source of self-knowledge and self-presentation. It does so through the figure of the contemporary musician. As performers on-stage and online, musicians are constantly assessed and evaluated by industry actors, peers, music fans, and themselves. The impact of powerful modes of quantification on personal experiences, understandings, and practices of artistic creation provides insight into the wider role that metrics play in shaping how we see ourselves and others; and how we present ourselves to others. Through in-depth interviews with emerging musicians, this chapter thus uses the artist as a lens through which to understand everyday life within the "performance complex".

International journal of cultural studies, Apr 13, 2024

There is a major blindspot regarding our understanding of different structural models of platform... more There is a major blindspot regarding our understanding of different structural models of platformization beyond the dominant Anglo-American markets. This article develops a typology of political economic models of platformization by using the case of music platformization. In order to generate such a typology, the article proposes that we start by identifying variables present in any music market around the world. Three different variables are proposed: (1) platform dependence; (2) dominance of 'global' platforms; and (3) the degree of platform and recording industry integration. To illustrate how these variables result in structurally distinct models of platformization, the article briefly discusses the cases of South Korea, the Netherlands and Nigeria. In doing so, a framework is provided through which to interpret the experiences and conditions of musicians, and other cultural producers, in diverse platform ecosystems.

The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 2007

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2024

The Information Society, 2023

In this article we develop the concept of "algorithmic network imaginary" to understand how music... more In this article we develop the concept of "algorithmic network imaginary" to understand how musicians imagine and relate to the networks of "related artists" they are algorithmically sorted into on Spotify. To address this question, we collected data on the related artist networks of 22 musicians constructed by Spotify's Fans Also Like feature and conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with each musician. We used the Qualitative Structural Analysis method for data analysis. Our findings provide insight into what musicians think Fans Also Like is and is for, and reveals how cultural creators understand and experience their algorithmic networks. More broadly, they provide insights into how social actors perceive, understand, and experience their algorithmically constructed peer networks.

The Necessity of Critique: Philosophy of engineering and technology, 2022

Our lives are increasingly mediated, regulated and produced by algorithmically-driven software; o... more Our lives are increasingly mediated, regulated and produced by algorithmically-driven software; often invisible to the people whose lives it affects. Online, much of the content that we consume is delivered to us through algorithmic recommender systems ("recommenders"). Although the techniques of such recommenders and the specific algorithms that underlie them differ, they share one basic assumption: that individuals are "users" whose preferences can be predicted through past actions and behaviors. While based on a set of assumptions that may be largely unconscious and even uncontroversial, we draw upon Andrew Feenberg's work to demonstrate that recommenders embody a "formal bias" that has social implications. We argue that this bias stems from the "technical code" of recommenders-which we identify as a form of behaviorism. Studying the assumptions and worldviews that recommenders put forth tells us something about how human beings are understood in a time where algorithmic systems are ubiquitous. Behaviorism, we argue, forms the episteme that grounds the development of recommenders. What we refer to as the "behavioral code" of recommenders promotes an impoverished view of what it means to be human. Leaving this technical code unchallenged prevents us from exploring alternative, perhaps more inclusive and expansive, pathways for understanding individuals and their desires. Furthermore, by problematizing formations that have successfully rooted themselves in technical codes, this chapter extends Feenberg's critical theory of technology into a domain that is both ubiquitous and undertheorized.

This dissertation begins from the premise that Dallas Smythe's attempt to develop a Marxist 'mate... more This dissertation begins from the premise that Dallas Smythe's attempt to develop a Marxist 'materialist' political economy of media remains a critically important-and unfinishedproject. To-date, the debate has largely been concerned with locating the central commodity produced by ad-supported media. This commodity has been at various times identified as either 'audiences', 'watching-time', 'ratings', and more recently, 'prosumers' or 'data'. Building from the late philosopher Henri Lefebvre's insight that Marxists have too often focused on the production of commodities in capitalist space, leaving them blind to the production of capitalist space itself, this dissertation proposes a different approach. Ad-supported media, I argue, generate rents from the spaces that are produced by media audiences/users around media content. The question of how 'media space' is produced and shaped by the stipulations of rent extraction is examined through a case study of the ad-supported music streaming sector. From terrestrial radio to P2P file sharing, music has long facilitated the production of mediated "social space". Contemporary music streaming services such as Spotify, SoundCloud and Pandora Internet Radio, represent the latest attempt to transform the spaces of listeners into spaces of capital: what Lefebvre referred to as "abstract space". This dissertation investigates the perceived, conceived, and lived dimensions of the struggle to produce abstract space on music streaming platforms. In particular, the role played by data mining and analysis, as typified by the music intelligence company The Echo Nest, is examined. I argue that the drive to increase advertising revenues leads to the further segmentation and ordering of listeners and content, as sociability is turned upon itself to fulfill the dictates of capital. While social space is never entirely dissolved, abstract space increasingly shapes the potentialities of social space, as our examination of SoundCloud demonstrates. In short, this dissertation develops an alternative materialist political economy of media that shifts focus from the production of commodities to the production of spaces. Music streaming services provide a window into the dynamic and unstable process through which mediated social space is made abstract in the commercial media economy.

