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Record W4410768283 · doi:10.1080/17510694.2025.2510847

From CDs to MP3s: The discursive politics of technological valuation

2025· article· en· W4410768283 on OpenAlexafffund
Kim de Laat

Bibliographic record

VenueCreative Industries Journal · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicDiscourse Analysis in Language Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council
KeywordsValuation (finance)PoliticsSociologyEconomic geographyRegional sciencePolitical scienceEconomicsAccounting

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article examines the music industry’s transition from CDs to MP3s to document how members of the established industry and new entrants used metaphors to reinforce pre-existing cultural values and the business models they comprise. I outline a process through which their evaluations and legitimation efforts are constrained: actors engage in metaphorical contestation, where they use the same metaphor topics to reinforce opposing interpretations of the MP3. Whereas established players such as record label executives used metaphors to liken the new technology to past experiences requiring a commitment to ‘music as art’ and as a product to be owned, new entrants used the same metaphor topics to suggest a more radical understanding of the MP3 as something to be accessed, and an appreciation for quantity over quality. The process of metaphorical contestation underscores how arguments rooted in an art vs. commerce binary are leveraged on the basis of one’s position within a field of large-scale cultural production. This article extends sociological accounts of valuation within cultural fields through its attention to the evaluation of sociotechnical phenomena using ‘art’ discourse.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.734
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.052
GPT teacher head0.323
Teacher spread0.271 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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