Platformed How Streaming Algorithms And Artificial Intelligence Are Shaping Music Cultures

Grounded in more than a decade of field research, this book uses empirical examples, quantitative data, and qualitative interviews with young music consumers as well as music industry professionals to understand how the platforms behind music production, distribution and listening work in our digital society. Bringing together the perspectives from science and technology studies, media studies, and the political economy of digital platforms, the book outlines the process of mutual construction between music digital platforms and the cultural value of music in today’s society, and also reflects on the complicated relationship between the power of platforms and the agency of listeners.

Dive into the transformative world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with this comprehensive guide, which demystifies AI for readers of all backgrounds. Whether you're a curious newcomer, a seasoned professional, or someone in between, this book offers a panoramic view of AI's significance in our modern world, its foundational concepts, technological advancements, and its profound impact on our future. "Exploring Artificial Intelligence: A Comprehensive Guide to AI's Impact and Future" begins with an engaging preface that sets the stage for a deep dive into AI's essence, starting with its basic concepts, historical milestones, and evolutionary journey. The book unravels the complex tapestry of AI technologies and tools, providing readers with a clear understanding of key developments that have shaped AI into the powerhouse it is today. Part I of the book lays the groundwork by elucidating AI's fundamental principles. It offers a detailed exploration of its origins and the pivotal technologies that drive AI development. From machine learning to neural networks, get acquainted with the building blocks of AI and the tools that bring AI applications to life. Part II shifts focus to AI in practice, showcasing real-world applications and the transformative potential of AI across various industries. From enhancing business operations to revolutionizing healthcare and beyond, this section illustrates how AI is integrated into daily life and making an indelible mark on society. Part III delves into AI's societal impacts, addressing rapid AI advancement's ethical and societal implications. It navigates AI's challenges and opportunities, fostering a critical understanding of how AI influences ethical considerations, privacy, employment, and social justice. Part IV looks ahead to the future, preparing readers for an AI-driven world. It discusses the skills, knowledge, and adaptations necessary to thrive in an increasingly automated society. This forward-looking section speculates on emerging trends and potential directions of AI technology, emphasizing the importance of ongoing research, ethical development, and policy-making. The book's conclusion offers a reflective summary and a call to action, encouraging readers to engage with AI technology thoughtfully and responsibly. It underscores the need for a collective effort to shape an AI-enhanced future that is inclusive, ethical, and beneficial for all. "Exploring Artificial Intelligence: A Comprehensive Guide to AI's Impact and Future" is not just a book; it's an invitation to participate in the ongoing conversation about AI. It provides the tools, knowledge, and perspective to navigate the AI landscape with confidence, curiosity, and a sense of responsibility. With this enlightening guide, embrace the journey into AI and prepare to be amazed by AI's possibilities for our future.

“A brilliant travel guide to the coming world of AI.” —Jeanette Winterson What does it mean to be creative? Can creativity be trained? Is it uniquely human, or could AI be considered creative? Mathematical genius and exuberant polymath Marcus du Sautoy plunges us into the world of artificial intelligence and algorithmic learning in this essential guide to the future of creativity. He considers the role of pattern and imitation in the creative process and sets out to investigate the programs and programmers—from Deep Mind and the Flow Machine to Botnik and WHIM—who are seeking to rival or surpass human innovation in gaming, music, art, and language. A thrilling tour of the landscape of invention, The Creativity Code explores the new face of creativity and the mysteries of the human code. “As machines outsmart us in ever more domains, we can at least comfort ourselves that one area will remain sacrosanct and uncomputable: human creativity. Or can we?...In his fascinating exploration of the nature of creativity, Marcus du Sautoy questions many of those assumptions.” —Financial Times “Fascinating...If all the experiences, hopes, dreams, visions, lusts, loves, and hatreds that shape the human imagination amount to nothing more than a ‘code,’ then sooner or later a machine will crack it. Indeed, du Sautoy assembles an eclectic array of evidence to show how that’s happening even now.” —The Times

Digital technology has profoundly transformed almost all aspects of musical culture. This book explains how and why.

An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.

Algorithms: Technology, Culture, Politics develops a relational, situated approach to algorithms. It takes a middle ground between theories that give the algorithm a singular and stable meaning in using it as a central analytic category for contemporary society and theories that dissolve the term into the details of empirical studies. The book discusses algorithms in relation to hardware and material conditions, code, data, and subjects such as users, programmers, but also “data doubles”. The individual chapters bridge critical discussions on bias, exclusion, or responsibility with the necessary detail on the contemporary state of information technology. The examples include state-of-the-art applications of machine learning, such as self-driving cars, and large language models such as GPT. The book will be of interest for everyone engaging critically with algorithms, particularly in the social sciences, media studies, STS, political theory, or philosophy. With its broad scope it can serve as a high-level introduction that picks up and builds on more than two decades of critical research on algorithms.

Social media platforms hold vast amounts of data about our lives. Content from the past is increasingly being presented in the form of ‘memories’. Critically exploring this new form of memory making, this unique book asks how social media are beginning to change the way we remember.

From the punch card calculating machine to the personal computer to the iPhone and more, this in-depth text offers a comprehensive introduction to digital media history for students and scholars across media and communication studies, providing an overview of the main turning points in digital media and highlighting the interactions between political, business, technical, social, and cultural elements throughout history. With a global scope and an intermedia focus, this book enables students and scholars alike to deepen their critical understanding of digital communication, adding an understudied historical layer to the examination of digital media and societies. Discussion questions, a timeline, and previously unpublished tables and maps are included to guide readers as they learn to contextualize and critically analyze the digital technologies we use every day.