The Impact of Technology on Nodes of Popular Music Product
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CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE IS MUSIC BECOMING PLACELESS? THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON NODES OF POPULAR MUSIC PRODUCTION BETWEEN 1991 AND 2010 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Geography By Avo Nersesian December 2012 The thesis of Avo Nersesian is approved: Dr. Ronald Davidson Date Dr. Edward Jackiewicz Date Dr. Steven Graves, Chair Date California State University, Northridge ii Without sound, space itself contracts, for our experience of space is greatly extended by the auditory sense which provides information of the world beyond the visual field. – Yi-Fu Tuan iii Table of Contents Signature Page ................................................................................................................................ ii Epigraph ......................................................................................................................................... iii List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. v Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi 1.0 Music geography? ..................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 History of research ................................................................................................................ 2 1.2 Major Themes ....................................................................................................................... 3 1.3 Purpose of this study ............................................................................................................. 4 2.0 Music Industry .......................................................................................................................... 7 2.1 A brief history of the music industry .................................................................................... 7 2.2Geographyof the music industry .......................................................................................... 13 3.0 Music and Place ...................................................................................................................... 15 3.1 Place creates music.............................................................................................................. 17 3.2 Music creates place ............................................................................................................. 18 3.3 Soundscapes ........................................................................................................................ 21 3.4 Diffusion of music ............................................................................................................... 21 3.5 The internet‟s impact on the geography of innovation ....................................................... 23 3.6The internet‟s impact on the geography of music ................................................................ 24 4.0 Concluding the reviewed literature ......................................................................................... 28 5.0 Data and Methods ................................................................................................................... 30 5.1 Assigning a point of origin to each artist ............................................................................ 31 5.2 Mapping the data ................................................................................................................. 33 6.0 Results ..................................................................................................................................... 35 7.0 Discussion ............................................................................................................................... 38 7.1 Juxtaposition........................................................................................................................ 38 7.2 The curse of technology ...................................................................................................... 40 7.3 The corporate manufacture of music ................................................................................... 41 7.4 The bottom “ninety-nine” percent ...................................................................................... 43 8.0 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 49 References ..................................................................................................................................... 52 iv List of Figures Figure 1 Market Share (Nielsen SoundScan 2005)......................................................................... 8 Figure 2 Music Revenue Apportioned by Country (IFPI Report 2010) ......................................... 9 Figure 3 iTunes Downloads (iTunes Store 2010) ......................................................................... 10 Figure 4 YouTube Uploads (Hypebot 2011) ................................................................................ 11 Figure 5 Google Maps Search for “Recording Studios in Los Angeles” ..................................... 19 Figure 6 Google Maps Search for "Recording Studios in Philadelphia" ...................................... 20 Figure 7 Internet Traffic................................................................................................................ 24 Figure 8 Internet Bandwidth (Ball State University 2011) ........................................................... 25 Figure 9 PC Data Capacity (Neinhuys 2011) ............................................................................... 26 Figure 10 Best-Selling Artists ....................................................................................................... 37 Figure 11 Best-Selling AOR Albums ........................................................................................... 47 v ABSTRACT IS MUSIC BECOMING PLACELESS? THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON NODES OF POPULAR MUSIC PRODUCTION BETWEEN 1991 AND 2010 By Avo Nersesian Master of Arts in Geography The purpose of this study is to investigate whether or not music is becoming placeless in this age of mass internet communication. Digital media have made it possible for anybody with access to the internet to buy and share music. Additionally, inexpensive audio recording programs have made it increasingly easier for the average person to make high quality music from the comfort of his bedroom. In this unprecedented era of musical democratization I find that nodes of popular music production have changed very little over the past twenty years. I contend that music production still largely remains in the hands of a few giant corporate conglomerates who have not allowed for the democratization of music production, and therefore, the diffusion of nodes of production. vi 1.0 Music geography? The vast majority of human geography has been concerned with the visual world. Geographers have paid little attention to the soundscapes in which we live. There are few studies of the olfactory or auditory landscapes that are all around. Geography is, after all, a social science; and scientific observation is most commonly conducted through vision. However, vision alone is not enough. Persistence of a bias toward visual analysis in human geography is problematic because it encourages us to neglect the role of all the senses in structuring and experiencing space and place; it creates a body of scholarship that excludes, or is irrelevant for, people who are blind or experience severe visual impairment; and it excludes a major art form – the production of sound generally, and of music in particular – from geographic study (Smith 1994). Despite the general lack of attention to soundscapes, a growing amount of research in music geography has been conducted. Geographers have produced more than 100 journal articles, theses/dissertations, monographs, and books, which will be examined in the succeeding sections. Moreover, special sessions on the geography of music have been organized for the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) and Association of American Geographers (AAG) meetings (Carney 1994). There is no good reason why the spatial perspective should not be applied to music. Reference to music and musical themes can help inform geographical interpretations of the cultural landscape (Smith 1994). Every human culture appears to include some kind of music, even if this relies on a very broad definition of music. The presence of musical instruments, excavated from archaeological digs from at least 7,700 years ago, suggests that this may have been true throughout history (Connell and Gibson 2003). Yet during the beginnings of the sub- 1 discipline in the 1970s, people criticized George Carney for being “frivolous” and “non- scientific” when he pushed for music geography (Carney 1994). We have come a long way since then. As Thomas Paine so befittingly stated in his Common Sense, “Time makes more converts than reason.” Much of the existing research on music has focused on the deep roots of music in the spatial context of various places. Indeed many places can hardly be imagined without reference to the music of those places. New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Liverpool and San Francisco are all cities whose place associations