Data Usage

In the 6th lesson of CIU111, the class was based on the topic of Data, and how it is used to market to people online.

In the 6th lesson of CIU111, the class was based on the topic of Data, and how it is used to market to people online.

Some examples were shown such as Spotify using collected data from users to advertise on billboards in creative ways, to creative projects being based entirely on using Data, such as an interactive music video. This Lesson was relevant to my career as I may potentially being trying to market something in the future, and though I don’t plan on doing marketing specifically, it's good to have some idea of what is happening. One thing in particular that stood out to me as something that I could look into, is exactly how much does the sites I use know about me? It’s already known that they are collecting data, but where is the line drawn? I would like to know and investigate what information the Internet and sites we use everyday is taking from us. To make this more specific to me and my career, is there a way that this information can affect the audio or music industry

Off the top of my head, there is actually an instance where I participated in a project that was based of Data being collected,

The promotional video for the song ‘Kilo’ by Light Light, involved an interactive video where each users mouse was recorded and added to the screen to show statistics. Certain questions came up such as: Where are you from? What Gender are you? Etc.

You can see in the video, and the website is still currently working, adding new data that you can participate in. (Moniker, 2013)

You can try it here!:

http://donottouch.org/

I did some research to find out the different ways the websites are collecting our data, and to many, invading our privacy.

The main two that most people think of straight away are Google and Facebook, but it seems that pretty much every major website is taking data and using it without permission.

According to Nicky Woolfe of The Guardian, In 2015, Yahoo! secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information at the request of US intelligence officials (Woolf, 2016) . The information was allegedly leaked from former Yahoo Employees who claimed “that the company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI” (Menn, 2016)

Daniella Capodilupo quotes in their thesis ‘BIG DATA AND ANALYTICS: THE FUTURE OF MUSIC MARKETING’: “Social Media analytics have opened the door for record labels, musicians, and others in the music industry to collect different information to determine what consumers will most likely spend their money on. Facebook and Twitter have allowed fans to like, follow, and talk and comment freely with their peers about their favorite, or least favorite,

artists and bands (Capodilupo, 2015).

That being said, Here is something that the internet is collecting from us that I particularly found interesting:

As many would know, Google Maps has a feature called Streetview. Streetview allows users to drop a marker on a street in a city, and get a panoramic 360 view of what is on it at the time of capture.

However, it was discovered in 2010 that the Google not only uses its beloved street view cars to collect panoramic shots of the world, it is actually detecting wifi domains and stealing information from us, such as emails, passwords, images and documents (Streitfeld, 2013) (Kiss, 2010).

This was quite a controversy for google at the time, and in their defense they stated that It was unintentional and that a large majority of personal information was not taken, however research shows that instances like this have occurred multiple times in the past with google, making them hard to trust by many ("Google faces wi-fi snooping action", 2013).

With these big companies such as google storing all of our information, they often sell them so that suitable advertisements are suggested for the right audiences.

You can find out what Google is advertising via what interests it detects for you here:

https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated

It’s even believed by some that Facebook is listening to you even while having the app on your phone closed:

Okay, so this is just one of the many examples of how data is sold and used to advertise online, but how can this be applied in the audio industry and what does it mean to me?

Lets link it back to my first example of using data in advertising, the Spotify billboard. In particular, let's look at the billboard that says “To the person who played sorry 42 times on Valentines Day, What did you do?” This suggests that Spotify uses seasons to direct certain songs. It had me thinking how much of a market there is for seasons in the creative Industry, and in the Music Industry… People clearly like to be festive, so if I were releasing lets say a really romantic song I might decide to release it on Valentines Day, where people are more likely in the mood to buy it.

Just think of Christmas Music, According to Officialcharts.com: The 2nd Most Sold song in the UK of all time is “Do they know it’s Christmas?” by Band Aid, The 12th most sold is “Last Christmas” by WHAM! (Myers, 2018)

By knowing this information, maybe when in doubt, make a Christmas song? I mean people seem to be buying them so?

But maybe we could apply this psychology to other factors of the music industry, and by using collected data we can get better ideas of more specific information, just maybe not on a google level.

References Capodilupo, D. (2015). BIG DATA AND ANALYTICS: THE FUTURE OF MUSIC MARKETING. [online] Available at: https://fau.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fau%3A31270/datastream/OBJ/view/Big_data_and_analytics__the_future_of_music_marketing.pdf [Accessed 17 Aug. 2018].

Kiss, J. (2010). Google admits collecting Wi-Fi data through Street View cars. [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-admits-storing-private-data [Accessed 17 Aug. 2018].

Menn, J. (2016). Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence - sources. [online] Reuters. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-exclusive-idUSKCN1241YT [Accessed 17 Aug. 2018].

Myers, J. (2018). The UK's biggest selling singles of all time. [online] Officialcharts.com. Available at: http://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/the-uks-biggest-selling-singles-of-all-time__21298/ [Accessed 17 Aug. 2018].

Streitfeld, D. (2013). Google Admits Street View Project Violated Privacy. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/technology/google-pays-fine-over-street-view-privacy-breach.html [Accessed 17 Aug. 2018].

Woolf, N. (2016). Yahoo 'secretly monitored emails on behalf of the US government'. [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/04/yahoo-secret-email-program-nsa-fbi [Accessed 17 Aug. 2018].