The Future of Live Music

Ewa Mazierska, Les Gillon, Tony Rigg, Ewa Mazierska, Les Gillon, Tony Rigg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501355882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique et affaires

What 'live music' means for one generation or culture does not necessarily mean 'live' for another. This book examines how changes in economy, culture and technology pertaining to post-digital times affect production, performance and reception of live music. Considering established examples of live music, such as music festivals, alongside practices influenced by developments in technology, including live streaming and holograms, the book examines whether new forms stand the test of 'live authenticity' for their audiences. It also speculates how live music might develop in the future, its relationship to recorded music and mediated performance and how business is conducted in the popular music industry.

Part One

Approaches

1

Theorizing the production and consumption of live music

A critical review

Arno van der Hoeven, Erik Hitters, Pauwke Berkers, Martijn Mulder and Rick Everts

Over the past decades, different theoretical perspectives have been developed that help to understand the social context in which live music is produced and consumed. Theories from the fields of sociology, cultural studies and popular music studies have enhanced our knowledge of (live) music industries and their impact on society. They help us to answer the central question that this book poses: How can we understand the future of live music? Theories offer models for understanding; they explain social phenomena, and structure data collection and analyses. In other words, theories allow us to make sense of social reality and can help us to think about future developments.

In this chapter, we will discuss different theoretical perspectives that have been used to study the production and consumption of live music. Each theory draws on a set of key assumptions, highlighting certain aspects of the live music industry over others. While this focus grants these theories their usefulness, it is insightful to compare these different approaches to get a better understanding of their contributions and shortcomings when it comes to the study of live music. We make this comparison at a time that the live music industry has undergone major transformations. On the production side, musicians increasingly depend on live concerts to earn a living in an already precarious labour market (Wikström 2009). New digital technologies have drastically altered the live music economy (Holt 2010). Furthermore, the live music infrastructure is changing through processes of festivalization and gentrification (Ballico and Carter 2018). These developments are related to changes on the consumption side of live music. Audience tastes are shifting, as omnivorous consumers have a wide range of competing cultural products to choose from in a globalized society (Berkers 2010; Chan 2019). Meanwhile, consumers’ willingness to pay for recorded music and see emerging talent has decreased (Naveed, Watanabe and Neittaanmäki 2017).

This chapter is structured as follows. The next sections, respectively, discuss sociological approaches to live music (art worlds and fields of cultural production), cultural studies approaches (subcultures, scenes and neo-tribes), network approaches (social network analysis and actor-network theory) and ecological approaches. Finally, we compare these different approaches and discuss what this comparison implies for the study of live music’s future.

Sociological approaches

Art worlds

Together with field theory, the art worlds approach has been one of main ways to study the production of arts and culture with cultural sociology. Embedded in the tradition of Chicago sociology, this approach focuses on arts and culture as a consequence of occupational contingencies and problems rather than considering the supposed qualities of the works themselves (Martin 2006: 98). In his seminal book Art Worlds, Howard Becker (1982) defines such worlds in relation to three core elements. First, taking issue of the myth of the individual artistic genius, he argues that ‘works of art […] are not the products of individual makers, “artists” who possess a rare and special gift. They are, rather, joint products of all the people who cooperate […] to bring works like that into existence’ (1982: 35). Art is thus viewed as a collective activity instead of an individual product. Second, art worlds are characterized by a division of labour. Whereas core personnel are those actors who receive most recognition for doing ‘artistic’ work, support personnel – doing the ‘hand work’ – are equally essential in the production of any work of art. Hence, Becker (1982) invites us to ‘think of all the activities that must be carried out for any work of art to appear as it finally does’ (5). Third, conventions ‘make collective activity simpler and less costly in time, energy, and other resources; but they do not make unconventional work impossible, only more costly and difficult’ (1982: 35). Conventions offer solutions for practical problems in the production of art, such as what materials will we use, how to convey meaning or emotion and who will do what? Art worlds have certain accepted conventions and do not reinvent the wheel each time. The ‘art work’ is the outcome of these choices.