Spector Books, 2021

Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing... more Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

<jats:p>Review of: <jats:italic>Music by Numbers: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in ... more <jats:p>Review of: <jats:italic>Music by Numbers: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in the Music Industries</jats:italic>, Richard Osborne and Dave Laing (eds) (2021)</jats:p> <jats:p>Bristol: Intellect, 270 pp.,</jats:p> <jats:p>ISBN 978-1-78938-253-2, h/bk, £85.00</jats:p>

Social Media + Society, 2020

Where does the “power” of platformization reside? As is widely recognized, platforms are matchmak... more Where does the “power” of platformization reside? As is widely recognized, platforms are matchmakers which interface between different markets or “sides.” This article analyzes platform power dynamics through three of the most important markets that Spotify—the leading audio streaming platform—is embedded within: the music market; the advertising market; and the finance market. It does so through the lens of the playlist. Playlists can be seen as a central example of how platforms like Spotify employ curation or “curatorial power” to mediate markets in the attempt to advance their own interests. At the same time, playlists are an outcome of the conflicting pressures and tensions between these markets. As such, they provide a lens through which to view broader structural dynamics within the platform economy. As this case study of Spotify demonstrates, platform “power” is an always unstable and shifting outcome of the ongoing attempt to coordinate between various markets and actors.

Information, Communication & Society, 2020

Jahrbuch für Musikwirtschafts- und Musikkulturforschung, 2019

Media, culture, and society, 2018

Raymond Williams once wrote, '… there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people a... more Raymond Williams once wrote, '… there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses'. In an age of personalized media, the word 'masses' seems like an anachronism. Nevertheless, if Williams were to study contemporary online platforms, he would no doubt conclude that there are in fact no individuals, but only ways of seeing people as individuals. This article explores this idea by taking a closer look at online music streaming services. It first conducts a comparison of how two leading streaming platforms conceive of the individual music listener. Then, drawing from Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation, it demonstrates how ways of seeing the individual work to enact the individual on these platforms. In particular, ways of seeing are heavily influenced by the consumer categories that are defined and demanded by advertisers. This article concludes with an examination of how commercial imperatives shape 'ways of seeing' and 'algor...

Networked Music Cultures, 2016

Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, 2016

The 'network metaphor' impoverishes our understanding of power. Its binary logic of inclusion/exc... more The 'network metaphor' impoverishes our understanding of power. Its binary logic of inclusion/exclusion leaves it blind to relations of exploitation. However, instead of ideological critique-the standard Marxist approach-this paper reconstructs Marx's theory of exploitation from a common "process-relational ontology" that is shared by both network theorists and Marx. From this shared ontology it becomes possible to demonstrate how Marx's materialization of process through 'production' and his understanding of relations as 'internal' and 'contradictory' lead him not into an inclusion/exclusion culde-sac but rather to a critique of exploitation writ large. This paper concludes by briefly demonstrating how the theory of exploitation that emerges from Marx's process-relational ontology is ideally suited to understanding and critiquing the intensification and extensification of exploitation under informational capitalism.

International Journal of Communication, 2024

Big Data & Society, 2024

The Information Society, Nov 13, 2023

The Performance Complex: Competition and Competitions in Social Life, Jul 9, 2020

International journal of cultural studies, Apr 13, 2024

The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 2007

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2024

The Information Society, 2023

The Necessity of Critique: Philosophy of engineering and technology, 2022

Spector Books, 2021

Social Media + Society, 2020

Information, Communication & Society, 2020

Jahrbuch für Musikwirtschafts- und Musikkulturforschung, 2019

Media, culture, and society, 2018

Networked Music Cultures, 2016

Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, 2016

The Necessity of Critique: Andrew Feenberg and the Philosophy of Technology, 2022

Listen to Lists, 2021

As music consumption as moved on to streaming platforms new modes of organizing and sequencing mu... more As music consumption as moved on to streaming platforms new modes of organizing and sequencing music have emerged. Particularly noteworthy is the dominance of the streaming playlist. This chapter charts the rise of the datafied playlist and argues that it is important to inquire into assumptions about the music listening subject and the social role of music that lay beneath the methods of playlist formation.

The Performance Complex: Competition and Competitions in Social Life, 2020

Big Data und Musik, 2019

This chapter explores how data is collected and used to personalise the listening experience on c... more This chapter explores how data is collected and used to personalise the listening experience on contemporary streaming platforms. Focusing on Spotify's 'Discover Weekly' feature and on the growing importance of context-aware recommendation systems, the chapter concludes by looking at some of the wider implications of 'datafication' for the future of music consumption and discovery.

