“Now Playing. You”: Big Data and the Production of Music Streaming Space. by Robert Prey M.A. (Communication), Simon Fraser University, 2005 B.A., University of Windsor, 2001 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Communication Faculty of Communication, Art, and Technology Robert Prey 2015 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Fall 2015 Approval Name: Robert Prey Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (Communication) Title: “Now Playing. You”: Big Data and the Production of Music Streaming Space. Examining Committee: Chair: Robert Hackett Professor Yuezhi Zhao Senior Supervisor Professor Rick Gruneau Supervisor Professor Enda Brophy Supervisor Assistant Professor Andrew Feenberg Internal Examiner Professor Mark Andrejevic External Examiner Associate Professor Media Studies Pomona College Date Defended/Approved: Nov 3, 2015 ii Ethics Statement iii Abstract 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. Keywords: audience commodity; labour; rent; value; abstract space; social space; music streaming. iv Table of Contents Approval................................................................................................................ ii Ethics Statement…............................................................................................... iii Abstract ................................................................................................................ iv Contents .................................................................................................................v Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 Case Study: Music Streaming Services ................................................................ 8 Outline of Chapters ........................................................................................... 12 Chapter 1. Reloading Smythe ......................................................................... 16 Adorno’s ‘Little Annie’ ..................................................................................... 16 What do Media Produce?: Dallas Smythe and the Audience Commodity .......... 18 The Prosumer/Data Commodity ....................................................................... 23 The Music Data Commodity: Pandora Internet Radio ....................................... 27 Labour: ‘Digital’ and ‘Free’ .............................................................................. 33 Chapter 2. The ‘Labour’ of Listening ........................................................... 37 Mixing: The ‘Labour’ of Programming and Generating Playlists ...................... 38 Tagging: The ‘Labour’ of Organizing Music .................................................... 44 Sharing: The ‘Labour’ of Marketing Music ...................................................... 48 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 51 Chapter 3: Critique of the Listener-as-Prosumer/Data Commodity ............ 53 Leisure as/or Labour? ........................................................................................ 54 Problematizing Audience Value Production....................................................... 58 Personal Data as Fictitious Commodity ............................................................. 64 The ‘Ratings Commodity’ ................................................................................. 67 Conclusion: Towards an Alternative Materialist Theory ................................... 71 Chapter 4: Towards an Alternative Materialist Theory: The Media Space- Rent Economy ............................................................................ 81 Cognitive Capitalism and the ‘Becoming-Rent of Profit’ ................................... 81 Marx’s Theory of Rent: Absolute Rent, Differential Rent I, Differential Rent II, and Monopoly Rent .................................................................................. 84 The Media Rent Economy ................................................................................. 88 Media Space ...................................................................................................... 94 v Chapter 5: The Production of Media Space .................................................. 99 Lefebvre and Spatial Trialectics .......................................................................104 Social and Abstract Space ................................................................................111 Chapter 6: From Social to Abstract Space ...................................................116 Radio Social Space ..........................................................................................117 Measure and the Production of ‘Abstract’ Radio Space ....................................123 Social and Abstract Radio Space: An Ongoing Struggle ...................................128 The Social Space of Napster .............................................................................130 File Sharing Surveillance .................................................................................133 BigChampagne .................................................................................................134 Producing Abstract Space on Music Streaming Services: The Echo Nest ..........139 Matching Audiences with Ads .......................................................................144 Pandora Internet Radio .....................................................................................147 Measuring Music: The Music Genome Project ..............................................148 Building Ad Spaces ......................................................................................153 Political Ad Targeting ...................................................................................155 Conclusion: Beyond the Enclosure Analogy .....................................................157 Chapter 7: The Trialectics of Music Streaming Space .................................164 Space as Perceived ...........................................................................................165 Space as Conceived .........................................................................................172 Space as Lived .................................................................................................179 SoundCloud: An Introduction ...........................................................................189 From ‘Classic’ to ‘Next SoundCloud’: Perceived and Conceived Dimensions of a Becoming-Abstract Space ...........................................................................192 Resistance through “Lived Space” .................................................................203 Conclusion .......................................................................................................206 Conclusion: Big Data and the Production of Music Streaming Space .........209 References .......................................................................................................222 vi Introduction One of the central disputes of the infamous cultural studies versus political economy debates of the 1990s