Authors
Massimo Airoldi, Davide Beraldo, Alessandro Gandini
Publication date
2016/8/31
Journal
Poetics
Volume
57
Pages
1-13
Publisher
North-Holland
Description
This article presents an exploratory study of the network of associations among 22,141 YouTube music videos retrieved by ‘following’ the platform’s recommender algorithm, which automatically suggests a list of ‘related videos’ to the user in response to the video currently being viewed. As YouTube’s recommendations are predominantly based on users’ aggregated practices of sequential viewing, this study aims to inductively reconstruct the resulting associations between the musical content in order to investigate their underlying meanings. Network analysis detects 50 clusters of tightly connected videos characterised by a strong internal homogeneity across different axes of similarity. We discuss these findings with reference to the literature on music genres and classification, arguing that the emerging clusters can be considered as ‘crowd-generated music categories’. That is, sets of musical content that derive …
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