Making independent music: urban ecologies, prosumer networks, and the meanings of making things.

Activity: Talks and presentationsConference presentations

Description

This presentation draws upon interview and ethnographic data from a large international study of independent music labels in electronic music scenes to explore how the ideology of independent music making is entangled with meaning formations and with specific spatio-material contexts in neighborhoods and cities. We often hear about the changing ways people consume and listen to music. In the public domain, stories of music consumption markets tend to be the ones that stick – for example, the Sony Walkman, the i-Pod and the MP3, mobile listening, headphone cultures, the death of vinyl and its celebrity-like renaissance. But, what about how music is made, distributed, marketed, and how it becomes an agent entangled with material and cultural forces in cities, scenes and spaces? And, moreover in the context of this project, what happens to music makers and music professionals who make music to sell, but who aren’t affiliated with the ‘big-music’ industry? This paper explores the meaning of independent cultural production in this context, showing how micro and niche record labels go about making, materialising, and distributing their music. A key part of this process involves transformations and exchanges of cultural capital and economic capital at individual and group level which use the city and translocal connections as resources. In independent markets, record labels are frontstage signifiers of artistic style, of local meaning and scene-related capital, artistic innovation, and even cultural resistance. They are scene participants, taste-makers, lifestyle entrepreneurs, and scene producers, but also enthusiastic consumers of the cultural content of independent scenes. In this context, artistic integrity and style considerations are more important than the star-system and profit margins, and cultural and symbolic capital are at least as important as financial capital. This paper examines the meanings, practices and networks that sustain the production of independent music consumption in this context.
Period6. Sept 2018
Event title10th midterm Conference of the European Research Networks Sociology of the Arts & Sociology of Culture : ESA Sociology of Arts and Culture
Event typeConference
LocationValletta , MaltaShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • music economies
  • Cultural consumption
  • Cultural Production