Jones / Bennett The Digital Evolution of Live Music

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-08-100070-0
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

The concept of 'live' has changed as a consequence of mediated culture. Interaction may occur in real time, but not necessarily in shared physical spaces with others. The Digital Evolution of Live Music considers notions of live music in time and space as influenced by digital technology. This book presents the argument that live music is a special case in digital experience due to its liminal status between mind and body, words and feelings, sight and sound, virtual and real. Digital live music occupies a multimodal role in a cultural contextual landscape shaped by technological innovation. The book consists of three sections. The first section looks at fan perspectives, digital technology and the jouissance of live music and music festival fans. The second section discusses music in popular culture, exploring YouTube and live music video culture and gaming soundtracks, followed by the concluding section which investigates the future of live music and digital culture. - Gives perspectives on the function of live music in digital culture and the role of digital in live music - Focuses on the interaction between live and digital music - Takes the discussion of live music beyond economics and marketing, to the cultural and philosophical implications of digital culture for the art - Includes interviews with producers and players in the digital world of music production - Furthers debate by looking at access to digital music via social media, websites, and applications that recognise the impact of digital culture on the live music experience

Angela Jones is a lecturer at Murdoch University, Australia. She completed her PhD in Cultural Studies in 2007, and has published book chapters and magazine articles that focus on youth, culture, and the Internet. Angela's current research interests include popular culture and the Internet, digital literacy and education, social media strategy, social media and identity, and online communities. She previously published The Host in the Machine, also with Chandos.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jones, Angela

Bennett, Rebecca Jane

Leseproben

Introduction

From the family tree of old school hip hop

Kick off your shoes and relax your socks

The rhymes will spread just like a pox

Cause the music is live like an electric shock

The Beastie Boys (1998).

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in there personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.

McLuhan et al. (1967), p. 26.

Given the rapid pace of technological change, especially in the digital era, any book investigating digital culture is a history text by the time it reaches the shelves. As Conner remarks, “technology forecasts tend to become outdated, if not entirely quaint, within hours of publication” (Conner, 2013, p. 17); yet, outdated or not, it is important to regularly press pause and take the time to reflect upon moments that would otherwise be swallowed up in the rush to the future. Fuelled by a desire to take stock of and memorialize social and cultural activities that infuse our everyday lives with meaning, this book seeks to re-examine the role of live music through the lens of a rapidly evolving digital culture.

Music and digital technology have much in common, in that both forms have the power to alter our experience of linear time and material space. Like following a link to a completely different website, a particular song can transport us back in time to the moment it first held meaning, or it can trigger an emotion or “feeling” that is less easy to place. Like the nonlinear, hypertext experience familiar to digital experience, this book offers a mash-up of various perspectives of the articulation between digital technology and live music.

The digital evolution

The speed at which digital technology allows people to communicate, and the increasingly sophisticated mediums through which this communication takes place, means that much of life can, and is, being lived through the screen. This new participatory culture enabled through the interactive features of digital technology has been the focus of a diverse body of scholarly work, dedicated to tracking the evolution and cultural ramifications of this “new media.” This book contributes to this expanding conversation by examining how musical consumption and enjoyment in an increasingly elastic conception of the “live” form functions “in an era of musical ‘abundance,’ in which both historical and contemporary recordings are increasingly accessible” (Sexton, 2009, p. 99).

Live music

Music is a powerful social tool, beyond that of cultural and subcultural affiliations and identity making, or recreational practices. “It arouses emotions, evokes memories and builds bonds—music touches people” (Unterstell, 2012, p. 20). While an abundance of enjoyment can be gained through listening to recorded music, live music changes and extends the rules of engagement by transforming the experience of music from that of a listener into that of an audience member. Thus “live-music” augments repeatable individualized and deeply personal auditory experience of the solitary listener, and re-frames it and re-energizes it by transforming it into the communal experience with the capacity to engage all of the senses at once.

