Cultural Industries and Digital Platforms
Cultural Industries and Digital Platforms
A talk by David Hesmondhalgh (University of Leeds)
Friday, April 26 at 12:30 pm
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 635
The increasing power of streaming services as intermediaries to music and television content brings with it the increasing penetration of tech companies into the realm of culture. There are political-economic and moral-economic implications in terms of ownership of intellectual property, user privacy and questions of transparency. There are also cultural implications, including for example the increasing importance of music playlists, many of them ‘mood-driven’, and across music and television the use of algorithms to organize user ‘discovery’. This talk considers these developments and implications, and the degree to which they represent positive ones for those committed to cultural democracy.
David Hesmondhalgh is Professor of Media, Music and Culture in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. He is the author or editor of 11 books, including The Cultural Industries (4th edition, 2019), Why Music Matters (2013), Creative Labour (2010, with Sarah Baker) and Media and Society (6th edition, 2019, with James Curran).
Free and open to the public.