This book explores social networking sites as the digital field of cultural production by loosely drawing from Pierre Bourdieu's notion of field and capital. The book examines four case studies on MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, and Indaba Music, and the roles and the impact they have on the music industry and musicians. In doing so, the author explores the groundbreaking developments that empower independent musicians and problematizes the emergence of a variety of issues symptomatic of social media environments at the height of convergence culture.
This book is about the relationship between media, communication and globalization, explored through the unique empirical study of electronic music practitioners’ use of the global social media: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. To understand the significance of the emerging nexus between social media and music in a global context, the book explores various aspects of production, distribution and consumption among electronic music practitioners as they engage with global social media, as well as a historical, political and economic exposition of the rise of this global social media environment. Drawing on interview-based research with electronic music artists, DJs, producers and managers, together with the historical portrayal of the emergence of global social media this pioneering study aims to capture a development taking place in music culture within the wider transformations of the media and communications landscape; from analogue to digital, from national to global, and from a largely passive to more active media use. In doing so, it explores the emergence of a media and communications ecology with increased mobility, velocity and uncertainty. The numerous competing, and rapidly growing and fading social media exemplify the vitality and volatility of the transforming global media, communication and cultural landscape. This study suggests that the music practitioner’s relationship with MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and the key characteristics of these global social media, alter aspects of our practical and theoretical understandings of the process of media globalization. The book deploys an interdisciplinary approach to media globalization that takes into account and articulates this relationship, and reflects the enduring power equations and wider continuities and changes within the global media and communications sphere.
The rapid pace of technological change over the last decade, particularly the rise of social media, has deeply affected the ways in which we interact as individuals, in groups, and among institutions to the point that it is difficult to grasp what it would be like to lose access to this everyday aspect of modern life. The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning investigates the ways in which social media is now firmly engrained in all aspects of music education, providing fascinating insights into the ways in which social media, musical participation, and musical learning are increasingly entwined. In five sections of newly commissioned chapters, a refreshing mix of junior and senior scholars tackle questions concerning the potential for formal and informal musical learning in a networked society. Beginning with an overview of community identity and the new musical self through social media, scholars explore intersections between digital, musical, and social constructs including the vernacular of born-digital performance, musical identity and projection, and the expanding definition of musical empowerment. The fifth section brings this handbook to full practical fruition, featuring firsthand accounts of digital musicians, students, and teachers in the field. The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning opens up an international discussion of what it means to be a musical community member in an age of technologically mediated relationships that break down the limits of geographical, cultural, political, and economic place.
Social networks are critical for the creation and consumption of music. This edited collection, Social Networks and Music Worlds, introduces students and scholars of music in society to the core concepts and tools of social network analysis. The collection showcases the use of these tools by sociologists, historians and musicologists, examining a variety of distinct 'music worlds', including post-punk, jazz, rap, folk, classical music, Ladyfest and the world of 'open mic' performances, on a number of different scales (local, national and international). In addition to their overarching Introduction, the editors offer a very clear and detailed introduction to the methodology of social network analysis for the uninitiated. The collection builds upon insights from canonic texts in the sociology of music, with the crucial innovation of examining musical network interaction via formal methods. With network analysis in the arts and humanities at an emergent stage, Social Networks and Music Worlds highlights its possibilities for non-scientists. Contributions hail from leading and emerging scholars who present social network graphs and data to represent different music worlds, locating individuals, resources and styles within them. The collection sits at the nexus of sociological, musicological and cultural studies traditions. Its range should ensure a large scholarly readership.
The emergence of social media in the early 21st century promised to facilitate new "DIY" cultural approaches, emphasizing participation and democratization. However, in recent years these platforms have been criticized as domineering and exploitative. For DIY musicians in scenes with lengthy histories of cultural resistance, is social media a powerful emancipatory and democratizing tool, or a new corporate antagonist to be resisted? DIY Music explores the significant challenges faced by artists navigating this fraught cultural landscape. How do anti-commercial musicians operate in the competitive, attention-seeking world of social media? How do they deal with a new abundance of data and metrics? How do they present their activity as "cultural resistance"? This book shows that a platform-enabled DIY approach is now the norm for a wide array of cultural practitioners; this "DIY-as-default" landscape threatens to depoliticize the call to "do-it-yourself."
Since the beginning of human civilization, music has been used as a device to control social behavior, where it has operated as much to promote solidarity within groups as hostility between competing groups. Music is an emotive manipulator that influences attitude, motivation and behavior at many levels and in many contexts. This volume is the first to address the social ramifications of music’s behaviorally manipulative effects, its morally questionable uses and control mechanisms, and its economic and artistic regulation through commercialization, thus highlighting not only music’s diverse uses at the social level but also the ever-fragile relationship between aesthetics and morality.
Explains what happened to music—for both artists and fans—when music went online. Playing to the Crowd explores and explains how the rise of digital communication platforms has transformed artist-fan relationships into something closer to friendship or family. Through in-depth interviews with musicians such as Billy Bragg and Richie Hawtin, as well as members of the Cure, UB40, and Throwing Muses, Baym reveals how new media has facilitated these connections through the active, and often required, participation of the artists and their devoted, digital fan base. Before the rise of social sharing and user-generated content, fans were mostly seen as an undifferentiated and unidentifiable mass, often mediated through record labels and the press. However, in today’s networked era, musicians and fans have built more active relationships through social media, fan sites, and artist sites, giving fans a new sense of intimacy and offering artists unparalleled information about their audiences. However, this comes at a price. For audiences, meeting their heroes can kill the mystique. And for artists, maintaining active relationships with so many people can be both personally and financially draining, as well as extremely labor intensive. Drawing on her own rich history as an active and deeply connected music fan, Baym offers an entirely new approach to media culture, arguing that the work musicians put in to create and maintain these intimate relationships reflect the demands of the gig economy, one which requires resources and strategies that we must all come to recognize and appreciate.
Streaming Music examines how the Internet has become integrated in contemporary music use, by focusing on streaming as a practice and a technology for music consumption. The backdrop to this enquiry is the digitization of society and culture, where the music industry has undergone profound disruptions, and where music streaming has altered listening modes and meanings of music in everyday life. The objective of Streaming Music is to shed light on what these transformations mean for listeners, by looking at their adaptation in specific cultural contexts, but also by considering how online music platforms and streaming services guide music listeners in specific ways. Drawing on case studies from Moscow and Stockholm, and providing analysis of Spotify, VK and YouTube as popular but distinct sites for music, Streaming Music discusses, through a qualitative, cross-cultural, study, questions around music and value, music sharing, modes of engaging with music, and the way that contemporary music listening is increasingly part of mobile, automated and computational processes. Offering a nuanced perspective on these issues, it adds to research about music and digital media, shedding new light on music cultures as they appear today. As such, this volume will appeal to scholars of media, sociology and music with interests in digital technologies.
The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning provides fascinating insights into the ways in which social media, musical participation, and musical learning are increasingly entwined.
