R. (Robert) Prey, PhD

I am currently Principle Investigator of the following projects:

The Platformization of Music: Towards a Global Theory ['PlatforMuse'] (2023 - 2028; funded by ERC Starting Grant 101077952)

How are streaming and social media platforms changing the working conditions, creative practices and identities of music artists around the world? How can we better understand the transformative impact of “platformization” through the lens of music?

Online platforms - from Amazon to YouTube – have been both celebrated and criticized. The COVID-19 pandemic has only further entrenched these platforms in our lives. 'PlatforMuse' takes music as a medium through which to examine the impacts of platformization. It offers the first cross-national analysis of this transformation as understood by music artists. To date, most research into platformization is limited to case studies of particular platforms in particular countries. 'PlatforMuse' provides a global perspective that is sensitive to the complexity of platformization. The three national contexts that make up this project – the Netherlands, South Korea, and Nigeria – represent three very different models and stages of platformization. 'PlatforMuse' asks: How might the everyday experiences of music artists in diverse locations challenge some of the assumptions about how platformization proceeds, and in turn, help us to generate a truly global understanding of cultural production in the platform era?

Platform Performances: How Korean popular music and musicians are adapting to online platforms (2020-2022; funded by the Academy of Korean Studies, Project No. AKS-2020-R82)

How is ‘platformization’ both experienced and imagined by South Korean musicians, songwriters and producers? South Korea has been widely recognized as a center of popular music culture (Shin, 2009; Shin & Lee, 2016). The global success of ‘K-pop’ has been attributed to the affordances of platforms such as YouTube (Xu, Park & Park, 2015). However, there has been a lack of research into how platformization is influencing the creative practices of music artists in Korea. Through in-depth interviews this project seeks to gain insight into how artists understand and adapt to the platforms they distribute their music through. We thus ask: how do Korean artists adapt their practices in relation to platforms, and how is this ultimately reconfiguring music as both an art form and as a cultural industry? In asking these questions, this project hopes to provide a non-western perspective on the platformization of cultural production, and thus allow for a more comparative and global understanding of this phenomenon.