Music Scenes as Infrastructures: From Live Venues to Algorithmic Data

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Popular Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem

Part of the book series: Pop Music, Culture and Identity ((PMCI))

  • 1378 Accesses

Abstract

The chapter aims at expanding the music scenes studies’ theoretical toolbox by focusing on the notion of infrastructure. The chapter addresses how the notion has been adopted in early music scenes research, arguing that a lack of theorization has characterized seminal works in this field. Then, the chapter takes into account how digital infrastructures have become much more important with the rise of the Internet and digital media, yet research on virtual music scenes has focused more on contents circulating on forums and Web sites than on the influence exerted by digital media’s infrastructural logic. Finally, the chapter explores emerging phenomena, including the role of platforms, algorithmic data flows, and future scenarios opened up by the adoption of blockchain technology in music industry.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
EUR 32.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or Ebook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
EUR 29.95
Price includes VAT (Thailand)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
EUR 93.08
Price includes VAT (Thailand)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
EUR 109.99
Price excludes VAT (Thailand)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free ship** worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
EUR 109.99
Price excludes VAT (Thailand)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free ship** worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Airoldi, Massimo, Davide Beraldo, and Andrea Gandini. 2016. “Follow the Algorithm: An Exploratory Investigation of Music on YouTube.” Poetics 57: 1–13.

    Google Scholar 

  • Balbi, Gabriele, and Paolo Magaudda. 2018. A History of Digital Media: An Intermedia and Global Perspective. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Balbi, Gabriele, Alessandro Delfanti, and Paolo Magaudda. 2016. “Digital Circulation: Media, Materiality, Infrastructures. An Introduction.” Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies 7 (1): 7–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barna, Emília. 2017. “The Perfect Guide in a Crowded Musical Landscape: Online Music Platforms and Curatorship.” First Monday 22 (4).

    Google Scholar 

  • Barone, Stefano. 2016. “Fragile Scenes, Fractured Communities: Tunisian Metal and Sceneness”. Journal of Youth Studies 19 (1): 20–35.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baym, Nancy. 2007. “The New Shape of Online Community: The Example of Swedish Independent Music Fandom”. First Monday 12 (8).

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2018. Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection. New York: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baym, Nancy, Lana Swartz, and Andrea Alarcon. 2019. “Convening Technologies: Blockchain and the Music Industry”. International Journal of Communication 13: 402–421.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bennett, Andy. 2002. “Music, Media and Urban Mythscapes: A Study of the ‘Canterbury Sound’”. Media, Culture & Society 24 (1): 87–100.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2004. “Virtual Subcultures? Youth, Identity and the Internet”. In After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, edited by Andy Bennett and Keith Kahn-Harris, 162–172. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bennett, Andy, and Richard Peterson, eds. 2004. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bennett, Andy, and Ian Rogers. 2016. Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory. London: Palgrave.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bonini, Tiziano, and Andrea Gandini. 2019. “‘First Week Is Editorial, Second Week Is Algorithmic’: Music Curation and Platformization.” Social Media + Society 5 (4) (forthcoming).

    Google Scholar 

  • Bowker, Geoffrey, and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bowker, Geoffrey, Karen Baker, Florence Millerand, and David Ribes. 2009. “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment.” In International Handbook of Internet Research, edited by Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrupa, and Matthew M. Allen, 97–117. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Braun, Joshua A. 2015. This Program Is Brought to You By…: Distributing Television News Online. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp. 2017. The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dowd, Tim. 2014. “Music Festivals as Trans-national Scenes: The Case of Progressive Rock in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries.” In The Festivalization of Culture, edited by Ian Woodward, Jodie Taylor, and Andy Bennett, 147–168. Farnham: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Edwards, Paul N. 2003. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems”. In Modernity and Technology, edited by Andrew Feenberg, Thomas Misa, and Philip Brey, 185–226. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Finnegan, Ruth. 1989. The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gillespie, Tarleton. 2010. “The Politics of ‘Platforms’.” New Media & Society 12 (3): 347–364.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gitelman, Lisa, and Virginia Jackson. 2013. “Introduction.” In “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman, 1–14. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Helmond, Anne. 2015. “The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready.” Social Media + Society 1 (2): 1–11.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kibby, Marjorie D. 2000. “Home on the Page: A Virtual Place of Music Community.” Popular Music 19 (1): 91–100.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kotarba, Joseph A., and Nicolas J. LaLone. 2014. “The Scene: A Conceptual Template for an Interactionist Approach to Contemporary Music.” In Revisiting Symbolic Interaction in Music Studies and New Interpretive Works, edited by Norman K. Denzin, 51–65. Bingley: Emerald.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kruse, Holly. 2010. “Local Identity and Independent Music Scenes, Online and Off.” Popular Music and Society 33 (5): 625–639.

