The Material Modalities of Music Consumption

Abstract

Issues of music consumption are entwined with the technological means that play music. Since the advent of recorded music in the late 19th century, technologies have contributed to configuring the ways in which music is written, recorded, produced, marketed, and listened to. Over the last couple of decades, technological innovations that are usually assembled under the umbrella term ‘digital’ have induced new modalities of musical consumption. In the meantime, the development of the sociology of music has somewhat widely overlooked the materiality of the music technologies that individuals interact with to consume music. Indeed, music technologies only play at best a minor role in explaining the various ways in which individuals engage in listening practices (see Nowak, 2014a). For example, the influential accounts of music sociologists Tia DeNora (1999, 2000, 2003) and Antoine Hennion (2003, 2007; Hennion et al., 2000) disregard the technological evolution of the digital age. Turning to the sociology of culture and media, it is possible to point out how interacting with music technologies participates in the affective responses that individuals feel when consuming music. Instances like Michael Bull’s iconic work on the iPod (2004, 2005, 2007), as well as Dominique Bartmanski and Ian Woodward’s recent account of the vinyl disc (2013, 2014) show how the materiality of objects is a factor in how individuals consume music and of how it affects them.