A Networked Self and Birth, Life, Death, 2018

Prey and Smit outline the path of personal to personalized memory to explicate how memories rende... more Prey and Smit outline the path of personal to personalized memory to explicate how memories render a self networked. As practices of autobiographical memory are gradually embedded in platforms, in ways that suggest or, in the case of Facebook, remind us of past memories or moments, the two take a closer look at industries created around the business of organizing our memories for us. The practice of using technics to create records of memories is not new, and such forms of tertiary retention enabled through photographs, for instance, have been studied as mnemotechnics. Prey and Smit distinguish these practices from those afforded by mnemotechnologies to explain how control of one’s memories is ceded to an industry, which makes a profi t from the business of connecting one to one’s past. For the self, practices like composing a diary or a collection of photographs constitute part of sustaining a sense of self, and enabling the storytelling project of the self. As the two authors argue, by composing these diaries, we are also composing ourselves. By contrast, Facebook’s structure of offering reminders mimics the intimacy of a diary, but also suggests an already rendered composition for the networked self: “the writer of the diary is also the reader, but more importantly, the encoder is also the decoder.” Through these automated processes of personalization, we choose from sets of remediated memories of our own making presented via technologies that premediate, or anticipate our need for memorialization.

In Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval (Eds.), Critique, Social Media and the Information Society. Routledge, New York., 2014

As five young scholars from Europe and one from North America, we first met each other at a confe... more As five young scholars from Europe and one from North America, we first met each other at a conference in Uppsala, Sweden called “Critique, Democracy, and Philosophy in 21st Century Information Society. Towards Critical Theories of Social Media” (see http://www.icts-and-society.net/events/uppsala2012/). For us it was a new and inspiring experience to have discussions with other emerging critical scholars in an international context and to discover that cooperation through joint projects can be an appropriate answer to feelings of isolation and marginalisation. This chapter is a first outcome of our cooperation and reflects our subjective experiences and basic views as emerging scholars. In what follows, we first want to point to the value and the importance of a critical approach to informational capitalism (section 1). We then (section 2) identify principal challenges for critical thinking in today’s higher education sector and in section 3 we describe struggles against this situation and point to prospects that arise therein.

In this course, we will be examining cultural, technological, and political economic practices th... more In this course, we will be examining cultural, technological, and political economic practices that have come to shape the production and consumption of popular music. Drawing upon a number of theoretical positions, we will look at the competing discourses, subject positions, cultural practices and ideologies that surround popular music. From the 19th century virtuoso to the current era of transnational digital production and consumption, we will trace how industrial organization, aesthetics and imagery, social protest and resistance, technology and individual style have come to constitute popular music. The overall goal of this course is to provide students with a vocabulary and an interpretive framework to understand the global popular music industry and the variety of ways in which popular music is socially and culturally constructed.

This dissertation begins from the premise that Dallas Smythe’s attempt to develop a Marxist ‘mate... more This dissertation begins from the premise that Dallas Smythe’s attempt to develop a Marxist ‘materialist’ political economy of media remains a critically important - and unfinished - project. To-date, the debate has largely been concerned with locating the central commodity produced by ad-supported media. This commodity has been at various times identified as either ‘audiences’, ‘watching-time’, ‘ratings’, and more recently, ‘prosumers’ or ‘data’.

Building from the late philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s insight that Marxists have too often focused on the production of commodities in capitalist space, leaving them blind to the production of capitalist space itself, this dissertation proposes a different approach. Ad-supported media, I argue, generate rents from the spaces that are produced by media audiences/users around media content. The question of how ‘media space’ is produced and shaped by the stipulations of rent extraction is examined through a case study of the ad-supported music streaming sector. From terrestrial radio to P2P file sharing, music has long facilitated the production of mediated “social space”. Contemporary music streaming services such as Spotify, SoundCloud and Pandora Internet Radio, represent the latest attempt to transform the spaces of listeners into spaces of capital: what Lefebvre referred to as “abstract space”.

This dissertation investigates the perceived, conceived, and lived dimensions of the struggle to produce abstract space on music streaming platforms. In particular, the role played by data mining and analysis, as typified by the music intelligence company The Echo Nest, is examined. I argue that the drive to increase advertising revenues leads to the further segmentation and ordering of listeners and content, as sociability is turned upon itself to fulfill the dictates of capital. While social space is never entirely dissolved, abstract space increasingly shapes the potentialities of social space, as our examination of SoundCloud demonstrates.

In short, this dissertation develops an alternative materialist political economy of media that shifts focus from the production of commodities to the production of spaces. Music streaming services provide a window into the dynamic and unstable process through which mediated social space is made abstract in the commercial media economy.

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2021