The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Arnt Maasø, who shifts our attention to the role of metrics in the music business. Datafication has grown in the music industry as well, with a strong turn to metrics in recent years. Where some decades ago the industry was run by self-taught entrepreneurs who were running their businesses predominantly by gut instinct, now music metrics are everywhere and directly influence decision-making.

Arnt’s project conducted surveys and interviews with professionals in the Norwegian music industry. Almost half of the survey respondents use music metrics in their jobs, but such use is …

The final session at IAMCR 2019 for today starts with George Anghelcev, whose focus is on binge-watching. There has been a major shift over the last decade in how audiences view serialised video content, from being constrained to the regular timeslots for TV series to on-demand viewing of multiple episodes in single sittings. Some three quarters of U.S. TV consumers now binge-watch, and the numbers continue to rise – contrary to earlier news coverage, this is not a minority practice.

This is in part also because media narratives now portray binge-watching as a normal, ordinary, and widespread behaviour; however, differences …

Up next at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Tiziano Bonini and Alessandro Gandini, who are interested in ethnographic research in the age of platforms, even in spite of the black boxing strategies now employed by many platforms to protect themselves from scrutiny.

They apply this principally to the field of music streaming – where they were met with a total denial of access to the inner workings of the platform production and operation teams. In the face of such a rejection of access, how is it possible to conduct ethnographic research into these new places of cultural production?

First …

The second speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is William Moner, whose focus is on participatory media systems analysis, especially in relation to the political economy of communication. This is inspired by Vincent Mosco’s call for a bridge between political economics, communication studies, and cultural studies, as well as related fields.

Much of this has to do with how power is configured in certain spaces, and how control flows from such configurations. William points to a number of case studies from the area of digital storytelling across YouTube, blogs, and other platforms; these are variously major commercial, NGO-backed, or …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Ellis Jones, who focusses on the connections between context collapse and the imagined audience. Social media users navigate the challenge of context collapse by imagining an ideal audience for their content, and Ellis is exploring this especially in the context of DIY music content – but context collapse may also lead to the presence of an unimagined audience.

Offline, there has been a broad historical change in the boundary policing by DIY music scenes in the UK; this takes place in cooperatively run independent venues and creates a close-knit community while …

I missed most of the first talk in the post-lunch panel at AoIR 2018, but here we go with Sophie Bishop’s paper on sponsored content on YouTube, in the context of beauty vloggers. Fans of these vloggers generally understand that such content is often commercially sponsored and supported in some form; they are very active in policing vloggers’ behaviours, establishing appropriate boundaries of authenticity in this space.

Such boundary-setting takes place in a range of online fora away from YouTube itself; here, fans critique their influencers (sometimes quite harshly) and discuss the limitations and implications of commercial sponsorship …

The second speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Omar Daoudi, whose interest is in the Saudi government's reactions to YouTube content. This work covers the period of time between 2010 and 2016, after which there were also considerable changes in government policy.

Saudi Arabia's media system is closed to unauthorised companies; the state controls the media, and indeed by proxy also has substantial influence over pan-Arab media companies. This is also in line with the overall structure of the Saudi government itself, where the king continues to exercise nearly absolute power. However, at the same time senior princes in …

The final paper in this ANZCA 2017 session is presented by Caroline Fisher, whose focus is on Australian politicians' approaches to bypassing the scrutiny of the parliamentary press gallery. This is based on a set of 87 interviews with key media actors from the Howard era, including the former Prime Minister himself, as well as on an analysis of the social media activities of five Australian political leaders and interviews with their press secretaries.

Politicians have always sought to control the information flows that cover their activities; through social media they have become more easily able to bypass conventional journalistic …

The second speaker in this AoIR 2016 session is Fabio Giglietto, who shifts our focus to Netflix. This was launched in Italy in October 2015, and has become especially popular with young adults in the 18-24 age range. There has been a growth in the practice of binge-watching TV series as part of this adoption process, too – and other online video providers have also become available in Italy, along with unauthorised sources.

Italian users have been especially attracted by the content discovery features that Netflix provides – especially the algorithmic recommendations of new shows to watch based on …