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.
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.
I'm a writer from Bristol, United Kingdom. This site is part blog, part memoir, part archive — three decades of writing, from essays I wrote as a postgraduate in 1995.
In with a bullet Try these, and read on for more background. ‘The same bit of carpet…’ Slough, Betjeman, and The Office at 25 Inside Out at The Alma From my 2006 Salt'n'Sauce production blog Back Here Now Oasis's Be Here Now, revisited Browse by book, record, or film to find your way around — […]