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Turkish Radio and TV Broadcasting Corporation’s new streaming application and the continuity of music policy as an educational institution
Abstract
While numerous studies focus on streaming platforms as new business models or as novel elements in the supply chain, there is a notable gap in research addressing how streaming is operationalized within the context of state cultural policies. This study aims to fill this gap by conducting a preliminary examination of Turkish Radio and Television Broadcasting Corporation’s (TRT’s) digital transformation through its music streaming platform, TRT Listen. This research contributes to the international literature by highlighting various potential approaches to the digitalization of public radio broadcasting. This study, which examines the purpose and realization of TRT Listen, first provides a historical overview of TRT’s radio broadcasting and thus reveals the continuity in TRT’s cultural policy, which is shaped as a mission to educate the public and inculcate a national cultural identity, from radio broadcasting to the platform app. Two different research methods were used in this study: walk-through technique for the app and in-depth interviews with TRT’s staff and music industry representatives. The basic argument suggests that TRT Listen represents a continuation of historical music policies and nation state cultural agenda inherited from TRT’s radio era. However, at the operational level, this strategic continuity seems to disappear in the audience engagement techniques of digital platforms. The three main discussion sections of this article – TRT Listen’s strategic orientation, content curation and copyright management – reveal the platform’s mission to educate the public culturally in Turkey.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Yaren, Ö., Saracoglu, C., Karademir-Hazır, I. (2021) ‘The Quest for Cultural Power: Islamism, Culture, and Art in Turkey,’ in Joost Jongerden (ed.) The Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Turkey.
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Why does music listening in streaming services seem tied to a superstar economy despite the plenitude of digital music? This article explores what we label the streaming paradox: the way in which plenitude at the outset produces narrowness as the outcome. Based on dissection of the interfaces of streaming services, interviews with stakeholders, and analyses of user data, the article introduces six key gatekeeping mechanisms (and concepts) at work in the platforms. These mechanisms are combined effects of algorithmic coding, interface design, and human curation and choices and serve as explanations for the streaming paradox.
Bu çalışma, Türkiye’de Kore Dalgası ve K-pop karşıtlığının geleneksel medya metinlerinde ve Twitter ortamında dolaşıma sokulan #kpopyasaklansın ve #kpopyasaklansin etiketlerinde ne tür söylemsel mekanizmalar aracılığıyla şekillendiğini incelemektedir. Geleneksel medya metinlerinde, K-pop’a yönelik ahlaki paniğin, günah keçisi gösterme, korku yaratma, damgalama ve etiketleme gibi söylem mekanizmaları kullanılarak üretildiği; ‘salgın’ olarak K-pop, hegemonik erkeklik temsiline karşı tehdit ve yeni din olmak üzere üç alt temada bu karşıtlığın kurgulandığı örnekler üzerinden tartışılmaktadır. Bu kapsamda çalışmada Twitter Türkiye ortamından Nvivo12 ile 17-21 Haziran 2020 tarihleri arasında derlenen #kpopyasaklansın ve #kpopyasaklansin etiketleri altında dolaşıma sokulan gönderilere tematik içerik analizi uygulanmıştır. Gerek geleneksel medya metinlerinde gerekse Twitter’da yapılan kampanyada K-pop karşıtı söylemin, kültürel özcülükten, İslam dinini tektipleştirici bir şekilde yorumlamaktan, homofobi ile transfobiden beslendiği görülmüştür. Çalışmanın bir diğer bulgusu, Türkiye’deki K-pop hayranlarının #kpopyasaklansın etiketini, katılımcı kültürün bir özelliğini yaşama geçirerek trolledikleri gözlemidir. K-pop karşıtlığını yayan bir etiketin, hayranlar tarafından trollenmesi K-pop aktivizminin Türkiye’deki başarılı örneklerinden biri olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır.
Turkish rap music has dominated the scene since 2017. This transformation occurred very quickly. Turkish rap was pioneered by alienated Turkish immigrants in Germany. Initially, it served as a tool for self-expression and dissent from an underground position. Although political rap gained popularity for a short period during the Gezi protests, today’s rappers are turning into influencers rather than protestors and harming rap’s ability of social expression. This research focuses on Turkish rap music’s integration with the current capitalist industries by using the perspectives of both cultural studies and political economy through interviews with industry professionals and historical analysis.
