Online networks and the production of value in electronic music

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Cultural value is one of the areas in which (as the saying goes) perceptions are also realities. Thus, sociologists have argued that the production of cultural value is actually the production of a form of belief. Although popular accounts of how culture gets made tend to focus on brilliant individual creators, research has highlighted over and over again that their work typically emerges from a creative milieu, in which value (or belief in value) comes into existence. This arguably explains why cultural producers - musicians, artists, etc - are among the most committed audiences for cultural products, and why so many of them create work primarily for appreciation by other producers. This highlights the relationship between amateur, professional, and semi-professional cultural production, which is commonly assumed to have been transformed by Web 2.0 technologies that potentially making every internet user into a creator and publisher of digital content.This project will make an incisive contribution to our understanding of how culture and its value is produced in the digital age by focusing on a specific art form: music. We will gather evidence from the SoundCloud website, which many musicians use for commenting on one another's work. And we will focus on a specific genre that has a special relationship with that website, i.e. electronic music. We will identify as 'electronic music' all audio files that are identified by their creators with synonyms of or recognised genres of electronic music (to take just a few examples: dubstep, intelligent dance music, electronica, algorave, chiptune, electronic pop, live coding). Although many registered users of SoundCloud do not produce audio content, the website's original core users consisted of musicians - especially electronic musicians - who use it for commenting on one another's work. This project will study relationships between millions of users of that website, building a series of social network graphs to represent their evaluations of audio files uploaded by other users. Social network analysis provides mathematical ways of analysing peer esteem and reflecting the intuition that the opinion of a highly-regarded creator may have special impact: for example, in a social network diagram representing positive evaluations, more highly esteemed producers will occupy more central positions, with the most central positions being occupied by those who are esteemed by other highly esteemed producers. In order to enhance this analysis, we will not only study evaluations implied by 'likes' and 'follows' on the website, but also use computational linguistic analysis to study the kinds of language used in comments and identify whether a given comment is likely to be positive or negative. Moreover, we will observe and interview musicians in the real world in order to understand how they locate value in their relationships with one another, both online and off.Findings will be disseminated through a range of venues, including a public access event featuring lectures from academics who have carried out related studies and invited performances by musicians who have been studied. We will also write a public report explaining our findings to a general audience (including emerging musicians who may wish to understand the role that websites such as SoundCloud can play in building a career), and we will release the source code to all the applications we create, with full instructions that will enable other researchers (both inside and outside the university system) to adapt those applications to study data from other sources. Our website will include a blog providing progress updates, and knowledge will be further disseminated through professionally-produced audiovisual podcasts and press releases to specialist media.