Papers by Massimiliano Raffa
Social media + society, 2024
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Hudební věda, Dec 31, 2022
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Creative economy, 2024
The present contribution aims at discussing the relevance for the cultural tourism sector of crea... more The present contribution aims at discussing the relevance for the cultural tourism sector of creating lasting strategic alliances with cultural and creative industries. We will be focusing on two key sectors in promoting and protecting the national cultural heritage, though today particularly impacted by the pandemic as venuebased: the museum and live music industries. Overall, the effects of the pandemic revealed some pre-existing structural fragilities of the national cultural production system and imposed a partial reconsideration of the business models of the Italian creative economy. However, while companies operating in the provision of venuebased cultural services-i. e., in the field of visual and performing arts, live concerts, preservation of artistic heritage, etc. continue to display clear signs of distress, other industries (those more properly "creative" than "cultural") have, on the other hand, proved to have greater flexibility and more strategic skills to cope with an increased demand for home entertainment through digital content. For these reasons, industries traditionally linked to the cultural field, such as the visual and performing arts, now need new audience development policies, new strategic alliances and convergence with other sectors, new views of cultural space, new resources and knowledge. Thus, the chapter will provide an updated overview on Italian cultural and creative industries and how the involved companies are redesigning their strategies for building relationships with cultural audiences and consumers through digitisation, reinvention of the spaces of fruition, and diversification of labour. Indeed, much emphasis will be placed on the future perspectives and challenges ahead for two crucial industries such as museums and concerts in revitalising Italy's creative economy and stimulating other entrepreneurial areas to act creatively and successfully interpret the ongoing change.
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Cultural Heritage in Japan and Italy. Perspectives for Tourism and Community Development (Springer), 2024
The present contribution aims at discussing the relevance for the cultural tourism sector of crea... more The present contribution aims at discussing the relevance for the cultural tourism sector of creating lasting strategic alliances with cultural and creative industries. We will be focusing on two key sectors in promoting and protecting the national cultural heritage, though today particularly impacted by the pandemic as venuebased: the museum and live music industries. Overall, the effects of the pandemic revealed some pre-existing structural fragilities of the national cultural production system and imposed a partial reconsideration of the business models of the Italian creative economy. However, while companies operating in the provision of venuebased cultural services-i. e., in the field of visual and performing arts, live concerts, preservation of artistic heritage, etc. continue to display clear signs of distress, other industries (those more properly "creative" than "cultural") have, on the other hand, proved to have greater flexibility and more strategic skills to cope with an increased demand for home entertainment through digital content. For these reasons, industries traditionally linked to the cultural field, such as the visual and performing arts, now need new audience development policies, new strategic alliances and convergence with other sectors, new views of cultural space, new resources and knowledge. Thus, the chapter will provide an updated overview on Italian cultural and creative industries and how the involved companies are redesigning their strategies for building relationships with cultural audiences and consumers through digitisation, reinvention of the spaces of fruition, and diversification of labour. Indeed, much emphasis will be placed on the future perspectives and challenges ahead for two crucial industries such as museums and concerts in revitalising Italy's creative economy and stimulating other entrepreneurial areas to act creatively and successfully interpret the ongoing change.
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Social Media + Society, 2024
In an age where music streaming platforms have become the primary media for music listening, the ... more In an age where music streaming platforms have become the primary media for music listening, the experiences of musically competent users are often overlooked. Employing a mix of research methods (semi-structured interviews, reflective diaries, and analysis of on-platform-activity metadata provided by Spotify's APIs), this contribution aims to explore the viewpoints of musically competent users from Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands regarding music streaming platforms. Through critical analysis, the study investigates both the subjective and objective aspects of their listening experience, as well as their interpretation of algorithmic mediation and platform affordances. The findings illustrate that competent users perceive the usage patterns afforded by streaming services to be insufficient in meeting their needs and the platforms to have been progressively diluting the quality of their listening experiences. Despite this, the study shows that streaming platforms lack alternatives to such an extent that even knowledgeable subjects prefer making do with this conditionthey consider appropriate to their current lifestyle-rather than striving to enhance their consumption experiences. Furthermore, hypotheses are posited, suggesting that adopting a "platform criticism" stance may be a distinction marker of competence status.
