SoundCloud and the social networks of electronic musicians: my talk at the Mitchell Centre, 16 June 2015

Last month, I was invited to speak at a Sociological Review symposium on Music and Social Networks, hosted by the Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis and organised by Nick Crossley, the author of Networks of sound, style, and subversion: the punk and post-punk worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975–80 (MUP, 2015). It was a brilliant event, and I wish I could have stayed for the whole thing. As I was extemporising from slides, I don’t have any proper notes to put up here – but I do at least have the livetweets. So here they are. They’re a pretty good record of a lot of my main points, provided you read ‘@dr_d_allington did X’ as ‘@dr_d_allington and his colleagues did X’ whenever the topic is music, and remember that those colleagues were the brilliant Anna Jordanous and Byron Dueck (or do I mean @annajordanous and @ByronRDueck?). I’ve inserted comments on the tweets where necessary.

For example, Anheier and Gerhards’s (1990) ‘Literary myths and social structure‘.

Now in press at Cultural Sociology! I signed the copyright form this week.

To clarify, this was something I did with the interactive fiction data and that we initially tried with the SoundCloud data. There were various reasons why we ended up analysing the latter in a different way.

Most of the interviews were actually done by Byron; Anna and I worked more on the quantitative data collection, although we all did some interviewing.

I.e. we collectively found this!

The research on music (as opposed to interactive fiction) is currently in press at Cultural Trends. Copyright form also signed this week.

London most of all, but also Los Angeles and New York. The notable thing is, these were the same three cities at the centre of the network of recording studios that Allan Watson uncovered behind the big hits of 2012 in the US, UK, and Australian download markets. Except that I didn’t know that until Allan got up to speak a little later. See below.

And this is where Allan tells me I can find the article with his social network analysis of recording and mastering studios (see above), later that afternoon:

Just in time for me to get a reference to it into the Cultural Trends article. Interestingly, the same troika of London, New York, and Los Angeles that appeared at the centre of ‘our’ social network of SoundCloud users and of Alan’s several social networks of recording studios turns out to be at the centre of Apple’s new online broadcasting initiative.

The blog post linked to here is an analysis of clusters in the network of SoundCloud cities, which got a little spike of interest thanks to the symposium:

Note troika.

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