Overview

How do digital technologies transform music? The answer depends on the lens of one's analysis: creation, promotion, or the experience of the listener. How Music Changed YouTube shows that the reverse question – How does music transform digital technologies? – is also worth exploring: through reliance on sound recording and music, internet technologies and media are manufactured, transformed, and come to dominate. Guillaume Heuguet's study situates YouTube in relation to both the internet platform and music industries by unpacking the cultural and technological forms embedded within and observing the practices and values associated with it, from the art of collecting to the accelerated circulation of samples and remixes. Heuguet's documentary and genealogical work relies on YouTube's traces in internet archives, its successive interfaces, the blogs of its teams, and a few emblematic channels and videos. Particular attention is paid to the tensions between the promises associated with music algorithms - recommendation system, copyright control, view calculation - and the reality of their operation from a technical and cultural point of view. How Music Changed YouTube shows how, far from responding to an immediate need, YouTube's editorial and economic model developed over time, how the various fans, artists, labels, lawyers and legislators shaped the site, and how these factors affected its rise as a global media force in the early 21st century.

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Guillaume Heuguet has written the best book on Youtube and on internet music platforms I have seen to date. The research is exhaustive, drawing on a breathtaking range of sources. The analysis is rigorous, in the best traditions of cultural industry scholarship, and full of ideas both original and stimulating. This book is a major contribution to several fields, from popular music studies through internet and platform studies and cultural research more generally. * Will Straw, Professor of Urban Media Studies, McGill University, Canada *

Author Information

Guillaume Heuguet is a Professor of Contemporary Art and Art History at ESACM (Clermont-Ferrand), France, and the Editor-in-Chief of Audimat, a French journal of music criticism. He holds a PhD in media studies from the School of Higher Studies in Communication (CELSA), Sorbonne University, France, and has edited for Paris' Philharmonic Penser les musiques populaires, the first French reader on popular music studies.

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