This article examines the transformative effects of platforms on cultural production through an analysis of the LINE “super app.” Super apps are apps that do-everything; mega-platforms unto themselves. They are particularly prevalent in East Asia. Like China’s WeChat or South Korea’s KakaoTalk, Japan’s LINE has evolved from a single purpose chat app to the do-everything platform for everyday cultural and economic activities. It is also the very reason for the global proliferation of stickers or large-size emoji in other chat apps, from Apple’s iMessage to Facebook’s Messenger to Tencent’s WeChat. This article offers a close examination of LINE to highlight and theorize the process of the “platformization of cultural production.” To do so, it traces Japan’s longer history of platforms going back to the i-mode mobile platform launched in 1999, and examines LINE’s regionally specific sticker-oriented strategies in East Asia. With a focus on the entrepreneurial work of sticker designers as cultural producers, this article also mobilizes LINE to both highlight the specificities of this platform and contest the excessive attention paid to platforms from Silicon Valley, or, at best, their Chinese counterparts. LINE and the regional convergences of super apps in East Asia are a potent reminder of the need to analyze platforms outside of the bi-polar hegemony of the United States versus Chinese tech world—which increasingly frames journalistic discourse and academic research—and of the need to attend to the historical and regional particularities of platforms and their cultural impacts.
The intervention of digital service providers (DSPs) or platforms, such as Spotify Apple Music and Tidal, that supply streamed music has fundamentally altered the operation of copyright management organisations (CMOs) and the way song-writers and recording artists are paid. Platform economics has emerged from the economic analysis of two- and multi-sided markets, offering new insights into the way business is conducted in the digital sphere and is applied here to music streaming services. The business model for music streaming differs from previous arrangements by which the royalty paid to song-writers and performers was a percentage of sales. In the case of streamed music, payment is based on revenues from both subscriptions and ad-based free services. The DSP agrees a rate per stream with the various rights holders that varies according to the deal made with each of the major record labels, with CMOs, with representatives of independent labels and with unsigned artists and song-writers with consequences for artists’ earnings. The article discusses these various strands with a view to understanding royalty payments for streamed music in terms of platform economics, offering some data and information from the Norwegian music industry to give empirical support to the analysis.
This article studies creative labour in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises (SOCEs). Based on the empirical analysis of fieldwork data, it analyses the governmentality of creative labour in Chinese SOCEs through an investigation of the condition of autonomy and the discourse of self-realization within selected Chinese media companies. The autonomy of creative work within the system is made contingent by the party state’s ideological concern, while since the commercialization reform of SOCEs, creative workers are also expected to ‘be creative for the state’ under the discourse of self-realization. In practice, as the case of loafing on the job illustrates, the system causes marked contradictions that furnish creative individuals with possibilities to distance themselves from the expected subjectivity of ‘being creative for the state’. This article offers an exemplary case study of how the governance of creativity and creative labour works in Chinese SOCEs, and of how it distinguishes itself from the creativity dispositif in the West. It suggests that the theorization of creative labour needs to go beyond the western neoliberal perspective and take into account the diversity of socio-political contexts across the world.
Recent writings on the new media emphasise how the gateless and equalising nature of digital platforms have enabled freer circulation of cultural products around the world and increased the global visibility and popularity of non-Western media content, including popular music products. These writings, however, fail to account for the intermediary role of market participants in patterning the specific consumption and circulation of products. This paper thus comparatively examines the rise and circulation of three East Asian popular musics, J-pop, C-pop and K-pop, and how their differential spread and success have been achieved on the basis of distinctly elaborated organisational strategies in the midst of rising digitisation. The article argues that industry participants of the three East Asian locations, embedded within their respective historical, social and market environments, strategised their courses of actions differently to elaborate distinct models of musical production and circulation. The author conceptualizes each operational model as 'niche', 'ethnic' and 'global', respectively.
