Consuming Music in the Digital Age

Technologies, Roles and Everyday Life

Raphaël Nowak

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137492562
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

This book addresses the issue of music consumption in the digital era of technologies. It explores how individuals use music in the context of their everyday lives and how, in return, music acquires certain roles within everyday contexts and more broadly in their life narratives.

1

The Material Modalities of Music Consumption

Issues of music consumption are entwined with the technological means that play music. Since the advent of recorded music in the late 19th century, technologies have contributed to configuring the ways in which music is written, recorded, produced, marketed, and listened to. Over the last couple of decades, technological innovations that are usually assembled under the umbrella term ‘digital’ have induced new modalities of musical consumption. In the meantime, the development of the sociology of music has somewhat widely overlooked the materiality of the music technologies that individuals interact with to consume music. Indeed, music technologies only play at best a minor role in explaining the various ways in which individuals engage in listening practices (see Nowak, 2014a). For example, the influential accounts of music sociologists Tia DeNora (1999, 2000, 2003) and Antoine Hennion (2003, 2007; Hennion et al., 2000) disregard the technological evolution of the digital age. Turning to the sociology of culture and media, it is possible to point out how interacting with music technologies participates in the affective responses that individuals feel when consuming music. Instances like Michael Bull’s iconic work on the iPod (2004, 2005, 2007), as well as Dominique Bartmanski and Ian Woodward’s recent account of the vinyl disc (2013, 2014) show how the materiality of objects is a factor in how individuals consume music and of how it affects them. The limits of such studies reside in the absence of the comprehensive picture required to understand the multiplicity and complexity of contemporary modes of music consumption (Nowak, 2014a). Indeed, the contemporary omnipresence of music correlates to the increasing multiplication of modalities of music consumption.

This chapter provides the technological and material framework of this research. It explores the context of the digital age of music technologies and seeks to understand how individuals have adopted new music technologies, how they use them, and how they have adapted their modes of consumption to a greater array of material options at their disposal. The chapter first features a brief discussion of the history of the digital age of music technologies, before then presenting some quantitative data on contemporary modes of consumption and comparing them with the qualitative empirical data I have gathered in both samples of my empirical research. The last section seeks to understand the meanings of the different music technologies and formats that individuals use as their modalities for everyday consumption.

1.1 A critical perspective on the digital age

This initial section discusses the historical evolution of digital technologies. The ‘digital’ is a problematic variable to account with in that it has contributed in reconfiguring the modalities to consume music. Looking at issues of production, distribution, and consumption within the last three decades helps identify the context within which contemporary modes of music consumption take place. It also locates the prominence of the technological variable in the ways individuals listen to music within everyday life.

The digital age of music technologies began with the advent of the Compact Disc (CD) in 1982. Conjointly manufactured and distributed by both Phillips and Sony, the format was marketed to replace the vinyl disc, whose sales had been declining since 1978 (Bartmanski and Woodward, 2014; Coleman, 2003; David, 2012; Tournès, 2008). The CD regenerated the market of recorded music by providing a set of advanced technical features. Mark Coleman (2003) notes for instance that listening to a CD highly reduces background noise, which means that every instrument in the mix comes through loud and clear. The list of innovations did not stop there: ‘The CD offers longer playing time, smaller size, programmability of tracks, and a subcode for display, control and optional user information. Integration of circuits permits portability of players and low manufacturing costs’ (Polhmann, 1989, p. 8).

The CD was not the only format that marked significant changes in modes of music consumption during the 1980s. Launched in 1984, the Sony Walkman enabled the ‘autonomy of the walking self’ (Hosokawa, 1984, p. 166) by allowing its users to ‘… re-appropriate place and time, with listeners regaining control of their auditory environments by blocking out undesirable surrounding noise (and people)’ (Shuker, 2008, p. 43). Music became ‘deterritorialized’ through the use of the Walkman and in the meantime, the CD brought new levels of success. Indeed, audiences’ infatuation for the CD resulted in a golden age of recorded music revenues. Matthew David writes:

The 1990s were, it can be seen in hindsight, the golden age for the recording industry. The transfer from vinyl to digital CDs saw increased prices and sales. Collection re-formatting could not last forever and, therefore, some tail off in CD sales was inevitable. (2012, p. 33)

In the early 1990s, the Discman was introduced to take over the Walkman and turn CDs into a portable sound carrier. Despite the continuing success of the format, music industry bodies however sought to introduce the MiniDisc as a replacement for the CD. Launched in 1992, the MiniDisc never caught on in about a decade of existence (Coleman, 2003).

