Making friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music culture in the context of web 2.0

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.

Abstract

The movement toward what has been described as Web 2.0 has brought with itsome significant transformations in the practices, organization and relations of music culture. The user-generated and web-top applications of Web 2.0 arealready popular and widely used, the social networking site MySpace already having more than 130 million members worldwide. 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. 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, but which also attempts to understand the part played by music in making the connections that form the collaborative and participatory cultures of Web 2.0 and the flickering friendships of social networking sites.

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Article details
Beer, D. (2008). Making Friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music Culture in the Context of Web 2.0 Cultural Sociology, 2 (2), 222-241 DOI: 10.1177/1749975508091034

Tags: Friendship, Music, music culture, MySpace, social networking sites, Web 2.0, Wikipedia, YouTube