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The Medium Is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan

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Sonic Technologies_ Popular Mus - Robert Strachan

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Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants

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What Is a Digital Native?

Digital native is a term coined by Marc Prensky in 2001 to describe the generation of people who grew up in the era of ubiquitous technology, including computers and the internet.

Digital natives are comfortable with technology and computers at an early age and consider technology to be an integral and necessary part of their lives. Many teenagers and children in developed countries are considered to be digital natives, as they mainly communicate and learn via computers, social networking services, and texting.

The opposites of digital natives are digital immigrants (people who have had to adapt to the new language of technology) and digital refugees (people whose jobs, livelihoods, and lives have been disrupted by the rapid advance of information technology, automation, and artificial intelligence).

Understanding Digital Natives

The idea of "digital native" came from an article explaining Prensky's opinion on why today's teachers are having trouble teaching students. Prensky argued that young people today are speaking a digital language, while teachers are speaking an old accented language-their accent being their reluctance to adopt new technology. He called for a change in the way children are taught so that they may learn in a "language" they understand.

It is worth noting that not all children born today are digital natives. Although cheaper mobile technology is making rapid inroads into developing and emerging markets, children in less affluent areas are less exposed to technology than their counterparts in the G-7, for example.

It is also important to note that Prensky's original paper was a speculative essay rather than an empirical science article. However, substantial research evidence has since been developed that supports his claims. Scientists have demonstrated how frequent or early exposure to modern information technology can lead to cognitive and functional changes to the human brain.

This research shows that those who have all their lives been exposed to the influence of modern information technologies do indeed think, learn, and understand the world differently than previous generations. Based on his own experience in working with students and educators, Prensky later extended his digital native metaphor into a concept he calls "digital wisdom" for educational reform.

Digital Natives in the Business World

The idea of digital natives became popular among educators and parents whose children fell within Prensky's definition of a digital native. In the context of business, the digital native was embraced as a new and potentially lucrative way to segment consumers for the purpose of marketing. Many strategies have set out to capture the attention of digital natives, though often these attempts have amounted to basic marketing with a few more buzzwords thrown in.

It was the focus on digital natives that encouraged many brands to go with social media as a main marketing platform and to gamify promotions. Other marketing tips for reaching the digital natives included digging into the ad data for insights, appealing to aspirational desires, and a host of other basic ideas that apply to marketing to anyone regardless of their childhood exposure to technology.

In recent years, the millennial categorization has overtaken the usage of digital native as a marketing segment, but many of the characteristics and techniques remain the same.

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Digital native is a term coined by Marc Prensky in 2001 to describe the generation of people who grew up in the era of ubiquitous technology, including computers and the internet. Digital natives are comfortable with technology and computers at an early age and consider technology to be an integral and necessary part of their lives.

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Months before the economic crisis that overwhelmed worldwide financial markets in the fall of 2008, I was asked by the Wall Street Journal to write a piece that could put an optimistic face on the state of so-called classical music. The idea was to counter the seemingly never-ending jeremiads about the future of music and arguments against the relevance of classical music and the equally distressing number of books that seek to defend it. The volumes that have argued the virtues of classical music are defensive. They assume that there is reason to question why the practices and institutions associated with classical music should be supported and continued.

For readers of the Musical Quarterly I am providing a longer, unedited version of the piece that ran in the WSJ on October 3, 2008. But before doing so, I would like to reflect on the context that has evolved since it was published. First, there never was a reason to doubt the relevance of classical music and its traditions. The continued expansion in the numbers of young people who learn to play instruments all around the world, particularly in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, defies the notion of irrelevance. The capacity of the traditions of classical music to adapt to cultural contexts radically different from the historical conditions in European culture that gave rise to it suggests continued significance.

Second, as I indicate in the essay that follows, the criterion for the worth of classical music should not be its capacity to draw a mass audience. Neither should it be the capacity of practices of music making to be financially self-supporting. What has plagued classical music are the consequences of a blind acceptance of free market logic. This logic had a renaissance beginning in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan to the American presidency and the aura that surrounded Margaret Thatcher's tenure as British prime minister. It was assumed that the quality of cultural institutions could be measured by their success in making profits. Culture, in other words, suffered from the enthusiasm for the privatization of functions that under a different public policy might properly be considered the province of government. Cultural institutions, from orchestras to art museums, were asked to show success by demonstrating more "earned income" from ticket sales, entrance fees, and even the sale of collateral products. Museums opened stores, and cultural institutions scrambled to find ways to sell objects to audiences who were increasingly regarded as customers. There is nothing wrong with earning money from ancillary activities, but the general climate resulted in an overarching presumption that cultural institutions needed to pay their own way along the lines of privately owned, for-profit businesses.

