Evaluation and credentialing in digital music communities - H. Cecilia Suhr

Professional and amateur musicians alike use social media as a platform
for showcasing and promoting their music. Social media evaluation practices --
rating, ranking, voting, "liking," and "friending" by ordinary
users, peers, and critics -- have become essential promotional tools for musicians.
In this report, H. Cecilia Suhr examines one recent development in online music
evaluation: the use of digital badges to aid in assessment and evaluation. Digital
badges have emerged in recent years as a potential credentialing method in informal
learning environments. Suhr explores online music communities' use of digital badges
as a reward for both casual music evaluators and musicians.

Suhr
examines the intersection of evaluation and gamification in Spotify's "Hit or
Not" game, in which players assess a song's hit potential and receive digital
badges as rewards, and considers the implications of turning music evaluation into a
game. She then explores in detail the development of peer and professional critics
on Indaba Music, a cloud-based collaboration platform where musicians earn badges
through participating in contests. Suhr considers the emerging challenges and
shortcomings of contest-based virtual communities and the value of badges, as
perceived by Indaba musicians. She investigates to what extent digital badges can
effectively represent and credit musicians' accomplishments and merits; describes
the challenges, benefits, and shortcomings of digital badges as an evaluation
mechanism; and compares the use of digital badges in assessing creativity to their
use in learning and credentialing institutions.