scholarly journals Music on-demand: A commentary on the changing relationship between music taste, consumption and class in the streaming age

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205395171988877 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Webster
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Goods ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
Cultural Taste ◽  
Challenging Question ◽  
Music Streaming

From providing on-demand access to vast catalogues of recorded music at little or no cost to the use of Big Data to personalise the experience of consuming music, music streaming platforms, such as Spotify and Apple Music, have the potential to disrupt the part that music taste plays in the performance of class identities and the reproduction of class privilege in ways not previously encountered. The influential sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu , demonstrated that cultural taste – what and how people consume cultural goods, such as music, food and fashion – is shaped by class background and in doing so serves to mark and reproduce class differences in everyday life. In this commentary, I consider how sociologists might address the important but challenging question of if and how are music streaming platforms shaping the part that music taste plays in the performance of class identities and the cultural reproduction of class privilege. I discuss some ways in which music streaming platforms may be shaping how class identities are performed through how people consume music, drawing attention to consumption practices that have the potential to both involve and resist the use of music streaming platforms in the pursuit of social distinction.

scholarly journals The promise of personalisation: Exploring how music streaming platforms are shaping the performance of class identities and distinction

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110278
Author(s):  
Jack Webster
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Key Informants ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Music Streaming

Not only do music streaming platforms offer on-demand access to vast catalogues of licensed music, they are actively shaping what and how it finds us through personalisation. While existing literature has highlighted how personalisation has the potential to transform the part that music taste and consumption play in the performance of class identities and distinction, little is empirically known about its sociological consequences. Drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews with a combination of key informants and Spotify users, this article demonstrates that personalisation is undermining opportunities to achieve social distinction by taking over the labour of music curation and compressing the time needed to appreciate music for its own sake. It demonstrates that those with cultural capital at stake – in the case of this study, young, (primarily) male cultural omnivores – experience personalisation as a threat, highlighting how particular claims to social distinction are being contested in the platform age.

scholarly journals Food consumption, habitus and the embodiment of social change: Making class and doing gender in urban Vietnam

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-701
Author(s):  
Judith Ehlert
Keyword(s):  
Food Consumption ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Nutrition Transition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Doing Gender ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Investment Capital ◽  
And Gender

This article draws on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a means to analyse social distinction and change in terms of class and gender through the lens of food consumption. By focusing on urban Vietnam, this qualitative study looks into the daily practices of food consumption, dieting and working on the body as specific means to enact ideal body types. Economically booming Vietnam has attracted growing investment capital in the fields of body and beauty industries and food retail. After decades of food insecurity, urban consumers find themselves manoeuvring in between growing food and lifestyle options, a nutrition transition, and contradicting demands on the consumer to both indulge and restrain themselves. Taking this dynamic urban context as its point of departure and adopting an intersectional perspective, this article assesses how eating, dieting and body performance are applied in terms of making class and doing gender. It shows that the growing urban landscape of food and body-centric industries facilitates new possibilities for distinction, dependent not only on economic capital but on bodily and cultural capital also, and furthermore, how social habitus regarding food–body relationships are gendered and interlaced with class privilege.

Are You Hooked on Paid Music Streaming?

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie C. Chen ◽  
Steven Leon ◽  
Makoto Nakayama
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Behavioral Dynamics ◽  
Revenue Sources ◽  
Streaming Services ◽  
Facilitating Conditions ◽  
Communication Control ◽  
Music Streaming

The proliferation of free on-demand music streaming services (e.g., Spotify) is offsetting the traditional revenue sources (e.g., purchases of downloads or CDs) of the music industry. In order to increase revenue and sustain business, the music industry is directing its efforts toward increasing paid subscriptions by converting free listeners into paying subscribers. However, most companies are struggling with these attempts because they lack a clear understanding of the psychological and social purchase motivations of consumers. This study compares and contrasts the two different phases of Millennial generation consumer behaviors: the alluring phase and the hooking phase. A survey was conducted with 73 paying users and 163 non-paying users of on-demand music streaming services. The authors' data analysis shows two separate behavioral dynamics seen between these groups of users. While social influence and attitude are primary drivers for the non-paying users in the alluring phase, facilitating conditions and communication control capacity play critical roles for the paying users in the hooking phase. These results imply that the music industry should apply different approaches to prospective and current customers of music streaming services.

