‘When You're Trying Something on You Picture Yourself in a Place Where They are Playing This Kind of Music’ — Musically Sponsored Agency in the British Clothing Retail Sector

Abstract

Despite the philosophical tradition from Plato onward, sociologists have not yet explored in full music's role as an active ingredient in social formation. This project has been left to environmental psychologists and market researchers who are more interested in`what' music can cause than in exploring its mechanisms of operation and the implications of these mechanisms for the constitution of social agency. This paper draws upon ethnographic research in and around High Street retail outlets to examine music's role in shaping consumer agency ± in-store conduct, purchase behaviour subjectivity, identity. Exploring music in this way illuminates the interface of material culture, social action and subjectivity. Music is used by retailers to signal target clientele and brand image and to structure the temporal dimensions of the retail to environment over the day, week and year. It is also used to structure in-store conduct. It is more important in relation to younger shoppers and to`browsers'. Some stores rely upon unacknowledged skill of sales assistants, who often act as ambassador users of store products, to make and implement local music policies. Music provides contextualization cues that may structure in-store subjectivity and clients' orientations to themselves as consumers and to goods on display. The heightened degree of aesthetic reflexivity exhibited by younger shoppers may be part of a transformation of the processes in and through which agency is produced and reproduced, one that is linked to an ascendancy of commercial control over agency's constitution.Throughout history, music has been integral to social organization. Martial music, liturgical music, national anthems, serenades, lullabies, dinner table music ± these and many other genre have been enlisted to structure human agency. In the twentieth century, broadcast media and the record industry have increased the flexibility ± and subtlety ± with which music can be deployed. Today, in restaurants, pubs and clubs, waiting rooms, workplaces and on-hold telephone lines, invisible minstrel's galleries pipe to the tune of commercial and corporate agendas.To be sure, the question of how music works ± its social`powers' is not new. Aristotle considered music to possess`the power of producing an effect on the

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