Posts citing: Hepworth, D. (2018) ‘Nobody Ever Asked a Girl Back to Listen to Their iTunes’, in Nothing is Real: The Beatles Were Underrated and Other Sweeping Statements About Pop. Kindle. London: Transworld Digital.

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.