The Hidden Dimensions of the Musical Field and the Potential of the New Social Data

Abstract

This article seeks to highlight what might be thought of as the hidden dimensions of the musical field and explores the potential of digital by-product data for illuminating the aspects of musical taste and preference that are difficult to see with traditional social science methods. It suggests that the limitations of existing field analysis create what might be thought of as darkened areas of music consumption that may remain outside of the gaze of the interested social scientist. The paper briefly discusses some of the analytical problems associated with this lack of visibility. In response this article focuses upon the specific example of Last.fm and looks to make use of the by-product data that this particular website accumulates about individuals’ everyday music listening practices. From this specific example the article provides some substantive observations about the contemporary musical field and uses these to offer insights into the potentials and limitations of using by-product data in the analysis of (the musical) field. This article specifically questions the boundaries drawn around genre in the study of field, and looks at how these might be reported upon in alternative ways using new forms of data.

Music Genres as Historical Artifacts: The Case of Classical Music

“…The main problem we see is that cultural research that uses a priori genre lists makes the assumption that genres are rigid and stable concepts (Beer & Taylor, 2013;Lena & Peterson, 2008). This is at odds with the prevailing conviction that music genres continually emerge, evolve and disappear (Beer, 2013;Lamont & Molnár, 2002;Lena & Peterson, 2008).…”

“…Atkinson (2011), for example, claimed the existence of a polarization between legitimate/artistic and popular/commercial within every music genre. Furthermore, respondents can have different understandings of what kind of music is entailed in the classical music genre (Beer & Taylor, 2013;Holt, 1998;Savage, 2006). The results of Savage & Gayo (2011), for example, show that respondents distinguish 'light classical' music from more 'esoteric' or 'avant garde' forms of classical music.…”

“…This approach fits into Lamont's call to find ways to study "classification systems comparatively and from the ground up" (Lamont, 2010, p. 132) and relates to Beer's (2013) concept of 'classificatory imagination', in which genre boundaries are formed continuously through 'negations in actions'. Rather than treating music genres as a stable set of classifications, cultural research should focus on how "boundaries are drawn and redrawn in a changing cultural context" (Beer, 2013, p. 157;Beer & Taylor, 2013). An open question on listening preferences for specific groups, singers, artists, and composers allows us to study music taste from the bottom up, within the context of everyday social interaction.…”

Producing and Consuming Inequality: A Cultural Sociology of the Cultural Industries

“…Methods are a more straightforward subject, whereby eclecticism is only to be encouraged. As we have shown with the inclusion of an article, Millward et al, using methods from relational sociology that have yet to find a mainstream position in cultural or media studies, there is rich potential for the emerging practices of sociology, for example big data approaches (Beer and Taylor, 2014; Daniels et al, 2016), or experiments (Reeves et al, 2015), to contribute much to our understanding. We are hopeful that by drawing attention to the need to link production, consumption and representation scholars versed in these practices will add to the intersectional understanding we seek.…”

Using GPS Geo-tagged Social Media Data and Geodemographics to Investigate Social Differences: A Twitter Pilot Study

“…There has been a recent move in the social sciences towards the use of naturally occurring 'by-product' data as a resource for analysing the social world (Beer and Taylor 2013;Rogers 2009;Savage and Burrows 2007;Tse et al 2017), both in the sense of understanding web-based culture (e.g. Burnap et al 2015;Dunbar et al 2015) and the broader social world (e.g.…”