Music and the internet: towards a digital sociology of music

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Music and the internet: towards a digital sociology of music (Digsocmus) is an interdisciplinary research project that aims to provide the first comprehensive analysis of the changing cultural roles of the internet in music. Taking as its historical focus a twenty-year period ranging from the early take up of the world wide web to the present day world of social media platforms, and taking as its empirical focus a series of music genres known for innovative experimentation with the internet, it responds to three overarching research questions: 1) Have uses of the internet contributed to greater boundary crossing between 'art' and 'popular' musics? ('Crossover')2) Has the internet affected an expansion or diversification of the geographical reach of contemporary genres? ('Geography')3) To what extent have the institutions that provide for the production and distribution of music been reshaped by the internet? ('Disintermediation')The project will take a comparative case study approach. It will analyse four 'born digital' music genres whose respective geneses coincide with important periods in the cultural development of the internet and world wide web, and whose aesthetics, politics, geographical extent, and supporting institutions have all been shaped by these developments. The case studies will be: 1) Mid-90s: experimental electronica 2) Early-00s: network music and live coding 3) Mid-00s-present: cassette tape revivalism (noise, drone music and DIY)4) 2010s-present: post-internet music (audio-visual composition, net art, vaporwave)Although they vary, each of the genres has substantial and innovative online manifestations that are central to their definitions and to how they are experienced by musicians, audiences and promoters. These range from the use of mailing lists to organise independent communicational channels, often merging art and popular musics (study 1); to the adoption of the internet as a live performance medium for geographically-distributed performance (2); to a reactionary move offline and towards the mail order exchange of cassette tapes, often bypassing mainstream institutions (3); and then to a subversive and critical engagement with the modern day world of social media and commercial webspace (4). The range and diversity of uses of the internet over this 20-year period demand new approaches to the analysis and theorisation of music for which online practices are central. A major conceptual and methodological contribution of this research, then, will be to analyse these genres using social data science, or 'big data' methods. Informed by the research questions, and mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches, these tailored methods will analyse and visualise data from 'natively digital' mediums like forums, mailing lists, and social media platforms, thereby taking the analysis of online music beyond the reach of a single researcher. By mixing these approaches with ethnography and history, the project will stake out a bold new direction in digital musicology: the digital sociology of music. The leadership activities are designed to support Haworth's development to becoming an international research leader. A visiting fellowship at the University of Amsterdam will place him in close contact with the leading figures in digital research, providing new opportunities for collaboration and publication. The international conference will allow him to collaboratively shape a new subfield of digital musicology, while also impacting on a new generation of digital musicologists. Finally, his international standing outside of academia will be enhanced by workshops at international festivals where musicians, industry professionals, and audiences will be invited to collaborate: first, in debating the themes of crossover, geography and disintermediation in relation to the genres; and second, in designing and shaping the digital methods themselves (see WP5.1).