Media narratives on the PrimaMateria-Helsing investment: coded corpus for legitimacy analysis
Description
This dataset contains the coded news-media corpus underlying the study From Streaming to Warfare: Capital Origin, Public Narratives, and Legitimacy Contestation in European DefenceTech Investment. It documents the public narratives and legitimacy claims that surrounded Daniel Ek's investment vehicle Prima Materia leading a major funding round in the defence-technology firm Helsing in 2025, and the artist boycott of Spotify that followed, as reported across international news media. Corpus: 26 English-language news articles published between 16 June 2025 and 1 October 2025, drawn from 21 outlets spanning music and culture press, general news, and business and technology media. Articles were retrieved through Media Cloud (22) and supplemented by snowballing (4). Each article has a stable identifier (A01–A26); full details and URLs appear in the Data Corpus sheet and in Appendix A of the article. The workbook has three sheets: Data Corpus (26 rows): one row per article, with source number, outlet, publication date, title, link, and retrieval route. Thematic (310 coding units): reflexive thematic coding at the coding-unit level, following Braun and Clarke. The columns preserve the full analytic trail: article ID, parent passage ID, coding unit ID, the verbatim excerpt coded (Phase 1), the initial code (Phase 1), the grouped topic (Phase 2), and the final cleaned theme. Two further columns classify each unit by narrative orientation (Legitimising, Delegitimising, or Mixed/contextual) and by evaluative standard, coded as SEC (security), VEN-MKT (venture/market), PLAT-MKT (platform/market), and CULT-ETH (cultural/ethical), including combinations where a unit invokes more than one. The six themes are: A: Cultural resistance to Spotify–DefenceTech entanglement B: Platform capitalism and the devaluation of cultural labour C: Legitimacy struggle and accountability in the public sphere D: Civil-to-defence capital redeployment and entrepreneurial diversification E: DefenceTech boom framed as strategic autonomy and necessity E2: DefenceTech boom as market phenomenon Narrative (5 rows): a structural narrative analysis of the five competing narratives identified across the corpus (Security, Growth, Cultural-integrity, Value-conversion, and Accountability dispute), each described along actors and roles, plot, temporality, causality, evaluation, closure. Software: articles retrieved via Media Cloud; coding and analysis carried out manually (pen and paper) and finalization in Excel
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Institutions
- Tallinn University of TechnologyHarjumaa, Tallinn