Jeremy Morris

Current and Future Projects

• AI and the Sound Industries
• History of software distribution

Expertise and Activities

I am currently serving as the Faculty Director for the Center for Humanistic Inquiry into AI and Uncertainty, where I am working with a team of faculty to bring insights and research from the humanities to discussions taking place around campus on artificial intelligence. This complements my current research projects, which center around the ways musicians and the music industries are incorporating generative AI and other artificial intelligence technologies into their every day routines.

My research focuses on how new technologies affect the ways we make, understand, discover and interact with cultural goods (music, software, podcasts, etc.). How do media formats (from analog records to digital CDs, mp3’s, streaming audio, apps, and more) mean for the ways we make and use the media we love? How do industries react and adapt to the introduction of new technologies (from file-sharing services to streaming platforms to generative artificial intelligence) and how do users and creative producers negotiate the various challenges, tensions and opportunities that each new technological innovation brings. I hope my work, with its concern for artists as creators and as entrepreneurs, helps contribute to healthy and vibrant local cultural scenes. I also hope it helps users make better sense of the role new media play in their everyday lives. My recent book, Podcasting, looks at the industrial, technological, economic and aesthetic history of the podcasting industry from its rather haphazard and humble beginnings in the late 1990s and early 2000s to its rise to a dominant, mainstream format. My first book “Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture,”  involved case studies of technologies – Winamp, the CD Database, Napster, iTunes, Cloud-based services – that played a key role in the migration of music on CDs to music as digital files on computers and online. I’ve also published edited collections on the rise of “app culture” as a dominant form of distribution for software and mobile media, and on podcast preservation (and our podcast research site, PodcastRE.org.

Education

• Ph.D. McGill University, 2010
• M.A. Ryerson/York University, 2005
• B.S. Queen’s University, 1998

Honors/Awards

• Carsey-Wolf Center Media Industries and AI Research Initiative, 2025, Co-PI, with Derek Johnson, for the project “Artificial Audio, Real Work: The Promises, Problems and Practices of AI in the Music and Sound Industries,”
• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence, July 2025, Inaugural Faculty Director and Steering Committee Member for the “Center for Humanistic Inquiry into AI and Uncertainty”
• The Humanities Respond to Global Challenges, 2024, for the project AI and Uncertainty
• Borghesi-Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshop in AI and Responsibility, University of Wisconsin Madison Center for the Humanities, 2025
• NEH Summer Stipend Award, 2023, for the project “Podcasting’s Precarious Future”
• UW2020 Discovery Initiative, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education/WARF, 2017
• Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (with co-PI Eric Hoyt), National Endowment for the Humanities – Office of the Digital Humanities, 2017, for the project ‘PodcastRE Analytics: Investigating the Golden Age of Podcasting through Metadata and Sound”.
• Borghesi-Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshop in Sound Studies, University of Wisconsin Madison Center for the Humanities, 2015
• Post-Doctoral Scholarship, Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société, 2010
• Dissertation Grant, Media@McGill, 2009
• Best Conference Paper Award, IASPM-Canada, 2008
• Canadian Doctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, 2007