This laissez-faire view got its greatest boost from the fall of communism in 1989. The quite admirable cultural infrastructures of communist Europe, from book publishing to opera production, emerged discredited. The absence of free expression in communist countries and the monopoly of the state certainly deserved no praise or admiration. But by the same token, the tradition of government subsidy in and of itself should not have been so uncritically dismissed. The abandonment of socialist and communist principles of government in the East justified the trend of the gradual dismantling of state support for culture in Western Europe.

The end result was that until the fall of 2008 conventional wisdom in North America and Europe held that the government should play a smaller role in supporting general research, university education, and the noncommercial arts in our culture. In the United States, the notion of free higher education had come to be regarded as not only impractical but unjustified, and tuitions to state universities began to rise rapidly. Perhaps the most endangered species of activities was basic scientific research in areas that afforded no immediate utilitarian result.

The irony is that an extended era of deregulation, privatization, the celebration of market values, and the presumption of an "invisible hand" guiding economic activity for the greatest good for the greatest number has come to a crashing halt. The immediate solution in the fall of 2008 was for governments to assume public ownership of activities that should not in the end have priority on government support: banking and insurance. The state has now stepped in to rescue the sector of society probably least deserving of public support. In other words, business failed on its own managerial terms as a nevertheless responsible profit-making enterprise within a market economy and was nevertheless rescued.

Because citizens and their governments all over the world will have the burden of regenerating a vital industrial sector, private enterprise, and the business community, it will be more difficult to argue for state support of education and culture. Given the cost of the worldwide bailout, governments will claim that they cannot afford to support culture and education. Yet before the collapse, when governments might legitimately have been able to provide support in a time of economic prosperity and boom, the argument was made that institutions of culture and education ought to fend for themselves in the marketplace, just as supposedly profitable industries and investment banks were doing. It seems clear that the current situation is both perverse and wrong-headed. There is no doubt that the massive state-supported economic bailout of banking, investment firms, and insurance companies is necessary. But the lesson to be learned is that the logic of a free market has limited utility. It certainly does not provide a universal basis by which to judge what is valuable in society.

Cultural institutions, particularly music institutions, are therefore faced with a desperate and daunting double-headed dilemma. First, the state's fiscal ability to support culture and education is weakened by the financial crisis. Second, the prospect of private patronage is now dimmer, owing to the collapse of major corporations, the reduced profitability of those that survived, and the wiping out of a great deal of wealth among individuals.

Whether the world is entering an era of depression or recession is a matter of terminology. We face the prospect of enormous pain and suffering, particularly among those least able to defend themselves. With inevitable increases in unemployment and rates of poverty, and declines in real income, what ought to be done? Some lessons can be learned from the experience of the 1930s. It is instructive to remember what wasn't done and what might have been done then. It is also vitally important to recall that during that period there were disastrous political consequences for misguided public policy.

At the same time, however, an opportunity presents itself as a result of the economic collapse. In the first instance, we will be forced to reconsider which values in society need active, aggressive promotion. Basic quality of life in the first instance must clearly be measured by material standards, but beyond the basic necessities it should also be measured by non-economic criteria. Now is the time for our governments to invest in culture and education. Institutions of culture and learning can provide for all citizens routes to a quality of life that can compete successfully with material consumption. Citizens are not just consumers of objects. We need a revitalized public sphere that places learning and entertainment, in its best sense, at the center. We face a greater need than ever before for new art, whether in the form of music or film or video, or dance and writing, or poetry or sculpture.

If classical music has suffered at all in North America and Europe since the end of the Second World War, it has not been because it lacks an audience, but because the cost to the consumer has risen unreasonably in the face of declining government support and private patronage. Particularly in the United States, where there is no tradition of public support, the problem has been private patronage. The super rich of today, the Warren Buffetts and Bill Gates of our time, are different from the Andrew Carnegies and Andrew Mellons of the past. Classical music has for a long time not been the favored pastime and object of philanthropy by the very rich.