Software applications (apps) are now prevalent in the digital media environment. They are the site of significant sociocultural and economic transformations across many domains, from health and relationships to entertainment and everyday finance. As relatively closed technical systems, apps pose new methodological challenges for sociocultural digital media research. This article describes a method, grounded in a combination of science and technology studies with cultural studies, through which researchers can perform a critical analysis of a given app. The method involves establishing an app’s environment of expected use by identifying and describing its vision, operating model and modes of governance. It then deploys a walkthrough technique to systematically and forensically step through the various stages of app registration and entry, everyday use and discontinuation of use. The walkthrough method establishes a foundational corpus of data upon which can be built a more detailed analysis of an app’s intended purpose, embedded cultural meanings and implied ideal users and uses. The walkthrough also serves as a foundation for further user-centred research that can identify how users resist these arrangements and appropriate app technology for their own purposes.
“Welcome to the uncertain world of ““Radio 2.0””—where podcasts, mobile streaming, and huge music databases are the new reality, as are tweeting deejays and Apple’s Siri serving as music announcer—and understand the exciting status this medium has, and will continue to have, in our digitally inclined society.
How did popular radio in past decades—from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ““Fireside Chats”” in the 1930s through Top 40 music and Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio empire—shape American society? How did devices and systems like the iPhone, Pandora, and YouTube turn the radio industry upside-down? Does radio still have a future, and if so, what will we want it to look like?
Radio 2.0: Uploading the First Broadcast Medium covers the history and evolution of Internet radio, explaining what came before, where Internet radio came from, and where it is likely headed. It also gives readers a frame of reference by describing radio from its introduction to American audiences in the 1920s—a medium that brought people together through a common experience of the same broadcast—and shows how technologies like digital music and streaming music services put into question the very definition of ““radio.”” By examining new radio and media technologies, the book explores an important societal trend: the shift of media toward individualized or personalized forms of consumption.”
This study analyses the public service broadcast terrain within a changing sector that is driven by digital media convergence using the case of the BBC Sounds. From the findings, we demonstrate that the BBC Sounds promotes the idea of a visible media, an inter-medial platform providing agency to some of its listeners as they choose what content they want to listen to, while questioning whether this new streaming service offers more control than choice. In this study we identify issues surrounding accessibility for all when exploring on-demand content, and what impact this has on the public. Finally, we highlight the blurring of podcasts and radio and whether all live radio shows become, or risk becoming, podcasts.
This article investigates algorithms and their construction of cultural taste through a socio-technical analysis of the Netflix Recommender System. I examined the key algorithmic processes in the intersection of its technological infrastructure, cultural processes, and social relations by employing Taina Bucher’s three methodological tactics for ‘unknowing’ algorithms. Drawing from media logic and computational logic, I propose the concept of ‘algorithmic logics’ to define the assumptions, processes, and mechanisms that govern the construction of taste within the Netflix platform. I identified these four logics of taste – datafication, reconfiguration, interpellation, and reproduction – and argue that they reappropriate old apparatuses of social control and generate new capacities in engineering cultural processes. Together, these logics transform algorithms from procedural to self-generative machines in the guise of algorithmic objectivity, user agency, and post-demographic experiences. Algorithmic logics function as an ‘interpretative schema’ in making sense algorithms in their entanglement with social actors, institutions, and infrastructures.
In contrast with radio broadcasting, which began in 1927, television started remarkably late in Turkey. When the country’s sole public service broadcaster, Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), was established in 1964 and all of the radio transmitters were transferred to the Corporation, even radio broadcasting was not successfully institutionalized to catch up with its Western counterparts. For a very young Republic like Turkey, radio was an integral part of the modernization and nation-building agenda of the early ruling elite and therefore it institutionalized as a part of the machinery of the state, under very strict state control. Much known indispensable merits of autonomy and independence attributed to the historical public service broadcasting model in Europe were hardly appreciated and supported in Turkey. Television broadcasting also had its share from this negative perception and had to face similar obstructions as radio from the beginning. This chapter traces the history of content regulation in television broadcasting by situating the political controversies at the center at different times from the 1960s until today. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun, not in Turkey.
In 2018, the BBC announced plans to replace their long-established ‘iPlayer Radio’ service with a new platform called BBC Sounds. The new service was promoted as a single space where listeners can consume BBC radio, music and podcasts, creating a single point of interaction between audiences and content. This is, however, far more than an exercise in reframing public service radio content in a new app; it is also a practical application of these policies through the commissioning of content made for online, specifically, younger, audiences. This shift happens not only at a time where traditional broadcasters are exploring ways to re-engage younger listeners but as commentators search for the ‘Netflix of Podcasts’ This article explores the manner in which the BBC Sounds project is a response to current trends in the radio industry and to which it recognizes podcasting as an audio medium that is distinct from but institutionally connected to radio.
