Stages, Platforms, Streams: The Economies and Industries of Live Music after Digitalization

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to histories of live music since digitalization and provides a corrective to the neglect of liveness in scholarship on streaming and platformization. The study argues that digital corporations and social media platforms are shaping the changing value and experience of live music, introducing new patterns of commodification, as digital technologies are incorporated into a live “experience economy,” and live music integrated into a digital “attention economy.” The article illustrates how platforms are exerting greater influence within the music industries as streaming extends live music from an activity associated with real place to an experience in real time.

KEYWORDS:

• digital conglomerates
• live music
• liveness
• platforms
• popular music industries
• social media
• streaming

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There are no systematic data available on this. The figures here have been derived from ticket stubs that have been made available by collectors on various Internet sites, and from the price of albums reported in the 1978 British Phonographic Industry Yearbook (117), along with the memories of musicians who bought the album at the time (thanks to Tom Perchard and Laurence Saywood for discussions and help locating this information).

2. See various entries on the MIDiA Research Blog during 2020, particularly “The Future of Live” and “Who Will Own the Virtual Concert Space?”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Qian Zhang

Qian Zhang is an Associate Professor at the School of Music and Recording Art, Communication University of China (CUC), in Beijing, and was Visiting Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018-19. She specializes in Chinese popular music and the music industries. Her research includes studies of vernacular musics and heritage in China, yellow and red music during the Cold War, fandom and audiences, music genres and historical change, digitalization and social media, and contemporary soundscapes. She has published extensively in Chinese, along with book chapters and journal articles in English and Korean.

Keith Negus

Keith Negus is Professor of Musicology, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Producing Pop (1992), Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (1999) and Bob Dylan (2008) and coauthor of Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value (2004). He has collaborated on studies of culture, music and technologies, notably Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (1996, 2013) and on “Digitisation and the Politics of Copying in Popular Music Culture” within the UK Research Council’s CREATe programme with John Street and Adam Behr.