[Air-l] indie music scenes + internet

[Holly Kruse]

I'm starting to work on a book chapter that I was asked to write for a
collection on music geographies, an area with which I'm pretty familiar and
have written about from an "old media" perspective, especially concerning
identity, locality, space and place, and all that (as in my book, Site and
Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes and a long-ago article in the
journal Popular Music called "Subcultural Identity in Alternative Music
Culture.")  

This chapter thus updates my old research/book on indie music scenes by
specifically focusing on the effect that the internet has had on notions of
locality, local scenes, and local sounds. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, there
was a fair amount of popular media attention to local music scenes -- e.g.
Athens, GA; Manchester, UK; Seattle; etc. -- and assertions (in many cases
spurious) that particular "sounds" were associated with these local scenes.
And whatever the validity of these claims, there was little doubt that
within localities there were complicated, incestuous genealogies of bands
over the years. The persistence of many local players, even as they moved
into different bands and collaborated with different people, may contribute
to the existence of a local sound or sounds to varying degrees. The key
question that I'm interested in is to what extent, if any, MySpace, file
sharing, iTunes, lastfm, and the like have changed/diminished the perception
that there are local music scenes, changed the way that participants
identify with a local scene, and affected the places and spaces of local
music. Clearly one consequence is the demise in many places of the local
indie record store as a gathering place and source of local knowledge.  I'm
also re-reading Kembrew McLeod's work on the internet and music/indie music.
As much as anything, I'm interested in people's musings on the internet,
music, and locality... even just the internet and locality and local
identity.  The internet and local community work (e.g. the Netville studies
and others) and internet and globalization work is all very interesting to
me, but I'm not sure how applicable it is to this particular project.

Thanks in advance for any reactions and insights!
 
Holly

-- 
Holly Kruse
Faculty of Communication
The University of Tulsa
600 S. College Ave.
Tulsa, OK 74104
918-631-3845
holly-kruse at utulsa.edu
http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~holly-kruse