Robert Prey
Dr. Robert Prey is a Research Fellow at Green Templeton College and Associate Professor of Digital Culture at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Dr. Prey studies the relationship between technology, capitalism and culture. His research and writings have included work on the social and cultural implications of algorithmic recommendation systems and the interdependent processes of ‘datafication’ and ‘platformization’. His current focus is the creative labour of musicians as they adapt to online platforms. Dr. Prey is principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded project “The Platformization of Music: Towards a Global Theory” (2023-2028), which is hosted at the University of Groningen, NL. The project investigates how streaming and social media platforms influence the creative practices, identities, and working conditions of musicians in the Netherlands, Nigeria and South Korea.
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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.
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.
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.