Introduction
The origins of the relationship between technology and popular music go back as far as the initial formation of popular music itself, and the beginnings of the music industry (Braun 2002; Frith 1986). With the advent of sound recording and reproduction, radio and electricity enabled the transformation of the practices of music production, consumption, and sharing in various different ways. The spread of recorded music empowered the sale and distribution of music as a product independent from live performances (Burnett 1992), and related to this, the record label and the “traditional” music business model were born. The traditional record label structure was created and maintained with the aim of selling as many recorded music items as possible. Business models, industry strategies and music consumption preferences are intertwined with the perspectives and limitations offered by technology in the digital ecosystem as well. During the rise and fall of eras defined by Napster, file sharing, MySpace, online radios, iPod, music stores, and in the most recent streaming age, we have seen a sequence of conflicts involving a network of artefacts, policies, laws, corporations, musicians and other stakeholders. The history and present of the popular music industry, business, audiences and discourses demonstrates the inseparable and co-evolutionary nature of music and technology—that their development mutually depends on each other. But what patterns and interactions might be unearthed in this relationship, and how does the interaction of music and technology work? Focusing on the relationship between recorded popular music and digital technologies, in this introduction, I intend to outline a culture-centered narrative regarding the co-evolutionary nature of music and technology, and inspect the following questions. What is the most beneficial way to approach the interaction of music production, distribution, sharing, and consumption, on the one hand, and technology, on the other? How do cultural meanings of audio formats and music technologies change over time and across communities? Finally, how do those cultural meanings coexist with the use of technologies, and how might culture shape technology?
“New” Technologies, Popular Music, and Society
So why all the anxiety? The key, in my view, is the currently uneasy relationship of music with technology. In the last 10 years, there has been an explosion in the ways that music can be discovered and consumed driven by technological shifts. Unfortunately, the industry was caught unawares when the digital tide first hit and is only now really acting on the changes it has wrought. But this feels like a paradox because music and technology have traditionally been good bedfellows throughout history. Instruments, records, cassettes, CDs, radio, TV, concert hall amplification are all examples of technologies that have expanded the possibilities for making, discovering and listening to music. (Bolza 2008)
The thoughts of Federico Bolza from 2008, the then senior director of digital development at Sony BMG, tell us a lot about the contradictory and uncertain nature of ideas centered around the relationship between music and technology. One of the uncertainties lies with the fluid scope of technology. When we call recent changes and developments in the music world “technological” or of technological origin, then we obviously refer to digital technologies and the Internet, the immaterial network as well as the gadgets and tools. Not technology in general, but particular technologies perceived as new. Yet with this notion coexists the universal meaning of technology: Technology as the sum of all tools and procedures through which music is to be born and represented—the universe of instruments, records, radios, studios, acoustics, amplification, and formats.
Interpretations of digital technology, often perceived as new, thus “the” technology (cf. Taylor 2001, 6–7), are characteristically inseparable from the technologically deterministic view that those novelties in certain ways define, direct, and shape music, as well as determine its production, distribution, and consumption. Naturally, this interpretation is also paradoxical, as however evanescent this angle in deterministic accounts may be, cultural and social traits are equally important in the diffusion and evolution of technology. The attitude of the late-reacting recording industry might provide an example to this. As it is widely documented, recording industry lobbyists, especially the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) (Electronic Frontier Foundation 2008), initially framed mp3 and online music sharing as either a fad or a crime (Andersson Schwarz 2014; Leyshon 2001). It thus forced innovations in digital music toward a particular direction, in accordance with the support of the copyright regime’s legislative infrastructure backing such—by now partly defunct—technologies as DRM (Digital Rights Management, see McCourt and Burkart 2003).
It was not exclusively the technology of file sharing, but also a vast array of industry interests, consumer needs and reactions to it that contributed to the fundamental reshaping of music industry and music scenes in the post-Napster era. Yet, the narratives’ nature on the issue remained predominantly similar. Similarly, technologies (or, “the” technology) are central subjects of most of the artefact-centered narratives trying to grasp the events and trends of the last two decades regarding the relationship between music and the internet. Either in a negatively deterministic way—as the by now proverbial sentiment of “internet killed music” reminds us—, framing “new” technologies as threats or inferior. Or, often loaded with technophile enthusiasm, offering them the main role of the protagonist (as the various “saviors” of the music industry resurface from time to time).
A Sides, Radio Edit, and YouTube Stars: Changing Materialities of Music Consumption
As it is represented in the majority of historical works, popular music as we know it today was born as a consequence of a series of changes in the technological ecosystem. The technologically deterministic focus in those narratives (Katz 2004) is not a coincidence. Although music has always been inseparable from instruments and acoustics, at the beginning of the twentieth century, three closely related technologies—sound recording, radio, and electricity—took the role of “technology” and thus became dominant in the recollections regarding the advent of popular music.
Sound recording and reproduction, radio, and electricity enabled the transformation of the practices of music production, consumption, and sharing in various different ways (Anderson 2006). The spread of sound recording and recorded music empowered the sale and distribution of music as a product independent from live performances, and related to this, the record label and the traditional recording-based music business model were born. The traditional record label structure, based on the dominance of a small number of so-called major labels, was created and maintained with the aim of maximizing record sales. The monitoring and scouting of potential new and sellable talents was subordinated to this aim; so was the division of labor between composers, musicians, and producers; marketing and PR activities; the creation of sound recording protocols and studio procedures; the established ways of cooperating with partners, contractors, and specialists; and the architecture and maintenance of the copyright law regime.
“Video Killed the Radio Star”—the 1979 The Buggles song written by Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes, and Bruce Woolley—succinctly summarized the widespread assumption according to which by the end of the 1970s, the era of the radio had finally come to an end, thanks to the emergence of television technology. A few decades later, in 2010, “Internet Killed the Video Star,” performed by The Limousines, reflected a similar mood: Internet technology, by the end of the first decade of the new millennium, had killed television and all related cultural formations. The Internet as a convergent medium has indeed contributed to the transformation of music-related social practices and of the creative industries in many ways, under the umbrella term of “digitization” (Allen-Robertson 2013, 2015; Anderson 2014; Bennett and Rogers 2016; Burnett 1993; Hesmondhalgh 2013; Born 2010–2015; Spilker 2017). Production of certain styles and genres of music has become more democratized and less location-bound with the proliferation of digital tools and online communication. The boundaries between artists and consumers have also become blurred (Ebare 2004). Besides, with the advent of widely accessible and freely downloadable music, old business models—based on the sales of live performance returned after a century dominated by record sales—and new models were also tailored exclusively to online sales (Collins and Young 2014; Marshall 2013; Tschmuck 2016). The complexity of the narratives of the relationship between Internet and music shows us the extent to which technology’s perceived role in music is culturally determined: The period after the appearance of Napster on the turn of the twenty-first century has been evaluated as revolutionary and a time of crisis at the same time (Nowak and Whelan 2014; Carter and Rogers 2014; Leyshon e...