From Cultural Sociology
Recent years have seen some significant changes in music culture, the Web 2.0 movement has been a catalyst. The general shift has been toward virtual cultural artefacts, where individuals download digitally compressed music files from internet sources or ‘rip’ them from CDs(or even audio tapes and vinyl records). By focusing specifically upon the presence of the popular music performer Jarvis Cocker across various Web 2.0 applications, this article seeks to open up a series of questions and create opportunities for research into what is happening in contemporary music culture. Of significant interest to cultural sociology is how senses of ‘belonging’ and ‘taste communities’ are altered as music cultures move out onto the web-top in the Web 2.0 context. This exploratory article lays out an agenda for research into music culture and Web 2.0 that is not only concerned with the implications of Web 2.0 for music. It concludes there is a need to think in some detail both about the implications for other cultural spheres, and the possible ways in which each of these spheres might in turn come to affect the nature of the connections that make up Web 2.0 itself.
