THE DIGITALIZATION OF MUSIC CULTURE: A CASE STUDY EXAMINING THE MUSICIAN/LISTENER RELATIONSHIP WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

This dissertation explores how the rise of widely available digital technology impacts the way music is produced, distributed, promoted, and consumed, with a specific focus on the changing nature of the relationship between artists and audiences new technology has engendered. Through in-depth interviewing, focus group interviewing, and discourse analysis, this case study explores the contemporary artist-audience relationship. This study demonstrates that digital technology impacts the relationship by making it closer and more multidimensional. This is intensified by the fact that everyone is participating; the audience and artist actively engage each other. The omnipresence of music culture combined with the omnipresence of technology is particularly salient. Media consumers are simultaneously engaged with music through technology, and technology through music and this happens on many different levels. Taken as a whole, artist and audience's musical lives are fragmented as they occur in multiple online and offline places, at multiple times, and are continuous. They create, download, stream, listen, share, burn, and build upon content while engaging in multiple personal and social practices. And, in the process, they experience rich meaning making attached to particular life events, people, places, and times. Engagement in a music community is not just listening to music, or consuming music, but participating in a culture. The nature of contemporary music culture is best characterized by community and as such, this dissertation argues we might better think of the audience as accomplices to the artist.