ABSTRACT

Economic, cultural, social, and political life is being increasingly shaped by digital platforms including social networking sites (Facebook), streaming services (Netflix) and sharing platforms (AirBnB). While social scientists have tracked the rapid emergence of platforms and developed useful conceptualisations about what they are and how they operate, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the nature of platform competition or the experiences of users. To address these gaps, this paper focuses on the illustrative case of recorded music, where platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music, face intense competition due to similarities in price and content. Drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews, 20 app ‘walk-alongs’ with Spotify users and an analysis of 120 documents (industry reports, trade magazines, press releases and news articles), it demonstrates how the basis of competition has shifted from content, price and curation to the engineering of compelling experiences that harness the unique and interconnected affordances of platformisation. The paper nuances our understanding of the dynamic and contingent nature of platforms, the processes of datafication and curation underpinning their interventions in markets and everyday life, the geographies of these virtual distribution and consumption channels, and the ways in which users imagine, value, and experience music streaming platforms.

抽象的

经济，文化，社会和政治生活正日益受到包括社交网站（Facebook），流媒体服务（Netflix）和共享平台（AirBnB）在内的数字平台的影响。尽管社会科学家追踪了平台的迅速兴起，并就其概念及其运行方式提出了有用的概念，但令人惊讶的是，人们对平台竞争的性质或用户体验的关注却很少。为了解决这些差距，本文重点介绍录制音乐的示例，其中由于价格和内容的相似性，包括Spotify和Apple Music在内的平台面临激烈的竞争。利用42个半结构化的访谈，与Spotify用户进行的20个应用“遍历”以及对120份文档（行业报告，行业杂志，新闻稿和新闻文章）的分析，它展示了竞争的基础是如何从内容，价格和策展方式转变为引人入胜的体验工程的，这些体验利用了平台化的独特且相互联系的功能。本文细化了我们对平台的动态性和偶然性的理解，支持其在市场和日常生活中的干预的数据传播和管理过程，这些虚拟分销和消费渠道的地域以及用户的想象，价值和方式的理解。体验音乐流媒体平台。