The Political Economy of AI - Nick Srnicek

Unwrapping Spotify Wrapped - Taylor Annabell and Nina Vindum Rasmussen

Last year you listened to 494 hours of podcasts, your favourite genre was probably true crime, but your top podcast was Media Industries! Perhaps? Well, maybe. We’re so used to algorithms wrapping our data in a neat ball and presenting it back to us at the end of the year. The trailblazer of these algorithmic events has been Spotify’s end-of-year celebration, Spotify Wrapped. Taylor Annabell (Researcher, Utrecht University) and Nina Vindum Rasmussen (LSE Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science) help us to unwrap this phenomenon. In particular, they talk us through insights gained from workshops they organised to get Spotify users thinking critically and creatively about Wrapped.

AI and Copyright: Authorship and Originality - Tanya Aplin

Copyright has been predicated on protecting original works of human authorship. When AI generates new works, however, what happens to the status of authorship, originality and protection? For this episode, we are very pleased to welcome back Tanya Aplin Aplin (Professor of Intellectual Property Law, King’s College London). Initially, Tanya outlines how copyright variously covers individual, collaborative and corporate forms of authorship. The discussion then moves on to unpack how the uses of AI problematise established conceptions of authorship and originality in creative production.

Can AI Cure Baumol’s Disease? - Gillian Doyle and Sabine Baumann

Across many industries, a key belief driving the current boom in AI use is the economic logic that certain processes can be streamlined in ways that reduce human effort and thereby bring efficiencies and cost reductions. How possible is this in the media industries, however, which have traditionally relied on high value, skills intensive human labour to create unique, distinct outputs? Putting this economic conundrum into perspective, we are very pleased to have as our guests Gillian Doyle (Professor of Media Economics, University of Glasgow) and Sabine Baumann (Professor of Digital Business, Berlin School of Economics and Law).

The Sound of the Future: AI’s Role in Music Creation - Hazel Savage

Developments in AI changed, transformed and disrupted many industries, but one of the industries where these shifts have been most felt is in music. From the bedroom producer using the assistance of AI in their creation, to multi-billion dollar music companies using AI for data management, AI is appearing everywhere. For this episode, Hazel Savage (VP Music Intelligence, SoundCloud) talks through her own experiences launching and subsequently investing in AI music start-ups, before explaining distinctions between the applications of generative and assistive AI, and some of the ethical challenges arising from the uses of AI in music creativity.

The Political Economy of AI - Nick Srnicek

When we think of AI, we tend to think about the chat bot, the prompt that generates the new image, the AI assistant that helps with some of our everyday admin. But, what about everything behind the curtain? The power dynamics, economics, and politics behind AI. Nick Srnicek (Senior Lecturer in Digital Economy, King’s College London) talks about the application of AI in the media industries, but also the how AI industry has achieved a recognizable form through the prominence of key players in hardware manufacturing, cloud computing infrastructure, producers of models, and app developers.