CHANGES IN THE PRODUCTION

Changes In The Production And Distribution Of Contemporary Popular Culture Challenge Traditional Conceptions Of Ownership?

Changes In The Production And Distribution Of Contemporary Popular Culture Challenge Traditional Conceptions Of Ownership?

Introduction

Youth, media and popular music studies have developed in separate fields of research, resulting in a lack of integration of key areas of enquiry, such as the relationship between the cultural and structural in youth music consumption and the role of media industries in 'framing' such a process. A more recent focus on popular music as a media culture suggest a way forward in exploring links between production, mediation and consumption of music and youth consumer practices. This article reviews three such frameworks: (i) the production of consumption, (ii) production of culture/cultures of production and (iii) cultures of consumption, evaluating their contribution to a more integrated understanding of how youth consume music as a structurally and culturally mediated process (Leyshon, 2005, 177-209). Controversies over youth 'download culture' and evidence of regulatory changes in the global music industry and its impact on how youth consumers can access music media, underlines the need to pursue a research integration agenda, drawing popular music and youth consumption research closer together. Yet it remains the case that both approaches exhibit a structural vs. cultural divide over youth consumption and its relationship to the global music industry, offering optimism and pessimism in equal measure.

Popular Culture

How meaningful is popular music to young people? What role, if any, does it play in the formation of youth identities? To what extent does the consumption of music by youth allow us to better understand what it means to be young at specific times? Are musical tastes an indicator of social or cultural distinctions between different groups of youth and, if so, do they reflect or contradict those of gender, ethnicity or class? What sort of impact have recent changes in the global organisation of the music industry, the proliferation of music media and synergies between media forms, had on the way music can be consumed by the young and the meanings that circulate around it as a consumer activity?

These are all really important questions but they are also questions that we do not have any coherent answers to at present (Leyshon, 2005, 177-209). A central reason for this is that such questions, and the complex issues that they address, are clearly interrelated but their study has rarely been so. This is not to suggest that important work has not been conducted into these areas but it has been work that has examined one or more of these questions in isolation from the others. Thus, the study of youth has been explored with little or no reference to musical tastes; or youth 'style' cultures have been identified in which music is assumed to play a subordinate or peripheral role. The musicological properties of recorded texts have been studied in isolation from the meanings they have for actual listeners. Or musical consumption has been discussed in isolation from its production or other ...