At about the same time, European researchers compressed the sound off a compact disc to encode it within a digital music file (Tournès, 2008). The MP3 was born. It was rapidly accompanied by a set of software that equipped personal computers (PC), which started to invade westerners’ households. The increasing speed of the Internet associated with the penetration of its access resulted in a new musical phenomenon: file-sharing. Early exchange systems were launched in the late 1990s – one example being Warez in 1998 (see Huizing and Van der Wal, 2014). However, file sharing became massively successful with the advent of Napster. Shawn Fanning, an American college student born in 1980, his uncle John Fanning, and friend Shawn Parker developed the peer-to-peer application Napster in 1999. They initially did not intend to turn online exchange of music files into a global phenomenon (see David, 2012). The application received a lot of coverage in the general press, but very little in music-specialized press (see Guzman and Jones, 2014). Nevertheless, by 2001, Napster counted more than 50 million users (Bergmann, 2004), and a large majority of these users did not consider the practice as constituting a ‘theft’ (see Lenhart and Fox, 2000). The MP3 was the dominant format in online exchanges of music:

The dominance of the MP3 music file format was largely the result of the conveniently small size of the compressed file and its distribution by Napster file-sharing software, which became hugely popular between its release in 1999 and its first closure in 2001. (Martin et al., 2010)

In reaction to this trend, musicians such as Madonna, Metallica or Dr. Dre were the first to sue downloading users over infringing copyright (see David, 2012). A strong link was then established by music industry bodies between the increase of online music sharing and the decrease of CD sales. It was only reinforced by court decisions and it continues to prevail today when looking at modes of music consumption. However, the correlation is overly simplistic. The decrease of CD sales can also be explained by other factors, such as the end of its golden age and its increasing wear effect. Curwen Best writes:

In 2001, CD sales were said to have declined in the United States. As had happened back in 1978, when record sales started to fall and the recording industry blamed the new technology of cassette tapes and early video games, the industry in the 2000s blamed the Internet, among other factors. (2008, p. 100)

Napster’s creator, Shawn Fanning, notes that sales were still going up at the time when Napster was hitting its peak, and rather blames the confronting and aggressive response from music industry bodies (Fanning, 2001, in Coleman, 2003, p. 182). Copyright laws were reinforced in the early 2000s, which did not prevent file sharing from becoming more popular. In fact, innovations in terms of illegal downloading have progressively adjusted to the evolution of copyright laws (Burk, 2014). In the meantime, music became a ‘catalyzer’ for Internet access (Jones and Lenhart, 2004; Rojek, 2005), or even the ‘… crack cocaine of the Internet’s growth’ (Lessig, 2004, p. 269).

Beyond the promises of a democratized access to music, the emergence of issues related to copyrights, to economic capital and skills required to access music for free online and to the economic remuneration for musicians contradict the utopian possibilities of the technology. In other words, the advent of a set of applications on the Internet has certainly resulted in as many forms of disruption of cultural trends as in forms of continuity (see Carter and Rogers, 2014; Nowak and Whelan, 2014; Tepper and Hargittai, 2009). In retrospect, the qualities of the CD (in terms of sound and convenience of use) have contributed to its fall. The format gave birth to digital music files and was superseded by it. In turn, digital music files, and primarily MP3s, were accompanied by a set of media and technologies that enable their massive diffusion. David writes: ‘Falling sales cannot be solely blamed on file-sharing. While digital recording and MP3 compression developed within the recording industry, their significance was transformed with their reapplication within file-sharing systems’ (2012, p. 33).

