UNIVERSITY of CALGARY 'Hold on to Your Genre': Digital Audio
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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY ‘Hold on to your Genre’: Digital Audio Collecting and Indie Music Connoisseurship by Thomas M. Everrett A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS FACULTY OF COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE CALGARY, ALBERTA APRIL, 2007 © Thomas M. Everrett 2007 Abstract Since the 1990s, practices in digital music collecting have been steadily on the rise, prompting a number of debates regarding the value or legitimacy of digital artifacts, as well as the technologies developed to facilitate their use. Though these changes have been met with significant opposition by scholars and audiophiles alike, there is much evidence to suggest that these practices are in fact leading to increasingly intimate and socially-constituted forms of music collecting and consumption. In this paper, the author uses the contemporary indie music scene as an example of how recent developments in portable audio devices, online download infrastructures, and social networking software have converted once-private experiences into public affairs, linking music collectors to social communities where their personal accumulations may be both accessed and judged. As such, traditional collecting practices associated with connoisseurship and canonism are demonstrated as being preserved by digital technologies both musically and culturally today. ii Acknowledgements The author would like to acknowledge the help and support of Bart Beaty, Cathy Everrett, Tom Everrett Sr., Corey Everrett, Jane Renyk, Bob Fisher and many other friends and colleagues in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary without which this project would not have been possible. iii Table of Contents Abstract............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements............................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents...............................................................................................................iv CHAPTER ONE: DIGITAL AUDIO COLLECTING AND INDIE MUSIC CONNOISSEURSHIP................................................................................................1 CHAPTER TWO: COLLECTING MUSIC IN THE DIGITAL AGE................................6 2.1 Music Collecting Goes Digital ..................................................................................7 2.1.1 Digital Collecting ............................................................................................10 2.2 Intimacy and Interactivity in the Digital Age ..........................................................12 2.2.1 Desire for Compacting ....................................................................................15 2.2.2 Desire for Immediacy......................................................................................16 2.2.3 Desire to Customize ........................................................................................19 2.3 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................22 CHAPTER THREE: THE PRIVATE AND PUBLIC IN DIGITAL MUSIC COLLECTING .........................................................................................................24 3.1 Digital Collecting in Private ....................................................................................26 3.1.1 The Age of Egocasting ....................................................................................27 3.1.2 The Private Collection.....................................................................................31 3.2 Digital Collecting in Public .....................................................................................36 3.2.1 The Digital Collection in ‘Offline’ Space .......................................................36 3.2.2 The Digital Collection in ‘Online’ Space........................................................41 3.3 Digital Collecting in the Age of ‘Ego-Broadcasting’ ..............................................46 3.4 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................49 CHAPTER FOUR: COLLECTING, CANONISM, AND CONNOISSEURSHIP IN THE INDIE MUSIC SCENE....................................................................................51 4.1 A Brief History of Indie Music................................................................................53 4.2 Collecting Indie Music.............................................................................................57 4.2.1 A History of Indie Record Collectors..............................................................59 4.2.2 The Historical Function of the Indie Canon....................................................61 4.3 The Politics of Indie Music Fandom........................................................................64 4.4 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................66 CHAPTER FIVE: THE PITCHFORK EFFECT...............................................................68 5.1 The Pitchfork Effect… on Music Criticism.............................................................71 5.2 The Pitchfork Effect… on Indie Artists...................................................................74 5.3 The Pitchfork Effect… on Indie Fandom ................................................................78 5.3.1 Indie Fan Networks .........................................................................................79 5.3.2 Indie Downloading ..........................................................................................83 5.3.3 Indie Blogging.................................................................................................86 5.4 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................94 iv CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION......................................................................................96 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................103 v 1 Chapter One: Digital Audio Collecting and Indie Music Connoisseurship Over the last ten years, traditional practices of music collecting have begun changing in many significant ways. Debates regarding the value or legitimacy of new digital formats have recently taken shape, challenging preconceived notions that the compressed audio file is inferior to traditional musical media, and by extension, that the digital audio collection is nothing more than a hard-drive stash of pirated musical booty rather than a valued and worthwhile artifact in its own right. Aside from the legal issues that surround the topic of free music downloading on the internet, two other perspectives have been especially apparent. The first, which I call the lament of the audiophile, concerns the fear that ‘degraded’ digital audio formats are somehow destroying musical recordings by reducing them to digital bits and contributing to an altogether inferior listening experience. The second, which I call the egocasting fallacy, concerns the fear that by allowing individuals to hear only what they want to hear, new portable audio devices and digital music software are effectively shielding music fans from unwanted influences in a kind of technologically-enabled form of selective musical perception. Over the course of this paper it will be shown that these perspectives, though noble in their quest to protect music from excessive and unnecessary degrees of degradation and technological mediation, often appear shallow in their overall understanding of how digital formats and devices actually function, both technically and socially, in the broader context of contemporary music consumption. Since the so-called ‘download revolution’ of the 1990s, digital audio files like the mp3, and more recently the AAC and WMA (two popular audio compression formats 2 developed and trademarked by Apple and Microsoft respectively), have risen exponentially in popularity. Though compact discs and vinyl records are still selling in large numbers, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that music is increasingly making its way from the realm of the physical to that of the digital. In this respect, the term ‘record collecting’ as it is used today no longer refers solely to the literal ‘collecting of vinyl records’, but to the collecting of various other media as well, from cassettes and compact discs, to many compressed digital formats now found readily online. To reflect this shift, use of the term record collecting in this paper will refer generally to any individual amassing of a sizeable, though not necessarily exorbitant, number of musical recordings – in any or all formats, either physical or digital – which are accumulated in a single location (milk crate, hard drive, etc.) and considered more significant as a whole. In saying this, a distinction between those recording formats that are ‘physical’ (vinyl, cassettes, CDs) and those that are not (mp3s, AACs) will still be necessary in order to allow for a comparison between older practices of music consumption and what is increasingly occurring in the digital realm today. In this regard, usage of the term digital or intangible media will refer only to those artifacts which can not be physically