1.1 Music and Digital Technologies
More or less explicitly, music and technologies are often thought of together, and rightly so. Without technologies, broadly understood (musical instrumentation, vocal techniques, modes for the transmission of replicable sequences and so on), there is no ‘music’ as customarily defined. As a contemporary popular cultural form, music is wholly technologically articulated and expressed, in terms of both consumption and production, and of course the technologies concerned are in turn social and cultural in their constitution, emergence and use.
This association between music and technology has received a particular inflection since the late 1990s, with the emergence of compressed digital music file formats, coupled with increasing Internet access and bandwidth. Napster seemed to redefine how listeners access and interact with (and through) music content. The following years were, in hindsight, defined in the ‘advanced’ economies by the development of a particular social drama: an opposition between the technological and legal enforcement of a production and distribution model on the one hand, and increasingly criminalised alternative distribution modes on the other (see, for example, Dennis 2009; Vaidhyanathan 2004). In the same period of time during which this techno-legal dynamic unfolded (and during which preferred legal distribution and monetisation strategies were also developed), digital technologies have, for many music cultures, become increasingly prominent: in terms of how music is produced (and to some extent thereby how it sounds), how it circulates, and how people access music, engage with it and ‘socialise’ (through) it.
Journalistic accounts of the association between music and digital technology have tended to emphasise the apparently radical changes it entails (see, for example, Witt 2015). This emphasis is a characteristic feature of popular discussion regarding music and digital technology, and has been for some time (Guzman and Jones 2014). Somehow, even after 20 years, music in digital formats remains a new ‘problem’. The most novel manifestation of digital music technologies—mass illegal downloading—is thus seen as the cause of all troubles. For instance, Andrew Edwards writes that the music industry ‘has been destroyed by digital technologies that have made music virtual, untethered to a physical unit, and very easily appropriated’ (2015, p. 9). Occasionally such stories are presented as augurs for other industries—higher education, for instance—which must adapt or face obsolescence. In the new world of plenty, traditional gatekeepers are in danger of extinction.
Such narratives are ‘default’, often appearing as it were by rote, and although they are sometimes presented as definitive, they generally gloss the complexities around how digital formats develop, come to be adopted, and adjust to dynamic cultural landscapes. In particular, these narratives have tended to neglect variations across the socio-economic, cultural and geographical contexts within which digital music technologies have become ‘naturalised’, in the same way that they often depict technologies as somehow fully formed and determined prior to their circulation across these contexts. Digital music technologies are far from being globally homogeneous. They do not penetrate all territories at the same speed. Different people, who have different interests, literacies, priorities and modes of engagement, use them differently. They are diffused across contexts where other longstanding technologies may be culturally durable, specified for highly particular uses, and not assimilable to the logic of the digital ‘upgrade’.
Discourses on the digital tend therefore continually to sever everyday digital music from its historical antecedents, although the constitutive relationships between music, format and transmission are long, complex and instructive (see, for example, Berland 1990; Carlsson 2008: Denning 2015; Durant 1990; Ernst 2016; Kromhout 2011; Lysloff and Gay 2003; Manuel 1993; Osborne 2012; Papenburg and Schulze 2016; Rogers 2013; Shelemay 1991; Théberge 2004; Sinnreich 2010; Sterne 2012). Accounting for changes concurrent with the inception of digital music technologies involves investigating processes that unfold over time. The temptation to generalise ‘universal’ dynamics of technological diffusion or uptake can be mitigated in part by attending to the detail of fragmentary and unresolved processes, that are often contradictory in their specifics. The motif of digital technologies that only now penetrate some ‘new’ and remote territories or cultural contexts is a prime example of such generalisation, a motif that confirms romantic notions of ‘authentic’ cultures, awaiting the miracle of modern technologies of inscription and fidelious capture.
There is therefore a dichotomy, between what are perceived as (claims to definitive) discourses attempting to capture changes induced by digital technologies, and narratives that unfold within, and with respect to, diverse contexts, where such narratives accrete to provide granular perspectives on the processes and dynamics whereby music technologies come to be consequentially embedded within particular contexts. To assemble such partial narratives, and showcase how they are illuminated by a diversity of contemporary research approaches, is the objective of this book.
Music is not a disembodied or autonomous social force. It is always enacted and encompassed within technological processes, which are in turn constituted, contested, appropriated and imposed under and in relation to specific social, political and economic conditions. As indicated by the essays contained herein, these processes can (and should) be approached and understood in multiple ways. They are processes, paradoxically, which seem both intense and slow moving, affecting different places, modalities and practices with varying intensities and rhythms. Attempts to explain digital music in everyday contexts under a singular research paradigm are invariably presented with the unenviable task of accounting for all the peculiarities arising from the immediate social and cultural context. Overarching narratives of the digital must remain permeable and inclusive, to incorporate the specificities of the conditions in which the digital partakes. The technological and its social uses and implications continuously unfold within specific contexts and historical junctures.
