That difficult first album
‘What was your first record?’ sparks nostalgia and misty-eyed reflection for those who grew up before online streaming. This post explores how evolving musical tastes shape our recollection of that pivotal first purchase.
Back Here Now:
Revisiting Be Here Now 25 years on
Drawing on personal memories, press coverage, interviews, and biographies, this post revisits Oasis’s third album, Be Here Now, 25 years from its original issue in August 1997. It recalls the expectations and excitement surrounding the release, explores its cover artwork’s creation, examines The Beatles’ influence on the album’s concept and composition, and discusses the quality of the music.
‘Musically speaking, you’re naked’
In this series of posts, I have explored the ways in which recorded music has been used in expressing personal identity through successive consumer technologies and have tried to identify the psychological motives for these uses. As Steven Levy[1]Levy, S. (2006) The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. New York: Simon […]
‘Bright dings of pseudo-pleasure’
Concerns among Silicon Valley insiders about the addictive nature of social media have led to their withdrawal from its use and denying it to their children. Concluding that these addictive qualities are psycholinguistic as well as neurochemical (as explored in the previous post), this series part examines the psychological compulsion to use social media with close reference to the psychoanalytical work of Jacques Lacan.
‘You can never beat the bandit no’
Based on its author’s experience of feeling compelled to make social media postings from the audience at a Rolling Stones concert, this exploration outlines research in behavioural psychology showing that addictive actions are driven by intermittent variable rewards. It goes on to examine how this behaviour is endemic in the use of communications technology and how social and other new media companies have identified it as a way of keeping their users’ attention.
The ‘Walkman of the digital age’
Opening with an outline of how Apple was able to turn the music industry’s ineffective response to illegal digital audio file sharing to its advantage by creating a coherent online music platform that favoured its iconic iPod player, this post traces the subsequent evolution of consumer music technology away from an ownership model to subscription services.
Music ‘to live by’
This article outlines how a Facebook meme recalled the way LP records were used in expressing personal identities when vinyl was the dominant medium for consuming music. It continues by exploring how some musical identities prove more profound than others.
The keys to the megastore and the dematerialisation of music
This post explores the relationship between recorded music and medium, finding that music is not bound to its media but its media tend to draw focus from it. It goes on to examine how portable music players have ‘dematerialised’ recorded music, making it much less communal and allowing consumers to use it to create personal mediated space.
Conspicuous consumption and the illusion of ownership
Starting with the idea that subcultures are expressed through conspicuous consumption, this post explores how the impression of ownership experienced by consumers of recorded music on vinyl, audiotape and CD was only ever an illusion of these media. It goes on to describe how subsequent technologies broke the bonds of recording and medium, reducing the possibilities of cultural expression through ‘ownership’ of recorded music.