Until recently, surprisingly few studies had adopted Becker’s art world approach to study popular music (Martin 2006). Most of these works focus on music-making as a social process of people working together – in learning music, writing songs, coordinating tasks (Finnegan 2007; Lewis 1988). Yet, they often contextually address live music as well. For example, Lewis (1988) writes ‘A live musical performance – to take just one example – is not solely the creation of the artist who happens to be performing. It is created by many cooperating individuals, established in a network within a specific art world, of whom the performer is one, albeit fairly important, element’ (36). More recently, these ideas have been further developed into a music worlds approach, that is, collectives involved in making music (Bottero and Crossley 2011; Crossley and Bottero 2015). Whereas Becker’s focus is more on the production of culture, making music here includes ‘perceiving, interpreting, and appreciating, such that audiences belong to this collective, alongside artists and various support personnel’ (Emms and Crossley 2018: 112). The audience is a particularly crucial aspect in the study of live music as the bodily presence in a physical space is what draws people to music (Berkers and Michael 2017). Moreover, the locus of a music world can be a musical style (e.g. punk), an ethos (e.g. DIY), an ideology (e.g. feminism), a locality (e.g. the Rotterdam music world) or a combination of elements (Emms and Crossley 2018: 114). Locality and its material implications are a particularly relevant specification of Becker’s conceptualization for the study of live music as the local – often in relation to authenticity – has become increasingly important as a result of globalization (Bennett 1999a).

The art worlds approach has been critiqued on several grounds, also affecting its usefulness for studying live music. First and foremost, this approach has been extensively criticized for its lack of attention to conflict. In line with symb olic interactionism, Becker’s work strongly focuses on doing things together, seemingly ignoring power structures and power struggles (Bottero and Crossley 2011). Yet, issues of inequality are at the heart of live music. Not only are few musicians able to make a living from live music, but success is also unequally distributed by, for example, gender (e.g. Savigny and Sleight 2015). In order to address the latter issue, the Keychange project has successfully encouraged 100+ festivals to pledge to achieve a 50:50 gender balance by 2022. Second, Becker’s art world approach focuses specifically on how conventions help to coordinate collective action; yet, pleasure and commitment of participants also play a crucial role in doing things together (Crossley and Bottero 2015), which have largely remained unaddressed.

Fields of cultural production

A second more widely used approach to study music has been field theory, even though Bourdieu himself ‘rarely engaged with music directly or in any detail’ (Prior 2011: 126). According to Bourdieu, a field can be defined as ‘a field of forces within which the agents occupy positions that statistically determine the positions they take with respect to the field, these position-takings being aimed at either conserving or transforming the structure of relations of forces that is constitutive of the field’ (Bourdieu 2005: 30). In the field of live music, agents include booking agencies, artists, concert organizers and promotors who struggle over what a ‘good’ live concert is and who determines how it should sound and look like. Fields operate at three levels: macro-, meso- and micro-level.

At the macro-level, fields operate relatively independently of each other. This means each field is rather autonomous (Bourdieu 1993), that is, it has its own logic (autonomous pole) but is also influenced by other logics (heteronomous pole). In fields of artistic production, the autonomous logic is that of cultural capital, where a good artist is defined as an aesthetically innovative artist, agents have faith in critics and gallerists as ‘brave discoverers’ of such artists and the focus is on long-term rewards (positive reviews, canonization). At the other end of the field, the heteronomous pole is dominated by the logic of economic capital, where a good artist is a successful artist and agents rely on audience demand and short-term rewards from the market, represented by sales figures. The degree of autonomy can be measured by strength of negative sanctions on violation of the field logic. Within the study of popular music, much research has used Bourdieu’s conceptualization of relative autonomy to address the distinction between mainstream pop music – the commercial, heteronomous pole of the pop music field – and alternative music – the more autonomous restricted field of pop music production (Hesmondhalgh 2006; Negus 1995).

At the meso-level, the functioning of the field is affected by doxa, the common – often undisputed – rules of the game. For example, agents within the field of artistic production often share the idea that it is possible to objectively distinguish ‘good’ art from ‘bad’ art. Yet, they battle over what is good and bad art (legitimacy) and who should define it (power of consecration). This struggle often occurs between those dominating the field (orthodoxy) and those trying to change the field (heresy). For example, Prior (2008) discusses how the new genre of glitch ‘remains a sonic signifier of experimentation, and its defence is felt by protagonists to be a matter of cultural purity’ (310). Guerra shows (2016: 624) how alternative rock bands entered the Portuguese field of music production by, for example, following a logic of sonic exploration and experimentation and avoiding involvement with major labels.

At the micro-level, a field is a network of objective relations between positions and homologous position-takings. Agents occupy different objective positions, affecting the behaviour of, for example, artists or bookers in artistic field. However, they take these positions differently, depending on – among other things – the characteristics of those who occupy that position. For example, bookers support different artists and different styles to position themselves in a particular way in artistic fields.

The field of cultural production approach has been critiqued on several grounds, also affecting its usefulness for studying live music. First, as Hesmondhalgh (2006) has pointed out, ‘It is simply astonishing how little Bourdieu has to say about large-scale, “heteronomous” commercial cultural production’ (217). Yet, this pole is highly important in popular music. Second, a major drawback for our study is that it lacks a spatial component. Bourdieu does address the social space, but it links more to relationships than material location. Although this perspectiv...