This shift in the tastes of the economic elite does not itself reflect the value of these now neglected enterprises. Therefore, the task facing the world of music is to make the argument that it is precisely in a moment of economic crisis that support for these traditions of culture in both the private and the public sectors is most needed. Perhaps the silver lining in this world financial crisis will be that more of our talented young people will enter professions of learning, public service, and the arts and that fewer will be lured by the high incomes promised by business. It is also to be hoped that more individuals will try to establish a style of life that includes activities that are not expensive to pursue, such as learning, participation in cultural life, and engaging in the arts.

Last, the revival of public institutions of culture, whether they be opera houses, concert halls, or museums, can provide for a more vital and engaged civic sensibility in a democracy. After all, as Daniel Mendelsohn has argued, Greek tragedy was a product of Greek democracy and gladiatorial brutalities the entertainment of an autocratic Roman Empire. I suspect that for most of the readers of this journal music is a matter of life and death. That it can provide a sense of meaning to life for a much larger percentage of the population than it does now seems entirely plausible. As a first step, those of us in academic communities need to find new ways to introduce our students to that phrase Leonard Bernstein aptly used as a title for one of his best-selling books: "the joy of music." It was for this objective that I wrote about the future of classical music for the WSJ.

The Unsung Success of Live Classical Music

(A shorter version of this article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on October 3, 2008.)

In Vienna this past June, I went to a thrilling production of Richard Strauss's Capriccio. The next morning, in a magnificent Gothic church, I was swept away by the reverberant beauty of a performance of a rarely heard Haydn mass. Both the opera house and church were filled to maximum capacity. The depth of the sound, its material sensuality and the allure of less familiar great music that has not been overplayed lent each listener an intimate sense of the human imagination that could be shared with hundreds of anonymous companions.

Nothing can reproduce the sonic and emotional power of live performance. But looking out at the audience at most classical music concerts in the United States, one sees a crowd that is largely middle-aged, verging on the geriatric. This has set off alarms within the music community, whose members are quick to blame the loss of a younger generation of listeners for the sorry state of classical music, waning ticket sales, and a record market that has all but disappeared.

Memories are deceptive. Classical music has never been the passion of the young. It is an acquired taste that requires both encouragement and education, like voting or drinking Scotch. And in fact, more young people today are interested in classical music than ever before. More surprising, the classical music world has never been healthier; since the early 1970s the growth has been robust.

The heralding of the demise of classical music is based on flimsy evidence. The number of concert venues, summer festivals, performing ensembles, and overall performances in classical music and opera has increased exponentially over the last four decades. There are currently nearly 400 professional orchestras in America, according to the League of American Orchestras, while thirty years ago there were 203. There are up to 500 youth orchestras, up from sixty-three in 1990. The number of orchestra concerts performed annually in the U.S. has risen 24 percent in the past decade, to 37,000. Ticket-sale income from orchestra performances grew almost 18 percent, to $608 million, between the 2004-05 and 2005-06 seasons.

The widening of interest in classical music isn't limited to our shores. The Asian embrace of western musical traditions took off in earnest after World War II. It first rose in Japan, then spread to Korea, and is now making its way throughout China, following the path of economic progress. The result: there are more young Asian instrumentalists and audience members for classical music than anyplace else in the world. In Venezuela, classical music training has become a powerful tool in the improvement of primary and secondary school education. When a nation backs music education, as in Finland, a new cadre of world-class performers emerges and audiences grow accordingly. We are in the midst of a global classical musical renaissance marked by a new vitality and higher standards of virtuosity and finesse.

So why all the hand wringing? Much of it stems from another false assumption: that classical music was once profitable, but is now failing financially. This distorted expectation is rooted in the peculiar experience of the last decades of the nineteenth century, after the rapid extension of literacy in Europe and America. Before recording became commercially viable, which occurred in 1902 when the Columbia and Victor companies joined forces and issued discs, sales of instruments (particularly the piano), concert tickets, and sheet music were thriving businesses. With the advent of recorded music-first the player piano, then the radio, the 78 rpm record, the long-playing record, and the digital CD-novel, albeit brief, opportunities for making money followed. These circumstances do not represent the broader historical norm. Classical music never held the promise that it could enlist a mass audience. From its birth as a secular and church-based art form, classical music has depended on patronage and philanthropy, not on income from sales either at the box office or in record stores.

The euphoria about the potential of recording and the electronic transmission of music reached a fever pitch during the mid-twentieth century. Glenn Gould, the legendary and eccentric Canadian pianist, was the most articulate proponent of a vision of the future in which recordings would replace live performance. He believed the only way to realize classical music's full potential was in the pristine and minutely controlled recording studio. Listeners would then enjoy the recording by using high-fidelity equipment in an isolated environment.