1.2 Networked Music Cultures
Technologies are themselves social in that they make manifest preferred uses and intended values on the part of manufacturers, which may or may not receive the preferred or anticipated uptake. Technology is a porous formation, with fuzzy border zones shared with normalised and potential communities of use, regulatory regimes, antecedent technologies, the corporate and workplace cultures in which they are seeded and developed, emerging and established infrastructures, industrial, economic and design contexts and so on. The various digital configurations all have their own characteristics and affordances, and are variously ‘open’ or ‘black-boxed’.
Furthermore, individuals and communities act variously on these technologies and their affordances, use them, embrace or abandon them, subject them to unexpected uses and pressures, and integrate them within their particular everyday contexts (see Nowak 2014). Routinised or embedded technologies can have uses and implications that are multiple, where some may contradict each other (for instance, infringing online downloading simultaneous with legal streaming services). Many inquiries have, for example, found that users who download the most music are also those who buy more compact discs (see Bahanovic and Collopy 2009, 2013). We stress therefore that the association between music and technologies is dynamic, because it is articulated across particular contexts in open-ended circuits of use, alongside pre-established technologies and practices, where processes and outcomes are often unpredictable and unanticipated. In the same way that contingent technological lock-ins come retrospectively to seem such inevitable and normal features of everyday life (the internal combustion engine, the QWERTY keyboard), so multiple possible future trajectories for the music–technology inter-articulation are plotted on the basis of partially known features of the present media ecology, by a range of actors who do not necessarily share compatible interests. While totalising accounts are therefore unsatisfactory, repeated but distinct empirical ‘takes’ can permit nuanced understandings of how this association unfolds, and demonstrate how it can be investigated and described.
As noted elsewhere (Nowak and Whelan 2014), the 15 years that separated the advent of the first notorious peer-to-peer network, Napster, from our exploration of the consequences of digital technologies for music gave rise to a range of analyses calling into question the assumptions hedged around discussions of the role of digital technologies in relation to music. In 2005, for example, David Beer described the ‘competing utopian and dystopian rhetorical formulations’ commonly aired when music as a networked cultural form is discussed. Certainly, the complex and multifaceted nature of digital music requires greater nuance than the tropes of revolutionary (or apocalyptic) change afford. To us, this implies that the everyday association of digital technologies and music must be read critically against multiple sites, scales and disciplinary matrices: technologically, aesthetically, socially, legally, historically and so on.
We present this collection of essays under the title Networked Music Cultures because we intend to highlight two important features of the digital for music in mundane social worlds: it creates connections, networks and links between individuals, structured soundscapes, protocols and processes; and it is interwoven with and embedded within cultural contexts and routine practices.
Just as networked music cultures are heterogeneous and dynamic, so the range of approaches making up the contemporary research field shares these features. Specific analytical frameworks, research projects and disciplinary orientations highlight different aspects of the fragmentary logics and dynamics around music in digital formats. There is not a ‘correct’ or ‘conclusive’ interpretive scheme for contemporary digital music, but understanding the wealth and diversity of approaches and their constitutive relations to the phenomena they uncover can foster a stronger appreciation of what is at stake in how networked music cultures are conceptualised.
1.3 Outline of the Book
Networked Music Cultures comprises a collection of essays, which cover a broad range of manifestations of digital music technologies within contexts where their presence has come to be felt. We expect these contributions to highlight novel ways to think about digital music technologies, and particularly about their increasing reach and variegated impacts. Our aim in compiling these contributions is to counteract definitive and resolute discourses on networked music cultures by placing social, cultural and economic processes at the core of the development of the digital. Taken together and read individually, the contributions to this volume demonstrate the diversity and vitality of research in this area on three counts.
Firstly, in terms of their areas of investigation, they indicate the depth and range of forms and scales by which everyday digital music is known and investigated. These include listening rituals and habits, intellectual property policy statements and instruments, the extensive implications of streaming audio, consumption practices set by corporate monopolies, nostalgic affects and the aesthetics of absence and virtuality, ‘active’ audiences and participatory culture, the constitution of the musical ‘object’, cultures of sharing, longstanding compositional practices and genres in legal grey areas, innovation in revenue-generation strategies, the remediation of prior formats, the audience as big data, intersections with and disruptions of established industry practices, discourses of economic justice and so on.
Secondly, in methodological, theo...