BlueBox:
Music in York
Music has become more omnipresent in contemporary society. From the background music played in shops to music that highlights the emotions of scenes in films or tv shows to the music you choose to listen to in your earphones while studying and commuting, music accompanies many individual and social actions. With successive technological innovations such as the Walkman (in the early 1980s) followed by the iPod (in the 2000s), music is said to have become deterritorialised. This means that it is not attached to a particular physical space. Instead, music becomes more volatile and evanescent. It becomes a temporary tapestry to a space to denote a particular meaning.
In cities that are known for their music production, different types of material memorabilia such as plaques and statues are visible (as for example in Birmingham, UK), and some even feature museums that are dedicated to celebrating the musical production of the city (as is the case in Nashville and Memphis (USA), or in Liverpool (UK)). In other places, it is more complicated to attach music to particular places. We know it is present and we can hear it playing in shops, bars, pubs, clubs, and so on, but oftentimes we do not necessarily listen to it. Music delineates spaces instead, and it indicates in which ones we will feel more comfortable (or the other way around).
With the success of streaming platforms and their recommendation algorithms, music listeners/consumers are said to not even be in charge of the music that reaches their ears. For some sociologists (Marshall, 2015; Hesmondhalgh and Meier, 2018), this possibly questions how we value music, if we do not select which one is playing and if we are not paying much attention to it.
Through this short podcast, I want to invite you to think about the presence of music in different spaces around York – where is it played? What is played? Why is it played? And to what effect is it played? These questions are underpinned by some more fundamental questions, such as ‘what is music for?’ and ‘do we (still) value music in contemporary societies?’.
Listen to the podcast below to learn more!
Raphaël Nowak is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. His research is in cultural sociology and specifically explores issues regarding the contemporary distribution and consumption of music; cultural taste and practices; and cultural heritage. He is the author of Consuming Music in the Digital Age (2016, Palgrave), co-editor of Networked Music Cultures (2016, Palgrave), and co-author of Curating Pop (2019, Bloomsbury), Music Sociology (2022, Routledge), and Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Justice and the Deindustrialising City (2023, Cambridge Element).