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Paper presented at the 5th Biennal International Conference of the Progect Network for the Study ... more Paper presented at the 5th Biennal International Conference of the Progect Network for the Study of Progressive Rock, University of Oxford
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The prominent role played by algorithmic platforms in people’s everyday lives has in recent years... more The prominent role played by algorithmic platforms in people’s everyday lives has in recent years triggered a growing interest towards algorithmic imaginaries, intended as worlds of experience users make of the algorithmic media, thereby building up their own awareness of the platform and in turn moulding the algorithm itself through their performativity. Today, part of the construction of individual cultures takes place on streaming platforms, media environments where subjects access cultural materials and cultural exchanges occur. Platforms, such as Netflix or Spotify, have become privileged sites for studying the platformization of cultural production and the construction of algorithmic imaginaries by users and developers. Despite this, to date little has been discussed about cultural creators’ algorithmic imaginaries. This paper intends to discuss how to include algorithmic imaginaries in research regarding platforms and cultural production, by focusing on the case of music plat...
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H-ermes: Journal of Communication, 2019
Aiming to review Bob Dylan’s poetics discussing it outside its traditional interpretative paths —... more Aiming to review Bob Dylan’s poetics discussing it outside its traditional interpretative paths — which use to interpret his poetry as a brilliant literary form of political commitment, the present video-essay argues that Dylan’s lyrical production has to be interpreted as individualistic and universalistic, rather than as communitarian and ideological. What is claimed is that in the twentieth century, in the United States, cultural conditions were created that were completely similar to those of Italian Renaissance humanism. However, what is here called ‘the Paranoid, American Humanism’, does not aspire to the harmony of forms, but to their corruption, determined by the paranoid influence of the religious precepts introduced by the Pilgrim Fathers. It will be argued that Dylan, as well as the greatest American narrators of the mid-twentieth century, have debunked the great American narratives through such groundbreaking form of pop humanism.
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Palaver, 2018
As late globalization, multiculturalism, migrations, multiple identities and complex networks hav... more As late globalization, multiculturalism, migrations, multiple identities and complex networks have redefined the ethnomusicological borders, a branch of researchers have consequently refocused their insterests towards the musical practices that minority subcultures experience in the context of large Western urban areas. The afrofuturistic cultural aesthetic — a literary sort of panafricanism from a political-technological-distopical perspective —, with its references to the afrodiasporic question, its reflections on the overwhelming role of information technologies on symbol production and its fabled imagery, captured the attention of anthropological observers. Nonetheless, despite some afrofuturism-related artists (such as Sun Ra or the Detroit techno pioneers) happen to have features that go far beyond a generalised journalistic interest, every kind of music conceived in the Western industrialised world inevitably connotes itself as popular music. Even when preserving symbolic cod...
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Elvis, the hidden king of rock and roll. Messianism, revolutionary delusion and birth of new pop ... more Elvis, the hidden king of rock and roll. Messianism, revolutionary delusion and birth of new pop fetishisms. Taking inspiration from Simmel’s insight regarding the presence of hidden kings in every distinguished cultural epoch, this paper explores the forms through which pop culture has got to generate new models of power, capable to set new standards by means of intrisic capabilities of overcoming social distortions the political power could not overtake. Elvis Presley, its myth, and the fetishisms derived from his stardom, condensed a number of Western stereotypes, subsuming counterposed social consciousnesses. In Presley’s figure, social antinomies are smoothed out through the delusion of a revolutionary pledge, that eventually comes out to be socially reassuring and equitable with an epiphany.
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H-ermes. Journal of Communication, 2021
The prominent role played by algorithmic platforms in people's everyday lives has in recent years... more The prominent role played by algorithmic platforms in people's everyday lives has in recent years triggered a growing interest towards algorithmic imaginaries, intended as worlds of experience users make of the algorithmic media, thereby building up their own awareness of the platform and in turn moulding the algorithm itself through their performativity. Today, part of the construction of individual cultures takes place on streaming platforms, media environments where subjects access cultural materials and cultural exchanges occur. Platforms, such as Netflix or Spotify, have become privileged sites for studying the platformization of cultural production and the construction of algorithmic imaginaries by users and developers. Despite this, to date little has been discussed about cultural creators' algorithmic imaginaries. This paper intends to discuss how to include algorithmic imaginaries in research regarding platforms and cultural production, by focusing on the case of music platforms. Specifically, the main goal of this contribution is to address the following issues in the light of existing literature: i) The role of algorithms as cultural gatekeepers and how they may affect the creative disposition of music producers, as well as their strategies to relate with the broader environment of cultural production and consumption. ii) The optimization of culture, i.e., how cultural producers may attempt to create platform-optimized products adapting their creative efforts to platforms' affordances, thus fostering processes of product homogenization. Finally, suggestions will be made for future investigations regarding how all the actors in the music industry relate to streaming platforms.