The live music economy

Live music is not just about the multi-sensual communal experience, it is also a form of cultural engagement that has a history reaching as far back as the records of human art and culture. It is only in the recent past, since the advent of digital technology and the decline of the “old” media economy, that it has become a central feature of the “new” musical economy (Holt, 2010, pp. 242–261). Lee reported that in the decade between 1999 and 2009, the sale of tickets to live music events in the United States rose from $1.5 billion to $6.4 billion, which was “vastly exceeding the growth of inflation and population growth” (2012). He also noted that as global wealth grows and further economic constraints are placed on the movement of resources, “a growing share of our disposable incomes are going to be devoted to experiences rather than manufactured products” (Lee, 2012). With diminished returns for individual music releases, live music has replaced the sale of music as the driving force in this new cultural economy, and whilst established artists may have experienced diminished sales as a result of digital music distribution, this has been offset by the increased viability and profitability of touring.

The increasing financial viability and likelihood of success for touring has been a defining characteristic of what has been labeled the “live music renaissance” (Apostolou, 2012). In an age of information surplus, niche markets are becoming increasingly viable and accessible, and artists and promoters operating in these markets have recognized that touring and live performance hold significant financial benefits that outweigh any likely profit from music sales. The proliferation of an increasingly live-music saturated cultural landscape has had significant ramifications for the ways in which we consume music, and the cultures that exist, and have developed, around the live music form.

Live music and digital culture

The so-called live music renaissance is supported by, rather than counter to, the growing familiarity with and use of digital technology in everyday life. The live music economy extends far beyond the revenue generated from ticket sales. Rather, digital technology plays a key role in the celebration of the live music form, with a myriad of interactive and social cyber-spaces dedicated to the celebration and promotion of live music events. From the local gig to the global festival, live music is streamed, shared, uploaded, downloaded, reviewed, watched, and re-watched online. Therefore, any analysis of live music must take into account the increasing power that Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies lend to the form.

In a time where fans have the capacity to communicate with one another and access live-streamed concerts or footage from wherever they happen to be in material space through mobile smartphones and tablets, we argue that it is no longer viable to conceive of online and offline as representing mutually exclusive categories. As Auslander (1999) attests, all live performances are forced by economic reality to acknowledge their status as media within a mediatic system that includes mass media and information technologies (p. 4). Thus, it follows that today’s mobile Internet technologies alter the conventions of live performance itself.

Today, there are multiple ways that audiences can use digital technology to participate in “live performance,” from the posting of pictures and video footage on social media, to the emergence of tweet seats, or using a smartphone application meeting to plan itineraries at music festivals. Thanks to digital technologies, the definition of “live music” has also expanded to include a number of forms that do not require the artist and audience to share the same space or even the same time. Sanden’s recent definition embraces the complexity of the notion of liveness today. He suggests that

In any given musical performance context, liveness can emerge in a variety of ways. We may experience liveness as a condition of temporality or spatial proximity. We may consider musical sound to be live in its fidelity to an original or ideal “true” utterance. We may interpret liveness as a quality of spontaneity, thought to reside especially in the uniqueness of individual performances. We may encounter liveness as a trace of corporeality, as an indication of musical interactivity, or as a condition of some other perceptual category ….

Sanden (2013), p. 159.

It is with this broad scope for interpretation that the authors who comprise this book approached their chapters. And the multiple ways that liveness can be interpreted in a digital culture, means that each chapter tells a unique story, which offers insight into the diverse experiences our culture of musical and digital abundance affords. Taking us on this journey is a diverse range of authors, exploring a wide range of topics, which together compose a pastiche of interpretations of the single theme that holds the book together: the increasingly interdependent relationship between live music and digital culture.

The title of this book, The Digital Evolution of Live Music, does not refer to an evolution in a linear sense, but a philosophical one. With a broad focus on contemporary manifestations of the relationship between live music and digital culture, the authors explore the reciprocal relationship between digital and musical texts evoking discussions of “live” which transcend economic boundaries to challenge and/or reinforce analog expressions of corporeality, genre, time, and fandom. This book is split into three sections: “Live that survives,” “Digital live,” and “Live after death.”...