Commodification
After reading the article today, I would say that music is a highly valuable form of data. We all listen to music and despite the efforts of copyright laws we continue to listen. I think it is ridiculously naive to try to regulate how the public listens to music. No matter what laws they put in place, there are always ways to get around the prices of itunes and listen to music for free. If I owned the music industry I would try to make restrictions that are reasonable. Taking what I know about burning music and copying it, I would take these things into account when I make restrictions.
It is hard to answer the question about data being exchanged for commodities. I think so much of it depends on a few things. Number one would be, is it worth the imposition. If a company is giving away free pizza to know your favorite color, then I would not have any reservations about doing just that. If they are giving away free pizza in exchange for my social security number, that would be a different story. So in the end, you have to ask yourself what information you want to keep private and what information you don’t mind sharing.
Youtube is where I spend most of my time, so that is where a lot of my usable data comes from. I look at how to videos as well as music videos. I also keep up with particular YouTube channels like the FineBros and Paint. To take it even further, I browse movie trailers and game walkthroughs. The data they are collecting lets them know what kinds of things I like and what music I listen to. This is valuable data if you are trying to market something like a new song to a particular demographic. I listen to pop a lot, so they could try to market the latest pop song to me. I would probably listen to it just because I like the genre. If you are doing a study on college students and you want to know what they do on a daily basis, this would also be valuable data. They could guess at what is important to me based on the types of videos I watch on a regular basis. They could figure out what content I would be more likely to give up my information in order to view.
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I think you’re the first person to choose data relating to music for their post, which is certainly a great choice! The complexities of the music industry are always made more interesting by how easy it is to access music without paying (I personally just watch official youtube videos of it, though more often I listen to covers/remixes on the same sight). Of course when the issue of employee pay is brought up like it was today, people seem to forget that major companies already make so much money, and while artists are clearly underpaid for the value of their work, they’re still pretty well-off for the most part (and the obvious solution is that companies should pay them what they’re actually worth).
I also talked about how much data they could obtain from my music. I use Spotify a lot which I think is one way to get around copyright laws because with my premium account I can have ultimate streaming of any music I want for $5 a month. I definitely agree that companies could use my music data to suggest new songs and Spotify actually does this. They produce a Discover Weekly playlist for me that has songs that are similar to the ones in my music library. This is one of my favorite features about Spotify, but it is pretty weird to think of the data they collect from me in order to provide this playlist for me.