    Google Scholar 

  • Landry, Charles. 2000. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Larkin, Brian. 2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–343.

    Google Scholar 

  • Magaudda, Paolo. 2018. “The Future of Digital Music Infrastructures: Expectations and Promises of the Blockchain ‘Revolution’.” In Popular Music in the Post-Digital Age: Politics, Economy, Culture and Technology, edited by Ewa Mazierska, Les Gillon, and Tony Rigg, 51–68. London: Bloomsbury.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mazierska, Ewa, Les Gillon, and Tony Rigg (eds.). 2018. Popular Music in the Post-Digital Age: Politics, Economy, Culture and Technology. London: Bloomsbury.

    Google Scholar 

  • Montano, Ed. 2011. “Festival Fever and International DJs: The Changing Shape of DJ Culture in Sydney’s Commercial Electronic Dance Music Scene.” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 2 (1): 63–89.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morris, Jeremy W. 2015. Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture. San Francisco: University of California Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Musiani, Francesca, Derrick L. Cogburn, Laura DeNardis, and Nanette S. Levinson (eds.). 2016. The Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski (eds.). 2015. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld. 2004. “Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music.” Social Studies of Science 34 (5): 635–648.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plantin, Jean-Christophe, and Aswin Punathambekar. 2019. “Digital Media Infrastructures: Pipes, Platforms, and Politics.” Media, Culture & Society 41 (2): 163–174.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards, and Christian Sandvig. 2018. “Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook.” New Media & Society 20 (1): 293–310.

    Google Scholar 

  • Prey, Robert. 2016. “Musica Analytica: The Datafication of Listening.” In Networked Music Cultures, edited by Raphaël Nowak and Andrew Whelan, 31–48. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schaap, Julian, and Pauwke Berkers. 2013. “Grunting Alone? Online Gender Inequality in Extreme Metal Music.” IASPM@ Journal 4 (1): 101–116.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shank, Barry. 1994. Dissonant Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stahl, Geoff. 2004. “‘It’s Like Canada Reduced’: Setting the Scene in Montreal.” In After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, edited by A. Bennett and K. Kahn Harris, 51–64. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

    Google Scholar 

  • Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. 1996. “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces”. Information Systems Research 7 (1): 111–134.

    Google Scholar 

  • Starosielski, Nicole. 2015. The Undersea Network. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Straw, Will. 1991. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies 5 (3): 368–388.

    Google Scholar 

  • Théberge, Paul. 2005. “Everyday Fandom: Fan Clubs, Blogging, and the Quotidian Rhythms of the Internet.” Canadian Journal of Communication 30 (4): 485–502.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tofalvy, Tamas. 2014. “‘MySpace Bands’ and ‘Tagging Wars’: Conflicts of Genre, Work Ethic and Media Platforms in an Extreme Music Scene.” First Monday 19 (9).

    Google Scholar 

  • van Dijck, José, Thomas Poell, and Martin de Waal. 2018. The Platform Society. Cambridge: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Whelan, Andrew. 2006. “Do You Produce?: Subcultural Capital and Amateur Musicianship in Peer-to-Peer Networks.” In Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture, edited by Michael D. Ayers, 57–81. New York: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paolo Magaudda .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Magaudda, P. (2020). Music Scenes as Infrastructures: From Live Venues to Algorithmic Data. In: Tofalvy, T., Barna, E. (eds) Popular Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44659-8_2

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Navigation