Ubiquitous music

Abstract

The task of guest editing this special issue of Marketing Theory entitled Ubiquitous Music proved to be a fascinating learning experience that conveyed to the guest editors not only the authors' depth of theoretical understanding but also a sense of their enjoyment and intellectual curiosity with the process of musical consumption. Although it was a challenging task to reduce our longlist and subsequent shortlist of manuscript submissions to just four published articles, our eventual decision was unanimous.Kerrigan, Larsen, Hanratty and Korta's article uses a diary study of seven runners, interviews prior to and shortly after diary completion, along with netnographic data from an online running forum to examine the role of music for the amateur running community. Their analysis of the musicalisation of running contributes to academic knowledge regarding the nature of hedonic and experiential consumption. They discuss how music elicits emotions for the runners that allow them to create distracting and inspiring soundscapes. Three emergent themes from their research include (1) musical technologies of escape, (2) music, meaning and escape and (3) music, hedonic consumption and escape.Eckhardt and Bradshaw's article considers how the licensing of music to advertising may be regarded as the ultimate sellout by musicians and fans. An alternative perspective would view such licensing as a great opportunity for musicians to gain access to mainstream markets. Their discussion of music in advertising identifies the cultural clash between the Bohemian ideology of music as a revered art form and the commodification of musical production. It uses the marriage metaphor to explore the inherent tension in the relationship between music and advertising,

Crossing wires: short-circuiting marketing theory

“…Paraphrasing Žižek, marketing theory is a network of knowledge that seems to function smoothly, but only by creating 'closed-circuits' where subjects like sexuality can be enclosed. Meanwhile topics like 'ubiquitous music' (Oakes et al, 2014), 'market system dynamics' (Giesler and Fischer, 2017), or 'space and place' (Chatzidakis et al, 2018) circulate freely in the open circuits of academic discourse.…”