[Air-l] indie music scenes + internet

[Fred Stutzman]

A must-read on the topic

Butch Lazorchak (founder of Squealer Music)
CH-Scene: Communication Theories and Musical Communities

http://www.ibiblio.org/squealer/butchhome/Ch_Scene/ch_scene_communication.htm



On Wed, 9 May 2007, Holly Kruse wrote:

> 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
>
>

-- 
Fred Stutzman
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