Negotiating Technological and Symbolic Capital: A Bourdieusian Perspective on the Datafication of the Music Economy

In this paper, I will try to make sense of the datafication of the music economy from a Bourdieusian perspective. In the first half two academic discourses will be reconstructed, discussed with regard to their desiderata and finally their relationship to each other. Here, I will focus firstly on attempts to transfer Bourdieu’s theoretical instruments to the digital sphere and secondly on studies on the datafication of the music industry. While the second discourse can benefit from a Bourdieusian framework, the case study of the datafied music industry also reveals the limitations of the theoretical approach in its current application. Therefore, the empirical part of the paper focuses on the negotiation processes around data as technological and symbolic capital.