In all, the digital acts as the techno-cultural frame within which issues of music production, distribution and consumption are located. Despite the complexity of what composes the ‘digital’, the term is used as a variable that anchors various debates about the present and future of recorded music, about what music represents in our contemporary societies, and about the consequences of exchanges and dialogues between individuals (or peers) mediated by online technologies. Nick Prior argues: ‘Sometimes lauded as a revolutionary new set of creative practices, sometimes denigrated as a technological beast responsible for destroying music, the digital has become a technocultural leitmotif for the twenty-first century’ (2010, p. 399, emphasis in original). The rhetorics of the ‘digital revolution’ have prevailed in discourses about the technological and cultural changes witnessed in the production and consumption of music (see Bylin, 2014; Knopper, 2009; Kot, 2010; Kusek and Leonhard, 2005). The consequences of technological changes, coupled with the adjustments made in the fields of production, distribution, and consumption of music, are more intricate and uncertain than a change of regime – as implied by the rhetorics of a ‘revolution’ – would let us think (see Nowak, 2014b). As David argues, ‘change is not simply the expression of technical “evolution”’ (2012, p. 30). In that regard, users of digital technologies also exist within a broader legal and cultural context that supersedes the possibilities of the technologies (see Meese, 2015). Instead, new technologies are incorporated within what Paolo Magaudda (2011) names a ‘circuit of practices.’ The significance of new technologies needs to be measured in context, or ‘in action’ as Prior (2014) does with the iPod. The various uses that individuals develop around new technological objects account for the ways in which these are adopted. In the case of music technologies, while it is undeniable that digital music files have challenged pre-existing models of music distribution and consumption, it is also apparent now that digital means have redefined individuals’ access to music and listening rather than ‘revolutionized’ them.

In light of the complexity of cultural changes induced by the digital, coupled with the uncertainty of its evolution, it is essential to develop more grounded and empirical approaches to the ways that digital technologies are accessed, adopted and used by individuals. Technological innovations do not transform cultural practices in a day. First, their level of penetration increases over time. Despite the rapid and massive success of online music downloading, many users have started exchanging music online long after the first peer-to-peer applications and copyright issues emerged. Second, new technologies are adopted within a set of pre-existing cultural practices and contexts (see Magaudda, 2011; Meese, 2015), which then adjust according to the novelty and interest of these new technologies.

This book attempts to inscribe music digital technologies within the ways individuals use them to listen to music that accompanies their everyday lives and personal narratives. This brief critical perspective on the digital age of music technologies anchors the context within which the empirical study of this research takes place. At times when the uncertainty related to issues of production and distribution of music still dominates, it is essential to seek how individuals – or music consumers/listeners – adapt to these changes to access and listen to music in their everyday lives. The next section explores contemporary issues of music consumption by discussing recent quantitative studies of music consumption and figures about uses of certain technologies. The aim is to examine how these cultural trends translate into everyday uses of music technologies.

1.2 Consuming music at the time of the maturation of the digital age

A decade after the advent of Napster and the massive access of digital music files through peer-to-peer applications, several quantitative inquiries discuss contemporary modes of music consumption, particularly in young people (see American Assembly, 2012; Bahanovic and Collopy, 2009, 2013; IFPI, 2011, 2012, 2013; Nielsen, 2013; Statista, 2014). By questioning the means through which individuals access and listen to music, these inquiries all point towards an increasing multiplicity of contemporary modes of music consumption. Digital music files and streaming technologies are at the core of consumption practices to browse through music, discover content, experiment with new releases, and listen to music. However, they are also complemented by other ‘physical’ technologies that remain important in the ways individuals consume music. This multiplicity enacts modes of consumption within everyday life (by associating technologies with particular contexts), while attributing certain uses and meanings to these technologies.

Contemporary modes of consumption are not only multiple, but increasingly fragmented and heterogeneous (see Nowak, 2014a). The fragmentation of modes of consumption refers to individuals who consume music through one particular medium or technology that corresponds to their taste. For instance, listening to popular music hits on streaming services, to hip-hop or electronic music on vinyl disc (see Bartmanski and Woodward, 2013, 2014), to ‘breakcore’ on MP3 file or ‘grime’ on cassette tape (see Whelan, 2008) are so many fragmented modes of music consumption. On the other hand, the heterogeneity of modes of consumption refers to uses of different media and music technologies in individuals. At times when repertoires of music preferences are said to be eclectic (see Glevarec and Pinet, 2009, 2012, 2013; see Chapter 4), developing heterogeneous practices of music listening through different media and technologies embodies the variety of one’s taste for various genres of music.

The studies conducted by Bahanovic and Collopy (2009, 2013) for the institute UK Music are particularly interesting to pinpoint the evolution of consumption modes over time. Drawing on samples of individuals between 14 and 24 years old, they measure the evolution of young people’s behaviors towards different technologies to access music. In their 2009 study, they find that although online downloading remains quite popular, CD collections are also growing and 85% of young people declare they would be ready to pay for an unlimited MP...