[Commlist] CFP--Feminist and Critical Race Approaches to ‘Culture’ in Music Streaming Services--Society for Ethnomusicology Conference

*Call for Papers*

*
*

*Panel Proposal for the Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting*

*Ottawa, Canada October 22-25, 2020*

**

*Feminist and Critical Race Approaches to Analyzing the Emerging Role of 
‘Culture’ in Music Streaming Services*

**

Panel Organizer: Darci Sprengel, University of Oxford

Discussant: Kyra Gaunt, University at Albany

In September 2018, Spotify launched its ‘Global Cultures Initiative’, 
which it insisted would make it a ‘leader’ in the field of audio 
streaming by moving the platform beyond its traditional focus on North 
American and European musics to ‘promote and advance culturally diverse 
music’ (Spotify Newsroom 2018). As Spotify expanded to other regions, 
however, it met pushback from local rivals. For example, Anghami (‘my 
tunes’ in Arabic), founded in Lebanon in 2012 and known as ‘the Spotify 
of the Middle East’, claims to meet better the needs of Arab listeners. 
It boasts alternative algorithmic technologies with unique abilities to 
combine international and local sounds in ways it asserts listeners in 
the Middle East and Arab diaspora want to hear, making Anghami’s 
distinctly local knowledge its ‘sonic brand’. These trends indicate that 
music streaming services differentiate themselves not through the music 
they provide, but through the techniques they employ to mediate between 
users and music catalogue (Goldschmitt and Seaver 2019).

This panel investigates how notions of ‘local knowledge’ and ‘cultural 
specificity’ are at the forefront of this consideration.It questions how 
multinational corporations and the AI technologies they develop employ 
‘culture’ and to what ends. This is a critical consideration given the 
music industry’s problematic history in cultural appropriation and in 
perpetuating essentialized tropes of ‘cultural difference’ to market 
non-Western music. As scholarly analysis of the ‘World Music’ industry 
has demonstrated, these marketing techniques rely on racialized tropes 
that lead to unequal treatment of non-Western artists and persist even 
with the development of new sonic technologies (known as ‘World Music 
1.0’ and ‘2.0’) (see for instance Erlmann 1996; Taylor 1997; Feld 2000; 
Bohlman 2002; Novak 2011). For instance, as ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt 
has recently demonstrated, new media technologies such as YouTube 
perpetuate many of the same inequalities of old media, including the 
appropriation of black music and dance to the disproportionate benefit 
of large corporations and white audiences (Gaunt 2015).

Using feminist and critical race approaches to digital media, scholars 
such Safiya Umoja Noble, Lisa Nakamura, Kyra Gaunt and others have 
uncovered the seemingly invisible ways online platforms and AI 
technologies reinforce oppressive social relationships and racial 
profiling, deepening inequalities along lines of race and gender in the 
‘real’ (as opposed to virtual) world (Nakamura 2002, 2007; Gaunt 2015, 
‘Music, Misogynoir’ unpublished paper; Noble 2018). More research is 
needed on how context-based recommenders, an emerging technology that 
uses algorithms to recommend new music based on location, are formed 
through AI infrastructures that may perpetuate similar biases. By making 
assumptions about listeners based on ethnicity or location, or 
privileging the dissemination of some music over others, do these 
technologies signal the emergence of a ‘World Music 3.0’ or do they 
enact a different logic altogether? Addressing this question contributes 
to the fields of ethnomusicology, media studies, and the digital 
humanities by demonstrating how online /listening/ practices may be a 
new frontier, not only in psychographic data mining, but in the 
development of online infrastructures that enact what Noble calls 
‘algorithmic oppression’ (Noble 2018).

This panel seeks papers that address (but are not limited to) the following:

  * The branding, technologies, and marketing techniques employed by
    regionally focused music streaming platforms in the Global South,
    especially as they may compare to large, multinational platforms
    such as Spotify.
  * How users and musicians in particular communities/locations utilize
    music streaming platforms, including how regional platforms are
    situated within or engage local music scenes.
  * The role of ‘culture’ and ‘difference’ in the marketing and
    development of music streaming services, and how these notions
    engage inequalities of race, gender, sexuality, geography, and so on.
  * The role of listening in the development of algorithmic
    infrastructures, including what psychographic data emerges when
    technologies ‘learn’ how users listen.
  * What ethnomusicologists, and an analysis of music streaming
    platforms, might have to contribute to discourses on race and
    technology pioneered by scholars of color.
  * The possibilities and limitations for developing an /ethnographic
    /feminist and critical race approach to digital technologies,
    including ways to expand the scope and reach of emerging digital
    humanities methodologies through digital ethnographies of online
    listening, or a critical consideration of the limitations of such an
    approach.
Please send a title, 250-word abstract, and short bio to Darci Sprengel 
(darci.sprengel /at/ music.ox.ac.uk) <mailto:(darci.sprengel /at/ music.ox.ac.uk)>by 
*February 5, 2020*.

*Works Cited*

Bohlman, Philip V. 2002. /World Music: A Very Short Introduction/. 
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Erlmann, Veit. 1996. ‘The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: 
Reflections on World Music in the 1990s’. /Public Culture/ 8: 467-487.

Feld, Steven. 2000. ‘A Sweet Lullaby for World Music’. /Public Culture/ 
12 (1): 145-171.

Gaunt, Kyra D. 2015. ‘YouTube, Twerking, & You: Context Collapse and the 
Handheld Co-Presence of Black Girls and Miley Cyrus’. /Journal of 
Popular Music Studies/ 27 (3): 244-273.

______. ‘Music, Misogynoir, and Technology as a Weapon’. Unpublished 
paper, available at: https://albany.academia.edu/KyraGaunt

Goldschmitt, K.E. and Seaver, Nick. 2019. ‘Shaping the Stream: 
Techniques and Troubles of Algorithmic Recommendation’. In /The 
Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture/, edited by Nicholas 
Cook, Monique M. Ingalls, and David Trippett, 63-81. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.

Nakamura, Lisa. 2002. /Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the 
Internet/. London: Routledge.

______. 2007. /Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet/. 
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. /Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines 
Reinforce Racism/. New York: New York University Press.

Novak, David. 2011. ‘Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media’. /Public 
Culture/ 23 (3): 603-634.

/Spotify Newsroom/. 2018. ‘Discover Hits from Around the World with 
Spotify’s Global Cultures Initiative’. 28 September. 
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-09-28/discover-hits-from-around-the-world-with-spotifys-global-cultures-initiative/

Taylor, Timothy D. 1997. /Global Pop: World Music, World Markets/. 
London: Routledge.


---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------