scholarly journals Music Platforms and the Optimization of Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630512094069
Author(s):  
Jeremy Wade Morris
Keyword(s):  
Digital Culture ◽  
Cultural Goods ◽  
Software Developers ◽  
Recording Technology ◽  
Streaming Service ◽  
Music Streaming ◽  
Data Optimization

Drawing on Mark Katz’s notion of phonographic effects—where musicians, during the advent of early recording technology, altered their style of play to be better captured by microphones—this article explores some of the “platform effects” that arise in the shift to platformization and how cultural goods and user practices are re-formatted in the process. In particular, I examine the case of the music streaming service Spotify to think through the variety of means, sonic, and otherwise, that artists, labels, and other platform stakeholders use to “optimize” music to respond to the pressures platformization creates. I develop a typology of strategies—sonic optimization, data optimization, and infrastructural optimization—to consider the creative and logistical challenges optimization poses for platforms, artists, and users alike. From creating playlist friendly songs to musical spam to artificial play counts, I use the blurry lines these cases create to explore the tensions between the competing needs of platform providers, content producers, and users. I argue that music, as data, adds pressure on musicians and producers to think and act like software developers and coders, treating their music not just as songs that need to reach listeners, but as an intermingling of sonic content and coded metadata that needs to be prepared and readied for discovery. This optimization of culture, and the pressures it creates, affects not just musicians, but content producers of all kinds (e.g., video, podcasts, apps, books, etc.) who are forced to negotiate their relationships digital culture and the platforms through which it circulates.

scholarly journals Musical NeuroPicks: A consumer-grade BCI for on-demand music streaming services

2018 ◽  
Vol 280 ◽  
pp. 65-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
F.P. Kalaganis ◽  
D.A. Adamos ◽  
N.A. Laskaris
Keyword(s):  
On Demand ◽  
Streaming Services ◽  
Music Streaming

When materiality ‘bites back’: Digital music consumption practices in the age of dematerialization

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Magaudda
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Digital Music ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Cultural Goods ◽  
Theory Of Practice ◽  
Music Consumption ◽  
Practice Approach ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
Empirical Point

Dematerialization of artefacts and material objects is a relevant issue in consumer studies, especially when we consider the ongoing changes regarding the consumption of cultural goods. This article adopts a theory-of-practice approach to analyse the consequences of dematerialization on the practices of digital music consumption. From an empirical point of view, the article is based on data collected during research into the appropriation of digital music technologies and based on 25 in-depth narrative semi-structured interviews with young Italian digital music consumers. The analysis mainly focuses on the appropriation of three specific technologies involved into the contemporary consumption of music: the iPod, the external hard drive and the vinyl disc. In order to understand the role of materiality in the age of dematerialization, the article adopts the ‘circuit of practice’, an explicative model that enables empirical analysis and that is aimed at highlighting the changing relationships between materiality and social practices. The analysis shows that music digitalization does not mean less materiality in the actual practice of listeners, that material ‘stuffs’ still occupy a relevant position in digital music, and that materiality nowadays seems to ‘bite back’, being even more crucial in shaping consumers’ practices.

scholarly journals Towards streaming as a dominant mode of media use?

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-57
Author(s):  
Marika Lüders ◽  
Vilde Schanke Sundet ◽  
Terje Colbjørnsen
Keyword(s):  
Media Use ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
Cross Sectional Survey ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Frequent Users ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Streaming Services ◽  
Music Streaming ◽  
First Mover ◽  
Do So

AbstractMusic and television streaming services present users with abundant catalogues of content available on demand. We investigate whether users respond by narrowing or widening the diversity of content they consume. Further, we examine how the different logics characterising music and television streaming are mirrored in the number of streaming services people use. To do so, we compare non-, sporadic, regular, and frequent users of television and music streaming services. Findings from a cross-sectional survey in Norway show that frequent streamers consume a wider variety of genres and rely on more services. Our results also indicate that streaming has gone from a first-mover activity to a standard consumer mode. This study indicates that we can expect continued growth in television streamers, whereas the music streaming industry seems more consolidated.

