Engineering culture: logics of optimization in music, games, and apps

ABSTRACT

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 policies by manipulating algorithms, business models, and guidelines, or otherwise readying their content for optimal circulation on multiple platforms. Through comparative cases of music, games, and apps that draw on trade press and industry discourse, institutional and financial analysis, and select interviews with musicians, we consider various forms of, and strategies for, what we call cultural optimization. We draw on these instances to better understand the similarities and differences in the optimization of cultural content and metadata for economic or cultural gains. We hope our comparative approach reveals different conceptions of the term optimization, and that this term—in all its digital, financial, and cybernetic connotations—might prompt new ways of thinking about the interactions between content, (meta)data, platforms, and culture that have long shaped the circulation of cultural goods.

KEYWORDS:

• cultural optimization
• platformization
• music
• games
• apps

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank this themed issue's Guest Editors, Fenwick McKelvey and Joshua Neves, for their guidance and feedback; thanks also to the others who reviewed and worked on this text. David thanks Rob. Rob thanks Jeremy. Jeremy thanks David.

Notes

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9 Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet; Gorwa, “What Is Platform Governance?”; Nieborg and Poell, “The Platformization of Cultural Production.”

10 Nieborg and Poell, “The Platformization of Cultural Production.”

11 Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London: Routledge, 1999).

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13 McKelvey and Hunt, “Discoverability,” 1.

14 David Beer, Metric Power (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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17 Morris, “Music Platforms and the Optimization of Culture.”

18 Though, see Hubert Léveillé Gauvin, “Drawing Listener Attention in Popular Music: Testing Five Musical Features Arising from the Theory of Attention Economy,” Musicae Scientiae 22, no. 3 (2018): 291–304.

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23 Malcolm Manswell, quoted in Leight, “Why Are Albums So Long Right Now?”

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26 Emanuele Arielli, “Taste and the Algorithm,” Studi Di Estetica, no. 12 (2018): http://mimesisedizioni.it/journals/index.php/studi-di-estetica/article/view/628. They are interdependent because content first needs to be found to be engaged with, while at the same time algorithms are designed to surface content that is more deeply engaged with.

27 Ibid., 79.

28 Daniel Ek, quoted in John Seabrook, “Revenue Streams: Is Spotify the Music Industry's Friend or Its Foe?” New Yorker, November 17, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/revenue-streams.

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34 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), 86.

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36 Stuart Dredge, “AI Music Reveals Its Plans for ‘Shape-Changing Songs,’” Music Ally, August 8, 2017, https://musically.com/2017/08/08/ai-music-shape-changing-songs/; Thomas Poell et al., “The Platformization of Cultural Production” (panel, Association of Internet Researchers Annual Conference, Tartu, Estonia, October 19, 2017).

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39 Morris, “Music Platforms and the Optimization of Culture,” 3.

40 Nieborg and Poell, “The Platformization of Cultural Production,” 4277.

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43 Arielli, “Taste and the Algorithm.”

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50 “iPhone App Store Downloads Top 10 Million in First Weekend,” Apple Newsroom, July 14, 2008, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2008/07/14iPhone-App-Store-Downloads-Top-10-Million-in-First-Weekend/; “Apple's App Store Downloads Top 15 Billion,” Apple Newsroom, July 7, 2011, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/07/07Apples-App-Store-Downloads-Top-15-Billion/.

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53 Sarah Perez, “ASO (App Store Optimization) Is the New SEO, and Here's a Tool to Do It,” TechCrunch, February 28, 2012, https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/28/aso-app-store-optimization-is-the-new-seo-and-heres-a-tool-to-do-it/.

54 Ibid.

55 Lee Wilson, “A Complete Guide to App Store Optimization (ASO),” Search Engine Journal, March 14, 2018, https://www.searchenginejournal.com/app-store-optimization-how-to-guide/241967/#close.

56 Lauren Goode, “App Store 2.0: The App Store Changed the Way We Buy Software. Can Apple Do It Again?” The Verge, June 8, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/8/11880730/apple-app-store-subscription-update-phil-schiller-interview; “Search Ads on Google Play and New App Promo Tools Roll Out to Advertisers and Developers,” Google Inside AdWords, July 29, 2015, https://adwords.googleblog.com/2015/07/launching-search-ads-on-play.html.

57 Sophie Bishop, “Managing Visibility on YouTube through Algorithmic Gossip,” New Media & Society 21, nos. 11–12 (2019): 2589–606.

58 Josh Kocaurek, “Deconstructing the App Store Ranking Algorithms [Infographic],” Appsposure, August 3, 2017, https://appsposure.com/app-store-ranking-algorithms/.

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61 Beer, Metric Power, 128.

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63 Nieborg and Poell, “The Platformization of Cultural Production.”