Mr. Gould was wrong. The success of the iPod has demonstrated that while some connoisseurs find its compression annoying, most classical music lovers value freedom and mobility over high fidelity. And thanks in large part to the pioneering strategy of the Naxos label, today's public is blessed with an inexhaustible archive of recorded performances. Each unit costs less than $10 to purchase or download, less than recordings from better-known companies such as EMI and Sony. And that's before considering the file sharing, streaming, and downloading that are all at hand.

Unprecedented easy access to the recorded treasures of classical music may have put an end to the commercial viability of recorded music, but there is a silver lining: It has inspired more people to go to live concerts. Recorded music now does what all reproductions should. It inspires the desire to experience the real thing, in real time and space.

The economic demise of classical recording and the retreat of commercial classical radio have forced us to turn back to the real attraction of classical music: the power and sensuality of the live sounds. The excitement that ensues from the unpredictability and drama of live performance is comparable to watching spectator sports. Following a game on television is enjoyable, but to be cheering at the stadium or sitting courtside is an incomparable experience. Indeed, the number of people who go to a single concert or opera on any day of the year, all over the world, outnumbers the total number of people who buy at least one classical recording over a whole year. After all, a hit classical record is one that sells just over 100,000 units. Classical music now accounts for just over 3 percent of the market for recordings, and in niche markets, where it once accounted for 20 percent, as was the case in Germany, it has fallen to 7 percent.

The world of classical music still faces serious challenges. The competition for patronage and philanthropy has become increasingly intense, as the private sector is now asked to shoulder responsibility not only for the arts but also for education and many social services once the exclusive province of government. There are few cost-saving measures at hand when operas and orchestras require over 100 professionals to realize a single performance of Mahler's Third Symphony or Verdi's Aida.

And then there is the snobbery problem. The explosive worldwide growth of popular music has created a competitive tension between classical "art" music and popular music that performers and composers in that past would not recognize. With this new chasm come smug defenders who delude themselves that allegiance to classical music is a sign of some sort of superiority. Musicians of note have rarely held this view. Consider Haydn, Liszt, Copland, and Stravinsky, composers who used popular and folk material-or Leonard Bernstein, whose music bridged both worlds, and even the twentieth-century violinist Jascha Heifetz, who wrote popular songs. Until recently classical musicians and their audiences have remained eclectic and catholic in their tastes. This tendency needs to be strengthened.

One needn't have access to secret codes to appreciate classical music. Its demands are minimal: no more than a willingness to spend the time listening and feeling. Listeners should not be deterred by the presence of a small but audible circle of devotees who derive pleasure from portraying themselves as more knowledgeable than the average citizen. There is very much to be learned about classical music just as there is in art and literature, but one does not have to "know" anything about it to begin to enjoy it.

Concerts need not be dull affairs dominated by excessive formality and decorum. Classical music often dispenses with words and images and storyline. This absence of realism permits individuals to let their imaginations run freely, to daydream and meditate. Listening to live music in a concert hall is at once a social and private event. This is why classical music composers, in contrast to writers and painters, have suffered less egregiously under political tyranny. Censors and spies could not deduce from observing listeners at a public concert in Stalinist Russia that featured Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony what thoughts the music was inspiring. Did people cry because they sensed recognition of their suffering or because they were inspired by the work's presumed patriotic celebration of Soviet life?

Classical music doesn't invite clear answers. It has always appealed to older adults who, with the passing of years, tend to contemplate the kind of daily life conundrums that are freighted with ambiguity and complexity. The average classical listener has historically hovered around middle age. This is encouraging, as there is no shortage of baby boomers on the horizon. The challenge facing classical musicians is to persuade adults to listen, even those who have no experience with classical music. It would be swell if there were public investment in music education, but since that is unlikely, musicians and arts organizations have to assume leadership.

The United States pours a great deal of money into our schools' sports programs on the grounds that athletics offer constructive experiences useful in economic and civic life. Those arguments should extend to music. In sports we have created not a participatory culture but a Roman gladiatorial system in which most of us end up as passive spectators watching a few individuals on the playing field. Music education, meanwhile, offers an opportunity for more individuals to participate as amateurs, with fewer relegated to the stands and sidelines.

