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.ht... 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
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