This article provides useful insights on the perception of TRT 6 (TRT Kurdî) by Turkey’s Kurdish community regarding TV broadcast in mother tongue. The research environment of the study is Kurdish citizens who live in both south-east and west regions of Turkey. TRT 6 is a sub-channel of state TV (Turkish Radio and Television Corporation) and mainly broadcasts in the Kurmanci dialect of the Kurdish language. The results of the study show the fact that those who define themselves primarily as Kurdish – as opposed to Muslim – reject TRT 6 (and especially criticize its news coverage), and Kurds who see themselves primarily as Sunni Muslims watch it with pleasure, implying that the channel serves as a tool in ‘Turkifying’ the Kurds of Turkey through a common religious identity.
Automated recommendation systems now occupy a central position in the circulation of media and cultural products. Using music as a test case, this article examines the use of algorithms and data mining techniques for the presentation and representation of culture, and how these tools reconfigure the process of cultural intermediation. Expanding Bourdieu’s notion of cultural intermediaries to include technologies like algorithms, I argue that an emerging layer of companies – call them infomediaries – are increasingly responsible for shaping how audiences encounter and experience cultural content. Through a critical analysis of The Echo Nest, a music infomediary whose databases underpin many digital music services, I trace the shift from intermediation to infomediation and explore what is at stake at the intersection of data mining, taste making and audience manufacture. The new infomediary logics at work are computational forms of power that shape popular culture and highlight the social implications of curation by code.
This article explores the impact of the Internet on the supply chain for music. Music is a massive global industry worth $38 billion annually. The global music industry is dominated by the “big five” major record companies. However, as this article will show, the advent of the Internet is having a significant impact on both the supply chain for music and the dominance of the big record labels. The article begins by describing the background to our research and the methods employed. It then goes on to examine how the Internet is transforming the supply chain for music. This is followed by a discussion of the impact of piracy on the music industry. The article concludes by arguing that while the future may look bleak for the major record labels, it looks much more positive for artists and consumers.
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is a full time professor of communication and new media studies and head of Radio Television and Cinema Department at Hacettepe University
- Mutlu Binark
Mutlu Binark, Ph.D., is a full time professor of communication and new media
studies and head of Radio Television and Cinema Department at Hacettepe
University. Her research and publications focus on new media, cultural policies, new media and digital inclusion.
is an assistant professor faculty of fine arts, design and architecture in the Department of Film Design at Başkent University. His research and publications focus on creative industries (CI) and creative labour
- M Erman
- Ph D Demir
Erman M. Demir, Ph.D., is an assistant professor faculty of fine arts, design
and architecture in the Department of Film Design at Başkent University. His
research and publications focus on creative industries (CI) and creative labour.
Contact: Başkent Üniversitesi, Bağlıca Kampüsü Fatih Sultan Mahallesi,
Eskişehir Yolu 18.km TR 06790, Etimesgut Ankara/Türkiye.
E-mail: medemir@baskent.edu.tr
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7123-5742
Contact: Ankara Bilim Üniversitesi, Maltepe Mahallesi Şehit Gönenç Caddesi No: 5 Çankaya Ankara/Türkiye. E-mail: serra.sezgin@ankarabilim
- Ph D Serra Sezgin
Serra Sezgin, Ph.D., is an assistant professor and head of the New Media and
Communication Department at Ankara Science University since 2020. Her
research and publications focus on new media, CI, labour and game studies.
Contact: Ankara Bilim Üniversitesi, Maltepe Mahallesi Şehit Gönenç Caddesi
No: 5 Çankaya Ankara/Türkiye.
E-mail: serra.sezgin@ankarabilim.edu.tr
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8737-515X
Serra Sezgin and Gökçe Özsu have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
- Mutlu Binark
- M Erman
- Demir
Mutlu Binark, Erman M. Demir, Serra Sezgin and Gökçe Özsu have asserted
their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified
as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.