A threat to classical music in America resides in shortsighted, conservative, and defeatist attitudes from those who manage and administer the institutions of music. Instead of looking for new ways to expand the audience and therefore charitable giving, orchestra, opera, and venue managers are reluctant to take risks and cling to obsolete practices. Managers have become far too cautious about what they are willing to put on the stage. The innovations at The Brooklyn Academy of Music, the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and, going back a decade or more ago, in St. Louis (and for that matter Birmingham, England) have had good results. Bring the visual media, literature, history, and theater into concert life. Engage the audience in discussion and debate.

If classical music is in trouble, it is because its advocates are behaving as though it were terminally ill. To survive and flourish we need to stop playing the same repertoire in concert and in the opera. Would we run a movie theater by screening the same dozen films ad nauseam, never showing any new releases or reviving old classics? There is so much more to be listened to in the history of music; yet judging from the repertoire that has become standard, it is as if all but two rooms in a museum were closed.

Concerts must be affordable for the middle class and accessible to the least privileged. There are few gimmicks for raising earned income. Classical music does not have anything comparable to the museum shop. Now that recordings can be downloaded cheaply, the best we have to sell are T-shirts. The greatest opportunity for improving revenue remains charitable giving by individuals. But the age of super-rich benefactors who loved classical music the way Alice Tully and Helen Hull (founder of the City Opera and supporter of the New York Philharmonic) did in New York and Henry Higginson (who built Symphony Hall) did in Boston is long past. The very rich of today need to be lured away from contemporary art to classical music and jazz, which faces a similar set of challenges. We need to make the case that not all that is good can be measured by the logic of the market, by volume in sales, and the possibility of profit.

And how to explain why some orchestras are getting into financial trouble and suspending operations, as appears to be the case in Columbus, Ohio? Because crises crop up when inertia and excessive caution sets in. To thrive, managements need to innovate and learn from the enthusiastic embrace of Western classical music around the world. Success will be found by adapting better to local circumstances and by looking beyond our borders. Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Minneapolis are promising examples where orchestras have become more important to civic life by making their programs challenging and relevant, reaching out-particularly to schools and colleges-beyond the confines of a concert hall. Above all, let's abandon politically correct notions about how ethnicity and class constitute barriers to the appreciation of classical music, a universally admired dimension of high culture and the human imagination.

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Months before the economic crisis that overwhelmed worldwide financial markets in the fall of 2008, I was asked by the Wall Street Journal to write a piece that could put an optimistic face on the state of so-called classical music.

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Towards a Model of Digital Fluency

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Business & Information Systems Engineering

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor, associate editor and reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments on this article. This article is a significantly revised version of a paper submitted to the European Conference on Information Systems 2012 and published in its proceedings (Wang et al. 2012).

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Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, University of Auckland Business School, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, 1142, New Zealand

Qian (Emily) Wang, Prof. Michael D. Myers & David Sundaram

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Correspondence to Prof. Michael D. Myers.

Additional information

Accepted after two revisions by Prof. Dr. Buxmann.

This article is also available in German in print and via http://www.wirtschaftsinformatik.de: Wang Q(E), Myers MD, Sundaram D (2013) Digital Natives und digital Immigrants. Entwicklung eines Modells digitaler Gewandtheit. WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK. doi: 10.1007/s11576-013-0390-2.

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Wang, Q.(., Myers, M.D. & Sundaram, D. Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. Bus Inf Syst Eng 5, 409-419 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-013-0296-y
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The article looks at the differences between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants." Digital natives are the new generation of young people born into the digital age, while "digital immigrants" are those who learnt to use computers at some stage during their adult life.

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What the digitalisation of music tells us about capitalism, culture and the power of the information technology sector

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What the digitalisation of music tells us about capitalism, culture and the power of the information technology sector

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ABSTRACT
This article examines a striking but under-analysed feature of culture under capitalism, using the example of music: that the main ways in which people gain access to cultural experiences are subject to frequent, radical and disorienting shifts. It has two main aims. The first is to provide a macro-historical, multi-causal explanation of changes in technologies of musical consumption, emphasising the mutual imbrication of the economic interests of corporations with sociocultural transformations. We identify a shift over the last twenty years from consumer electronics (CE) to information technology (IT) as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how music and culture are mediated and experienced, and argue that this shift from CE to IT drew upon, and in turn quickened, a shift from domestic consumption to personalised, mobile and connected consumption, and from dynamics of what Raymond Williams called 'mobile privatisation' to what we call 'networked mobile personalisation'. The second aim is to assess change and continuity in the main means by which recorded music is consumed, in long-term perspective. We argue that disruptions caused by recent 'digitalisation' of music are consistent with longer term processes, whereby music has been something of a testing ground for the introduction of new cultural technologies. But we also recognise particularly high levels of disruption in recent times and relate these to the new dominance of the IT industries, and the particular dynamism or instability of that sector. We close by discussing the degree to which constant changes in how people access musical experiences might be read as instances of capitalism's tendency to prioritise limiting notions of consumer preference over meaningful needs.

