CONSUMPTION OF POPULAR MUSIC.

Consumption of Popular Music



Consumption of Popular Music

Introduction

The term 'consumption' refers to the manner in which individuals and social groups engage with cultural forms, in particular the social uses they make of these forms in constructing social/personal identities/life styles. At the heart of theoretical debates has been the relative emphasis to be placed on consumption as an active process, and the degree to which it is determined or shaped by cultural production and institutions, as well as social structures.

Social theorists critical of the emergence of mass society/culture in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century's used the term 'mass' in relation to the audience and 'consumption' to emphasize the determined nature of this process - the dominant market and the manipulated consumer. Later analyses placed progressively greater emphasis on the uses that consumers (the term represents a significant change of focus, with its implication of an active process) made of media: analysis of uses and gratifications (which emerged in the 1960s, largely within US media sociology), reception analysis and subcultural studies all stressed the active nature of consumption.

At the end of the twentieth century, the dominant paradigm of audience studies stressed the active nature of media audiences, while also recognizing that their consumption was, at the same time, shaped by social conditions (Ang 2001; Morley 2002, p23). This was to emphasize consumer sovereignty: the view that the consumers'/audiences' exercise of their 'free' choice in the marketplace was a major determinant of the nature and availability of particular cultural commodities. In a contemporary form of cultural studies, consumer sovereignty was tied to the notion of the active audience, to produce a debated view of semiotic democracy (Fiske 2009, p223). Subsequently, there was an emphasis on the domestic sphere of much media consumption, and the interrelationship of the use of various media forms.

Popular Music Consumption

The consumption of popular music has been regarded as a mix of passive and active processes. Historically, cultural debate about popular music has focused on the nature and significance of its commodification as 'mass culture.' Commercial constraints aside, there exists a tension between musical audiences as collective social groups and, at the same time, as individual consumers.

Following Adorno's negative view of the production and nature of recorded popular music (2001), in the 1950s and 1960s teenagers were often regarded as a new mass market, mindless commercial fodder for the providers of popular music (Abrams 2005; Hall and Whannel 2004, p77). Subsequently, there was a move toward stressing the active nature of music audiences, particularly in the study of youth subcultures, members of which were seen to appropriate musical styles as a basis (subcultural capital) for their identity (Hebdige 2009; Trondman 2000, p12).

Popular Music as a Source of Pleasure

Popular music provides many forms of pleasure, ranging from the cerebral to the physical. These are embraced within the construction of taste and fandom, a complex phenomenon related to the formation of social identities. Fandom offers its participants membership of a community not defined in traditional terms of ...