The invitation: niche audiences, participatory culture, and The Hype Machine

This paper explores the use of aggregation and curation of syndicated sources to support social media listening as a way of addressing the problem of information overload inherent in music discovery. Whereas Hodson & Wilkes looked at textual patterns and sentiment in discourse, the objective of my research is to apply their techniques within the context of identifying trends in electronic music discourse. I’ll then determined whether a traditional model for understanding influence, such as Katz & Lazarsfeld’s “Two--‐step flow theory,” remains true in a digital ecosystem. I’ll examine the music blog aggregator Hype Machine, which employs crowdsourcing and content curation to pre--‐filter a sample of top blog posts, with the objective of creating a dataset from which to identify correlations in both audio properties and blog influence. My research is driven by an exploration of technology and cultural change, as well as examinations of why and how audiences consume music.