Articles and Edited Special Issues

• 2023. “Competing Sounds: Podcasting and Popular Music.” Special Issue of Radio Journal co-edited with Ellis Jones. 20(1).
• 2021. “Infrastructures of discovery: examining podcast ratings and rankings.” Cultural Studies. Vol. 35 (4-5): 728-749.
• 2021. Hoyt, Eric, Bersch, JJ, Noh, Susan, Hansen, Sam, Mertens, Jacob and Morris, Jeremy. “PodcastRE Analytics: Using RSS to Study the Cultures and Norms of Podcasting”. Digital Humanities Quarterly. 15(1).
• 2020. “Music Platforms and the Optimization of Culture”. Social Media + Society. Brooke Erin Duffy, David Nieborg and Thomas Poell, (eds.).
• 2019 with Hoyt, Eric and Hansen, Samuel. The PodcastRE Project: Curating and Preserving Podcasts (and Their Data). Journal for Radio and Audio Media. 26(1): 8-20.
• 2019. with Morris, Austin. “App-ed Out: Logics of Failure in App Stores”. Computational Culture. Issue 7, 21 October.
• 2015. “Curation by Code: Infomediaries and the Data-Mining of Taste.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4-5): 446-463.
• 2015. “Anti-Market Research: Piracy, New Media Metrics and Commodity Communities.” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, 13(1): 32-44.
• 2015. “Control, Curation and Musical Experience in Streaming Music Services (with Devon Powers).” Creative Industries Journal, 8(2).
• 2014. “Non-Practical Entities: Patents and the Digitization of Culture.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 31(3): 212-229.
• 2014. “Artists as Entrepreneurs, Fans as Workers.” Popular Music and Society, 37(3): 273-290.
• 2013. “‘The Person Behind the Music We Adore’: Artists, Profiles, and the Circulation of Music.” Wi: Journal of Mobile Media, 7(1)
• 2012. “Hear Here: Location Based Music Commodities.” Journal of Popular Music Studies Online: Pop/IASPM Sounds of the City Special Issue, 15
• 2012. “Making Music Behave: Metadata and the Digital Music Commodity.” New Media and Society, 14(5): 850-866.
• 2011. “Sounds in the Cloud: Cloud Computing and the Digital Music Commodity.” First Monday, 16(5).
• 2008. “The Politics of Podcasting.” Fiberculture, 12(1).

Books

• 2024. Podcasting. Polity Press.
• 2021. Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography (Edited Collection, with Eric Hoyt). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Open Access available here.
• 2018. Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps (Edited Collection, with Sarah Murray). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
• 2015. Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture. Berkley: University of California Press.

Chapters

• 2025. “Music in the Metaverse” in Music Culture in the Age of Streaming, eds. David Hesmondhalgh, Bondy Kaye, Shuwen Qu and Raquel Campos Valverde. Berkeley: University of California Press
• 2024. “New Music Fridays: Now Available in Podcast Form” in The Oxford Handbook of Radio Studies. Andrew Bottomley and Michele Hilmes, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 41-62
• 2023. “Live at the App: The Economics, Platforms and Technologies of Livestreamed Music”. The SAGE Handbook of the Digital Media Economy. Terry Flew, Julian Thomas and Jennifer Holt eds. London and California: Sage Publications. 260-279
• 2021. “The Spotification of Podcasting” in Saving New Sounds: Dispatches from the PodcastRE Project. Jeremy Wade Morris and Eric Hoyt (eds.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 208-225.
• 2021. (with Yizhou Xu). “App Radio: The Reconfiguration of Audible Publics in China through Ximalaya.FM”. Engaging Social Media in China: Platforms, Publics, and Production (US–China Relations in the Age of Globalization). Guobin Yang and Wei Wang (eds.). Michigan: Michigan State Press.
• 2019. “Hearing the Past: The Sonic Web from MIDI to Music Streaming” in The SAGE Handbook of Web History. Niels Brugger and Ian Milligan (eds.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 491-504.
• 2018. “Platform Fandom.” The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, Melissa Click and Suzanne Scott New York: Routledge, 356-364.
• 2018. “Introduction” in Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps. Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1-19.
• 2018. “Is it Tuesday: Novelty Apps and Digital Solutionism.” Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps, Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 91-101.
• 2016. “App Music.” Music and Virtuality, Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran Oxford University Press.
• 2008. “Delegating the Live: Musicians, Machines, and the Loops they Create.” Sonic Mediations: Body, Sound, Technology, Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns Cambridge University Press.

Courses

• CA330 – The Music Industries and Popular Culture
• CA 346 – Critical Internet Studies
• CA 449 – Sound Cultures: Podcasting and Music
• CA 459 – New Media and Society
• CA 950 – Digital Methodologies
• CA 950 – Digital Commodities
• CA950 – Sound Cultures
• CA950 – Qualitative Methods and Writing for Media and Cultural Studies
• CA 950 – Digital Commodities (now with AI!)