Digital Connectivity and Music Culture

This book explores how the rise of widely available digital technology impacts the way music is produced, distributed, promoted, and consumed, with a specific focus on the changing relationship between artists and audiences. Through in-depth interviewing, focus group interviewing, and discourse analysis, this study demonstrates how digital technology has created a closer, more collaborative, fluid, and multidimensional relationship between artist and audience. Artists and audiences are simultaneously engaged with music through technology--and technology through music--while negotiating personal and social aspects of their musical lives. In light of consistent, active engagement, rising co-production, and collaborative community experience, this book argues we might do better to think of the audience as accomplices to the artist. Mary Beth Ray is Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, NH, USA.