Mention ‘music online’ and people start thinking about platforms and algorithms, open archives, niche micro-cultures and the activities that give rise to them, and the endless quantities of music available at our fingertips.
I am interested in how sociologists can best investigate and understand the practices and processes that generate musical styles and communities online, and their social and cultural ramifications. The mediated production and distribution of music, and online discussion about music, shape rather than merely document how music cultures now emerge and develop.
These dynamics have to be situated in the longer history of the entanglement of music and technology. At the same time, for the sociology of popular music, the contemporary context requires methodological and conceptual approaches attuned to the relations between music, technologies, discourses, and the people who inhabit and animate all of these things.
I’ve been publishing work in this area for a while, see for example here on noise / power electronics, here on ‘music as commodity’, in here on the circulation of noise mp3s, in here on how vaporwave is discussed online, and with Raphaël Nowak, this article on vaporwave as critique, this co-edited book, Networked Music Cultures, and this most recent article in Sociological Review.