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Lo Squaderno. Explorations in Space and Society , 2020
Western popular music is a field of creative production intrinsically tied to urban spatiality. T... more Western popular music is a field of creative production intrinsically tied to urban spatiality. The places where the historical forms of entertainment music originated were in most cases frightening areas, connoted by social marginality and cultural intermingling. This article aims to discuss how the spatial dimension of musical creativity is currently going through a moment of dramatic change, primarily triggered by the shift from the material creative environments of the cities to the immaterial environments of the network society, where human interaction is mediated by machines. In fact, a number of processes (starting from the emergence of the participatory culture of digital media all the way to the recent measures of interpersonal distancing imposed by the ongoing health crisis) seem to have contributed to the consolidation – in the environments where material culture is
expressed – of what it will be called 'haphephobia' -- the fear of physical contact. The article, through some specific examples, aims to stimulate a reflection on the centrality of human interaction and urban proxemics in the creative processes that define the popular arts, introducing some considerations about the alarming idea that such spaces may one day disappear permanently.
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Journal Issues by Massimiliano Raffa
by losquaderno_ journal, Jelena Božilović, Riccardo Pronzato, belingardi chiara, Giada Bonu Rosenkranz, Federica Castelli, Serena Olcuire, Massimiliano Raffa, Alessandra Micalizzi, Asma Mehan, and Ana Ivasiuc lo Squaderno, 2020
lo Squaderno no. 57 – November 2020 | Fear the city
a cura di / dossier coordonné par / edited b... more lo Squaderno no. 57 – November 2020 | Fear the city
a cura di / dossier coordonné par / edited by // Elisabetta Risi, Riccardo Pronzato & Cristina Mattiucci
Guest artist / artiste présenté / artista ospite // Tommaso Vaccarezza
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Books by Massimiliano Raffa
Hundreds of millions of people globally engage with musical products distributed through services... more Hundreds of millions of people globally engage with musical products distributed through services that have engendered a contentious and inadequately understood system of production, distribution, and consumption. According to some, these new communication environments enhance cultural openness and diversity, facilitating a horizon for the free exercise of collective intelligence in the spirit of participatory culture. Conversely, others contend that these developments signal a regressive drift, increasingly dominated by the conformities of commercial culture. This book undertakes a critical examination of the symbolic, political, economic, spatial, interactional, and ideological dimensions of the current media ecosystem. It includes the presentation of a number of empirical studies designed to explore the perceptions of record executives, music managers, marketing professionals, songwriters, producers, and listeners. The book aims to provide scientifically grounded responses to a question that has predominantly been confined to common discourse: is digital capitalism genuinely an ally of culture?
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Papers by Massimiliano Raffa
expressed – of what it will be called 'haphephobia' -- the fear of physical contact. The article, through some specific examples, aims to stimulate a reflection on the centrality of human interaction and urban proxemics in the creative processes that define the popular arts, introducing some considerations about the alarming idea that such spaces may one day disappear permanently.
Journal Issues by Massimiliano Raffa
a cura di / dossier coordonné par / edited by // Elisabetta Risi, Riccardo Pronzato & Cristina Mattiucci
Guest artist / artiste présenté / artista ospite // Tommaso Vaccarezza
Books by Massimiliano Raffa
expressed – of what it will be called 'haphephobia' -- the fear of physical contact. The article, through some specific examples, aims to stimulate a reflection on the centrality of human interaction and urban proxemics in the creative processes that define the popular arts, introducing some considerations about the alarming idea that such spaces may one day disappear permanently.
a cura di / dossier coordonné par / edited by // Elisabetta Risi, Riccardo Pronzato & Cristina Mattiucci
Guest artist / artiste présenté / artista ospite // Tommaso Vaccarezza