Samuel Coavoux is a sociologist, currently working as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at ENSAE and as a researcher at Crest in the CSS research group in Palaiseau, France. Before this, he earned a PhD in Sociology from ENS Lyon in 2016, and then worked for five years as a digital researcher at telecommunication company Orange in Paris.

He works on cultural consumption, cultural inequalities, and digital culture, using computational social science and mixed methods. He has studied museum visitors, video game players, Twitch and Twitter influencers, digital advertisers, and users of streaming platforms.

His main current research project is Records, a collective endeavour with music streaming platform Deezer to look at digital music consumption using log data, surveys and interviews. In the project, Samuel uses detailed consumption data to take a new look at cultural inequalities; he also studies the uses of recommendation algorithms and the way users come to adopt new music.

Main recent publications (link to full list):

Thomas Beauvisage, Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Samuel Coavoux & Kevin Mellet (2023). “How online ad- vertising targets consumers. The uses of categories and algorithmic tools by audience planners”. New Media & Society.

Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Samuel Coavoux & Jean-Baptiste Garrocq (2023). “Listening to music videos on YouTube. Digital consumption practices and the environmental impact of streaming”. Journal of Consumer Culture, 23(3).

Hovig Ter Minassian, Vincent Berry, Manuel Boutet, Samuel Coavoux, Isabel Colon de Carvajal, David Gerber, Samuel Rufat, Mathieu Triclot et Vinciane Zabban (2021), La fin du game ? Les jeux vidéo au quotidien, Tours, Presses Universitaires François Rabelais.