Assignment 2 - Recommended Readings (Music)

he Pop-Pickers Have Picked Decentralised Media: the Fall of Top of the Pops and the Rise of the Second Media Age

by David Beer
University of York

Sociological Research Online, Volume 11, Issue 3,
.

From the Abstract: This second media age is defined by the emergence of decentralised and multidimensional media structures that usurp the broadcast models of the first media age. This article argues that the decommissioning of Top of the Pops, and the ongoing expansion of 'social networking' sites such as MySpace and Bebo, illustrates the movement from a first to a second media age. In light of these transformations I suggest here that there is a pressing need to develop new research initiatives and strategies that critically examine these new digitalised forms of musical appropriation.

The real reason for TOTP to be taken off the BBC program schedule:

2.3 Achieving its highest viewing figures during the 1970s when 'audience figures regularly reached 16 million' (The Museum of Broadcast Communications, n.d.) it has been reported that, leading up to its decommissioning, TOTP audience figures fell from 'nearly 7 million to around 1 million' (Byrne, 2006: 3). The BBC have directly connected this fall in TOTP's viewing figures with the rise of digital technologies and transformations in music consumption. A BBC statement on the issue claimed that:

'Over recent years the show has faced ever increasing competition from multimedia and niche musical outlets which enable viewers to consume music of their choice any time night or day in a way that Top of the Pops simply can't deliver in its current weekly format' ('BBC spokesman', Telegraph.co.uk, 2006)

From 2.6: Whether we agree with the BBC's appraisal that these alternative media streams have directly caused the fall of TOTP or not, it is worth considering what appears to be a large scale and significant uptake of decentralised media opportunities, particularly as these become embedded into everyday cultural routines. Indeed, it is possible here to use the fall of TOTP as illustrative of broader transformations in how people are appropriating music in their everyday lives, or, indeed, how popular culture is reorganising itself around the affordances of a range of new information and communication technologies (ICTs)^[4].

Crucial Point:
3.2 The crucial point here is that musical artefacts and music reproduction and collecting practices have, to varying degrees, been reconfigured in the movement from physical discs to digitally compressed virtual music files. This transformation, when allied with the interactive potential of the internet has radical consequences. A striking example of this transformation in music appropriation practices in the face of digtialisation is illustrated by the recent number one single 'Crazy' by Gnarls Barkley, which, during the early summer of 2006, reached number one in its first week of release solely through internet downloads (and before the release of the physical CD format).

Summing up the difference between web 1 (the old web) and web 2.0:
'[the user] can do a lot of the usual internet things on their Bebo homepages like uploading music, videos and photos, and updating their blog, but for the first time they can do it all in one place…so imagine the possibilities if anyone of any age could create their own webpage for free, and include in it almost everything that turned them on; and imagine if they were instantly linked to everyone else.' (Garfield, 2006:6)
These networked sites are used to display personal photographs, to provide links to favourite music, performers, film, and television sites, to update journal entries, to communicate with other users, and to build up social networks of 'friends' around shared interests, and even, in some instances, to arrange actual meetings (Garfield, 2006). Here we see virtual and actual communities enmeshing in everyday life practices, thus further undermining any notion that we may keep these as distinct spheres in sociological research.
Reference:
GARFIELD, S. (2006) 'How to make 80 million friends and influence people', The Observer Review, 18^th June, 2006.

Excursion as for the above: Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0:
What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software by Tim O'Reilly
09/30/2005

Question: Why did Myspace loose so many users?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/29/myspace-facebook-bebo-twitter
referencing on...
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/stats/1716726/facebook-doubles-audience-year-year-myspace-continues-decline

Mark Poster on himself (Digest 17, Simon Fraser University, Canada)

D: Where do you think our new media are taking us? Which trends do you see unfolding?

MP: Well, for me, two trends are important. First, new relations between humans and information machines. It’s increasingly difficult to regard the machine as a simple tool that does what you want it to because it’s so complicated and has its own dynamics that are so powerful and interesting.

That’s one major direction. The other is in relation to globalization. The Internet is not a nation state kind of thing but it is a global network. As international capitalism creates this push toward globalization at the communication level - at the level of culture - the Internet provides a way of exploring possibilities of globalization that do not necessarily go along with economic tendencies of globalization.

D: What has surprised you about the field since you began?
...The third thing is probably the demography of who is doing this stuff, and the fact that it’s probably for the first time in human history that young people are having a major impact on the development of this technology. There is nothing like this that, as an historian, I can even remotely connect to it. Most of the original features of the Internet were developed by people like graduate students.

Reference: LeNeve, A. (2006). Digest interviews Mark Poster . Digest 17, School of Communication community at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Retrieved September 28th, 2010 from http://neuf.cprost.sfu.ca/digest/digests/digest-17/digest-interviews-mark-poster

3.11 Poster's prediction, back in the mid 1990s, was that a 'second age of mass media [was] on the horizon.' (Poster, 1996: 3). For Poster, this was a transition that would ultimately result in the collapse of the boundaries between the previously distinct categories of producer, distributor, and consumer. This suggested collapse of categories, as a consequence of the incorporation of digital technologies, has now emerged as a theme across a range of works into contemporary music and contemporary music culture (Théberge, 1997; Taylor, 2001; Beer, 2005). The fall of TOTP, and the emergence of the social networking phenomenon, may be understood as further evidence of the shift toward, or even the realisation of, a second media age.

Rather this shift toward decentralised media, exemplified by music file-sharing and the multidimensional communities of the social networking phenomena, is implicated by the technologies and cultural practices of the preceding era. Indeed, it would be a mistake to think of the new digitalised media as distinct from the analogue, to talk of media ages is not a attempt to reproduce 'a binary logic' (Poster, 1996: 21).

The challenges of 'social networking'

...on Music:
4.11 This type of research project needs to fit into an ongoing programme that explores how digitalisation, as an ongoing social process, is not only transforming how people consume or relate to music, but also, on the other side of the coin, how the music industry is becoming fluid, morphing (Sandywell & Beer, 2005), and reconfiguring itself through these new media infrastructures and marketing rhetoric, in order to capture, protect and maintain its revenue streams (Jones, 2000; Breen & Forde, 2004; Leyshon, et.al., 2005;Hesmondhalgh, 2006)^[10]. This requires analytical strategies that attempt to understand how the music industry is reflexively theorising and re-theorising its own practices, musical artefacts, and the everyday practices of music production, reproduction and appropriation (Thrift, 1997 & 2005).