Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society

From shifts in format, through the effects on circulation and ownership, to the rise of digitally-produced genres, the ways we create, share and listen to music have changed fundamentally. In Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society, Nick Prior explores the social, cultural and industrial contexts in which these shifts have taken place. Both accessible and authoritative, the book:

• Clarifies key concepts such as assemblage, affordance, mediation and musicking and defines new concepts such as playsumption and digital vocalities
• Considers the impact of music production technologies such as MIDI, sampling, personal computing and smartphone apps
• Looks at the ways in which the internet shapes musical consumption, from viral marketing to streaming services
• Examines the effects of mobile audio devices on everyday social interactions
• Opens up new ways to think and write about the personal experience of making and performing digital music

This book is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand the place of popular music in contemporary culture and society. It will be fascinating reading for students and researchers across media and communication studies, sociology, cultural studies and the creative industries. 

Nick Prior is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His primary interests pivot to the sociology of music and particularly the attempt to understand the complex layers that fold around popular music in an increasingly digitally mediated present. His most recent book, Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society, is published by Sage (2018) and explores how music′s devices, styles, sounds and personnel are implicated in post-1980s shifts in the nature and organisation of culture and society. He works in a post-Bourdieusian tradition, though his most recent work opens up the potentials of assemblage thinking when applied to electronic and digital vocalities and the role of virtual idols in Japan. His work has appeared in the journals Contemporary Music Review, Cultural Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, New Formations, Information, Communication and Society, Space and Culture, Réseaux, Sociology Compass and Poetics. He has been co-editor of Cultural Sociology since 2016.