Download Chapter 3 – A Critical Approach to Popular Culture

SOCIOLOGY OF
MUSIC
Lesson 10
SOC 86 – Popular Culture
Robert Wonser
MUSIC AS A SOCIAL
PRODUCT
Music is not just sound but more
importantly a social product as
many people are involved with its
creation, distribution, and
consumption.
Music thus connects with important
sociological concepts and
processes, and many social
worlds.
THE SOCIOLOGICAL
STUDY OF POP MUSIC
Pop music as a social phenomenon
is thought to have emerged during
the early twentieth century when
music became a commodity.
Benjamin (1936) referred to this as
the age of mechanical
reproduction.
•What is the role of the work of art
in the age of mechanical
reproduction?
MUSICAL MEANINGS AS SOCIAL
CONSTRUCTIONS
• Social constructionist theories
focus on how things become
meaningful.
• All these theories focus on
“doing,” that is, on practice,
action, conduct, behavior,
rituals, work, and in the
consequences of ideas, values,
roles, scripts, language, and
norms.
Thus a constructionist believes that
social realities are made by people
acting in accord with (and often in
spite of) one another.
Constructionists focus on microsociological interpretation but also on
the criticism of social inequalities.
Music then, is a sociological
phenomenon insofar as it is socially
constructed.
• Like what is considered music and what
is not? Good or bad music?
WHAT IS NOT THE CASE
REGARDING MUSIC
What is music?
Music generally defined as some sort
of pattern of organized sounds,
deliberately created in order to
produce certain effects (Martin
1995)
It has been argued that we
understand music because its
meaning is inherent within it and is
communicated to us through our
ears.
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The sociologist of music is not
concerned to establish the ‘true’
meaning of a piece of music, but
instead what people believe it to
mean, for it is these meanings that
will influence their responses to it.
WHERE DOES MUSIC AS
ART FIT IN WITH MUSIC
AS COMMODITY?
The link between music and the market in
inevitable in a capitalist society.
In such a system, can indie music exist? And if
so, can it survive?
Is conspicuous consumption everything, or is
authentic expression of musical identities
possible?
Can you think of other ways in which music
serves as a commercial technology?
INSTITUTION
• To understand what institution means
think of an institution as custom and an
institution as recognized social
organization.
• No matter how original a form of art may
be, it has to deal with institutional
gatekeepers of art institutions.
• Art institutions are known by sociologists
as “art worlds.”
• Ever wonder why some music gets made
and others don’t (or with limited
resources?).
INSTITUTIONS
Becker (1982:x) defines art worlds as
“network[s] of people whose
cooperative activity, organized via
their joint knowledge of conventional
means of doing things, produce[s] the
kind of art works that art world is
known for.”
Institutionalization may makes life
difficult for original expression, but it
also allows for familiar and customary
performances to register more easily
with audiences
MCDONALDIZATION
OF MUSIC
Have you felt like you’ve heard a
song before on your first hearing of
it?
The principles of the fast food industry
come to dominate social life
• Predictability
• Calculability
•Efficiency
• Control through technology
MCDONALDIZATION
OF MUSIC
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McDonalization reduces the risks
inherent in creativity
Music is a business,  minimizing risk
and taking the safer bet makes
more sense economically
standardized and predictable
product of mediocre quality
INSTITUTION:
AMERICAN IDOL
• The success of the show American
Idol depends on the solidity of many
institution on which it depends.
• The American idol contest resembles
the US presidential election process.
• American Idol is grounded in the
instrumental rationality typical of an
advanced market-based
democratic bureaucracy.
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• American Idol can also be said to
be a case of McDonaldization of
popular music talent.
• Like presidential candidates
American Idol winners hope to
appeal to a large mass, by
offending the taste of as few
audiences as possible.
• Is this a case of talent or
predictability?
The study: In a recent study, researchers from the Medical
University of Vienna in Austria studied 15 genres and 374
subgenres. They rated the genre's complexity over time —
measured by researchers in purely quantitative aspects,
such as timbre and acoustical variations — and compared
that to the genre's sales. They found that in nearly every
case, as genres increase in popularity, they also become
more generic.
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"This can be interpreted," the researchers write, "as music
becoming increasingly formulaic in terms of
instrumentation under increasing sales numbers due to a
tendency to popularize music styles with low variety and
musicians with similar skills."
As reported by the Atlantic, "Top 40 stations last year played
the 10 biggest songs almost twice as much as they did a
decade ago."
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Human beings crave familiarity. Numerous psychological
studies show that people choose songs they're familiar
with over songs that more closely match their reported
music tastes. Our somewhat manipulative music industry,
which chooses familiar-sounding music and pushes it to
listeners in massive quantities, knows well how to
capitalize on those cravings. Genres standardize over time
as a way to plug into this psychology. And then we hear
the same songs, over and over again.