Let’s talk about money, data, and platform-dependent cultural production
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24137/raeic.12.24.1Keywords:
platforms, cultural production, political economy, streaming, mobile gamesAbstract
This essay investigates the political economy of platform-dependent cultural production, focusing on music streaming, mobile games, and short-form video. While platforms still present themselves as democratizing tools, access to the means of production is decoupled from equitable opportunities for distribution, marketing, and monetization. The essay walks through studies that discuss this dynamic such as researchers counting songs on Spotify playlists, app store revenues, or using large-scale datasets of views on TikTok. The old blockbuster logic is alive and well, whether in 30-second TikTok clips or mobile games that rake in millions. To conceptualize these examples, the essay advances the heuristic of ‘platform dependency.’ By situating these patterns within longer histories of digitization, the essay underscores continuities alongside novel platform-specific asymmetries. It ends with a call for renewed scholarly attention to the flow of money and data across geographies and media industry sectors.
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