Robert Prey

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of Oxford

The voice biometrics industry is promised today as a new center of digital innovation. Tech companies and state agencies are massively investing in speech recognition and analysis systems, pushed by the belief that the acoustics of voice contain unique individual characteristics to convert into information and value through artificial intelligence....

This article examines how independent musicians in South Korea adapt to digital platforms. The Korean music industry provides a valuable case study because platformization, vertical integration, and what we call "platform closure" occurred earlier and to a significantly greater degree than in the West. This has resulted in Korean indie musicians mi...

There is a major blindspot regarding our understanding of different structural models of platformization beyond the dominant Anglo-American markets. This article develops a typology of political economic models of platformization by using the case of music platformization. In order to generate such a typology, the article proposes that we start by...

Our lives are increasingly mediated, regulated and produced by algorithmically-driven software; often invisible to the people whose lives it affects. Online, much of the content that we consume is delivered to us through algorithmic recommender systems (“recommenders”). Although the techniques of such recommenders and the specific algorithms that u...

This article investigates the ways content producers, marketers, and other promotional stakeholders work to optimize cultural goods and services for platform-dependent production, distribution, and monetization. We are particularly interested in how content creators find novel ways to work within, around, and even against platform politics and poli...

As music consumption as moved on to streaming platforms, new modes of organizing and sequencing music have emerged. Particularly noteworthy is the dominance of the streaming playlist. This chapter charts the rise of the datafied playlist and argues that it is important to inquire into assumptions about the music listening subject and the social rol...

This chapter explores the implications of performance metrics as a source of self-knowledge and self-presentation. It does so through the figure of the contemporary musician. As performers on-stage and online, musicians are constantly assessed and evaluated by industry actors, peers, music fans, and themselves. The impact of powerful modes of quant...

This chapter explores the implications of performance metrics as a source of self-knowledge and self-presentation. It does so through the figure of the contemporary musician. As performers on-stage and online, musicians are constantly assessed and evaluated by industry actors, peers, music fans, and themselves. The impact of powerful modes of quant...

It has been widely recognized that platforms utilize their editorial capacity to transform the industries they intermediate. In this paper, we examine the intermediary role of the leading audio streaming platform – Spotify – on the recorded music industry. Spotify is often called the ‘new radio’ for the influence it has on breaking songs and artist...

Where does the “power” of platformization reside? As is widely recognized, platforms are matchmakers which interface between different markets or “sides.” This article analyzes platform power dynamics through three of the most important markets that Spotify—the leading audio streaming platform—is embedded within: the music market; the advertising m...

By first revisiting the design of Amsterdam's famed 'Concertgebouw', this article reflects on the implications of streaming services on current and future cultures of listening, and on the agency and autonomy of practicing musicians.

In diesem Kapitel wird untersucht, wie Daten gesammelt und verwendet werden, um das Hörerlebnis auf modernen Streaming-Plattformen zu personalisieren. Mit dem Fokus auf Spotifys Discover Weekly-Feature und der wachsenden Bedeutung von kontextsensitiven Empfehlungssystemen schließt das Kapitel abschließend einige der umfassenden Auswirkungen von Dat...

Prey and Smit outline the path of personal to personalized memory to explicate how memories render a self networked. As practices of autobiographical memory are gradually embedded in platforms, in ways that suggest or, in the case of Facebook, remind us of past memories or moments, the two take a closer look at industries created around the busines...

Raymond Williams once wrote, ‘… there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses’. In an age of personalized media, the word ‘masses’ seems like an anachronism. Nevertheless, if Williams were to study contemporary online platforms, he would no doubt conclude that there are in fact no individuals, but only ways of seeing people...

This panel focuses on an emerging set of techno-economic relations reshaping cultural production and networked publics. In a growing number of industry segments—from journalism to games and from music to video and fashion—cultural entrepreneurs are finding audiences and advertisers on and via digital platforms. In response, they are reorienting the...

In this chapter, Robert Prey explores what he calls the datafication of listening. On contemporary music streaming services, every song we listen to, every song we skip, every thumb up or thumb down, is tracked and fed into an algorithm. Prey provides a detailed description of how data is collected and used to personalise the listening and advertis...

Fuchs (2010, 2012) argues that users of social media produce value and surplus value in the Marxian sense. Arvidsson and Colleoni (2012) critique this hypothesis, claiming that Marx’s theory of value is irrelevant to the regime of value production on social media platforms in particular and in informational capitalism in general. They claim that th...

The ‘network metaphor’ impoverishes our understanding of power. Its binary logic of inclusion/exclusion leaves it blind to relations of exploitation. However, instead of ideological critique – the standard Marxist approach - this paper reconstructs Marx’s theory of exploitation from a common “process-relational ontology” that is shared by both netw...

The 'network metaphor' impoverishes our understanding of power. Its binary logic of inclusion/exclusion leaves it blind to relations of exploitation. However, instead of ideological critique - the standard Marxist approach - this paper reconstructs Marx's theory of exploitation from a common "process-relational ontology" that is shared by both netw...

The geography of multiculturalism has expanded beyond western settler societies and post-colonial Europe, the traditional focus of most research on the topic. South Korea, once one of the most ethnically homogenous nations in the world, has recently adopted multiculturalism as official policy in order to manage a still small but rapidly growing pop...

This paper examines the circulation, popularization and utilization of revolutionary ideologies within the South Korean student movement since 1980.