This multi-authored collection largely focuses on contemporary music cultures that are, in various ways, on the margins – popular music that is not particularly popular. It therefore locates and analyses myriad challenges and opportunities in the present-day production, distribution and consumption of music that might be missing from broader-brush studies of the music industries’ relationship with digital technologies. The contributions here shed light on a wide variety of small music cultures from across Europe, and the diversity of genres and scenes represented here is the book's great strength, although we often end up back in Manchester (a stone's-throw from the editors’ home institution, the University of Central Lancashire). Many of the chapters draw upon interviews with and observation of musicians, and the contributor biographies indicate a fair amount of ‘hands-on’ industry experience, too.
The ‘post-digital age’ of the title does not imply that ‘digital technologies or the internet [have] ceased to operate or matter’, but rather that they have become ubiquitous (p. 3); this is also reflected in the introductory chapter's diagnosis of an ‘advanced convergent digitalization’ (building on Robert Strachan's notion of ‘convergent digitalization’). Those in search of less-dramatic terminology might prefer Nick Prior's ‘normal internet’ (Reference Prior and Bennett2015), which I think captures something similar.
The studies of specialist scenes here tend to go one of two ways: some make a case for distinctiveness of their subject, whereas others seek to find parallels across diverse cultures in order to build meso-level theory. In the former camp are chapters by Kenny Forbes on post-rock festival ArcTanGent as an ‘alternative alternative’ scene (p. 71), and by Chris Inglis on electro-swing as a ‘forward thinking and innovative’ music (p. 191); there is always a risk that such attention to distinctiveness might excessively valorise, or implicitly align with, the normative underpinnings of that specific scene. In contrast, Waldemar Kuligowski's chapter draws on very different musical cultures – punk in Poland, psytrance in Hungary and brass band music in Serbia – to consider the ‘axio-normative’ dimensions of festivals, i.e. how these events all use visual style, geographic location, etc., to act ‘as a medium for promoting certain moral and ideological values’ (p. 95).
In a volume so concerned with the technologically induced precarity of much musical employment, it was disappointing to see a chapter by two of the book's three editors become rather entangled in questionable rhetorics of entrepreneurialism. Having sketched out the professional biographies of Manchester music veterans Peter Hook and Graham Massey, the authors conclude that ‘the largest part of their success is due to their talent, commitment and, to use the old-fashioned word, “authenticity”’ (p. 151). In asking the question of what musicians can learn from these paragons of self-realisation, they suggest that ‘most successful musicians need to endure a long period of “apprenticeship”, accepting not “seeing money” at age thirty or working for ten years as an amateur before becoming a professional’ (p. 152). As Mark Banks, Angela McRobbie and other scholars of cultural labour have noted, it is exactly these kinds of ‘war stories’ – told by those who have already ‘made it’ – which serve to discursively legitimate the un(der)paid efforts of those lower down the ladder, thus masking structural inequality. In fairness, Mazierska and Rigg note elsewhere that ‘success in music […] is an outcome of many factors that are outside the musician's influence, such as the existence of conducive environments accessible to the artist for the production, commoditization, and consumption of music’ (p. 152). However, in the context of the rest of the book, the exaltation of Massey and Hook goes against the ‘bottom-up approach’ that the editors rightly argue ‘provides a more balanced view of the music business than focusing on stars whose labour is in high demand’ (p. 20).
The book is not just concerned with the post-digital, but also with whatever is coming post that. The editors’ introductory chapter is titled ‘The Future of and Through Music’, and most of the chapters close with predictions concerning their specific remit (blockchain technology, the professional composer, music curation, and more). Many of these forecasts are, understandably, cautious and bet-hedging. The invocation, by a few, of Jacques Attali's Bruits as evidence of music's predictive powers, suggests that Eric Drott's quite comprehensive disassembly of that work (Reference Drott2015) deserves a larger readership.
Matthew Flynn, however, devotes his chapter to taking prediction seriously. Drawing on a briefly outlined history of playback devices, and in particular of the self-playing piano, he develops an heuristic of playback technologies’ (future) viability based on concepts of ‘playback’, ‘playlists’ and ‘playbour’. The ‘rule of thumb’ is that music playback devices which ‘improve situational control and playlist choice whilst, at the same time, becoming less reliant on the skill, knowledge and ability (playbour) of the participant consumer, will displace, replace and surpass incumbent technologies in the mass market’ (p. 226). The focus on consumer agency here as a critical factor in technological adoption is positioned as a mild corrective to David Hesmondhalgh and Leslie Meier's history of playback technologies (Reference Hesmondhalgh and Meier2018), which Flynn sees as attributing excessive causality to the economic power of electronics and ICT firms.
Michael Huber's chapter also makes interesting predictions, drawing on the latest iteration of long-standing survey work conducted at the Institute for Music Sociology in Vienna. The quantitative stuff is revealing, but I also enjoyed his neat summations of the declining role of popular music in the identity work of young people. Amongst those under 26, says Huber, music ‘has been re-evaluated, from a core interest to a welcome tool for impression management’ (p. 242). In Austria at least, compared with previous generations’ affiliation with rock, hip-hop, and techno, there is ‘no comparable socializing music culture’ (p. 237).
This book offers a strong overview of the variety of ways in which technology continues to impact music cultures. It should be required reading for those with interests in the study of local music scenes, and would be appropriate as supplementary reading for undergraduates. A focus on career trajectories and working conditions might make it particularly relevant for courses which aim to prepare students for a life in and around the music industries.
