Professor
College of Letters & Sciences | Department of Communication Arts
Hometown: Fredericton, New Brunswick
Jeremy Morris is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on how digital technologies affect media industries like podcasting, music, and software. He is the author of numerous publications on these topics, including two books – Podcasting (2024) and Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture (2015) – and two edited collections: Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography (2021, with Eric Hoyt) and Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps (2018, with Sarah Murray). He is also the founder of PodcastRE.org, one of the largest public databases for studying podcasts.
Talks:
Fake Artists, Fake Listeners: AI and the Music Industries
Several recent controversies around artificial intelligence and the music industries have raised fears over issues of intellectual property, ownership and creativity. While the popular press focuses on age-old worries about fraud, deception, and the differences between “real” human practices and “fake” machinic ones, these incidents speak to larger issues about the future role of AI in the everyday lives of music industry workers and in our experiences of popular music. In this talk, media studies researcher Jeremy Morris looks at an overview of these tools and reflects on how streaming services like Spotify have created particular data, institutional, aesthetic, and technical “conditions” where artificially generated artists and listeners are not only possible but an unsurprising outcome.