Representing the middle-class ‘hipster’: Emerging modes of distinction, generational oppositions and gentrification

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias le Grand
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Spatial Dimension ◽  
Young Person ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
The Public ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
Social Anxieties ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries ◽  
Cultural Taste

This article explores how representations of the ‘hipster’ in newspapers and on blogs are bound up with processes of class distinction in contemporary Britain. The analysis demonstrates that the hipster is a contested middle-class social type who is the object of both denigration and prestige. The hipster is typically represented as a young person associated with the middle-class fraction of the cultural intermediaries who is engaged in a particular set of reflexive and trendy consumption practices, often performed in gentrified urban spaces and linked to the creative industries. The article suggests that the disputed status of ‘hipster cool’ is indicative of shifting class distinctions in cultural taste and classificatory struggles within the middle class between generational groupings that involve questions of authenticity. Such contestations are reflected by the increasing legitimacy of emerging forms of cultural capital rooted in popular culture and embraced by young people, and the waning symbolic power of traditional highbrow culture associated with an older generation of middle-class people. It is also argued that the classificatory struggles over hipster tastes and lifestyles have a spatial dimension as bound up with the public controversies and social anxieties linked to gentrification in neoliberal Britain.

Insider Perspectives or Stealing the Words out of Women's Mouths: Interpretation in the Research Process

1996 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Reay
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Primary Schooling ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Dividing Line

This article examines the ways in which social class differences between the researcher and female respondents affect data analysis. I elaborate the ways in which my class background, just as much as my gender, affects all stages of the research process from theoretical starting points to conclusions. The influences of reflexivity, power and ‘truth’ on the interpretative process are developed by drawing on fieldnotes and interviews from an ethnographic study of women's involvement in their children's primary schooling. Complexities of social class are explored both in relation to myself as the researcher and to how the women saw themselves. I argue that there is a thin dividing line between the understandings which similar experiences of respondents bring to the research process and the element of exploitation implicit in mixing up one's own personal history with those of women whose experience of the same class is very different. Identification can result in a denial of the power feminist researchers exercise in the selection and interpretation of data. However, researchers are similarly powerful in relation to women from very different class backgrounds to their own, and I attempt to draw out problematic issues around power and ‘truth’ in relation to the middle-class women whom I interviewed. I conclude by reiterating that, from where I am socially positioned, certain aspects of the data are much more prominent than others and as a consequence interpretation remains an imperfect and incomplete process.

Social Class, Social Change, and Gender

1993 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail J. Stewart ◽  
Joan M. Ostrove
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Women's Roles ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Cohort Differences ◽  
Women’S Roles ◽  
Class Background

This article explores the implications of social class background in the lives of women who attended Radcliffe College in the late 1940s and in the early 1960s. Viewing social classes as “cultures” with implications for how individuals understand their worlds, we examined social class background and cohort differences in women's experiences at Radcliffe, their adult life patterns, their constructions of women's roles, and the influence of the women's movement in their lives. Results indicated that women from working-class backgrounds in both cohorts felt alienated at Radcliffe. Cohort differences, across social class, reflected broad social changes in women's roles in terms of the rates of divorce, childbearing, level of education, and career activity. There were few social class-specific social changes, but there were a number of social class differences among the women in the Class of 1964. These differences suggested that women from working-class backgrounds viewed women's marital role with some suspicion, whereas women from middle- and upper-class backgrounds had a more positive view. Perhaps for this reason, working-class women reported that the women's movement confirmed and supported their skeptical view of middle-class gender norms.

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