Introduction

One striking feature of culture in modern capitalist societies is that the main ways in which people gain access to cultural experiences are subject to frequent, radical and disorienting shifts. This has been very apparent in recent changes in musical consumption. Over the last 20 years, there has been a marked change in dominant ways of experiencing recorded music. In the mid-1990s, most music consumers in wealthier parts of the planet would buy CDs or cassettes from specialist or general record shops, and play them back via electronic devices in the home and car, and in some cases via mobile devices such as the Sony Discman or Walkman; radio and television provided important further exposure for musical recordings. There was a shift in the early twenty-first century to the personal computer and mobile digital playback devices such as Apple's iPod as the prevalent ways of consuming music. More recently there has been a further change. A new ecology of musical consumption is emerging, based on subscription audio streaming services and Internet-connected mobile phones. While only a minority of music consumers currently consume music in this way, even in the relatively wealthy Global North, this configuration is slowly reviving the ailing music industries, and looks set to be the future of recorded musical consumption in many places - until the next transformation comes along.

These regular and dramatic changes may be experienced by some users as progress, and even as invigorating, while others may experience them as loss. Regardless of these differences, the development and production of new systems and devices that are quickly rendered obsolete is in itself a striking and significant feature of contemporary capitalism. It has potentially important implications for an understanding of media's relationship to capitalism and the environment, a topic of increasing interest in media, communication and information studies (e.g., Maxwell & Miller, ). Our two main aims are as follows.

First, we seek to delineate the main forces driving the constant shifts in the prevalent technological means by which music is experienced. We do so via a macro-historical perspective on the music industries and their 'inter-sectoral relations' with other industries: not just other cultural industries, but vitally important yet often neglected neighbouring industries such as consumer electronics (CE), information technology (IT) and telecommunications. At the heart of our macro-historical account is the identification of a shift over the last twenty years from CE to IT as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how music and culture are mediated and experienced, a fact insufficiently recognised and/or fore-fronted in research on media, culture and music. However, our analysis does not assume that change can be understood entirely, or even predominantly, in terms of technologies imposed by businesses. Instead, we offer a multi-causal understanding of change in cultural industries (see Hesmondhalgh, , pp. 93-118), showing that the shift from CE to IT draws upon, and in turn quickens, a move from domestic consumption to personalised, mobile and connected consumption (what we call networked mobile personalisation) as the 'cutting edge' of capitalism, a move which both draws upon, and contributes to, broader sociocultural changes.

Our second goal is to assess the mixture of continuity and change in the new musical 'ecosystem', in order to go beyond an excessive focus in existing accounts on radical transformation. Our account shows that the disruption in prevailing forms of musical consumption in modern societies brought about by digitalisation is consistent with longer term patterns of turbulence (which is easy to misinterpret in retrospect as stability). Having said that, we recognise that there have been significant changes: the last 20 years have seen particularly high levels of disruption, even chaos, and the IT industries are now the primary sector determining change.

In drawing out the implications of our analysis in the final section, we suggest that these two factors might be related: that the particular dynamism or instability of the IT sector may help to explain the particularly disruptive nature of recent changes in musical experience (though it is possible that the recent rise of an IT oligopoly may now be leading to relative stabilisation when it comes to technologies of consumption). We also briefly address normative questions concerning what all this means for understanding capitalism, culture and music: what music's seeming role as a testing ground for technological change might mean for music's status in capitalism; and whether changes in how people access musical experiences might be read as capitalism's successful meeting of fundamental needs and desires, or as instances of waste, instability and the prioritisation of consumer preferences over meaningful needs. Before then, we structure our article into three main sections: a discussion of recent work on changes in musical production and distribution; an account of changes in the main ways in which recorded music was consumed in the twentieth century, emphasising the crucial role of CE companies catering to domestic consumption; and an examination of changes in the twenty-first century, emphasising the key role of the IT sector, and mobile, connected, personalised technologies.

First though, we need to define and clarify the plural term 'music industries'. Some analysts now consider that the term 'music industry' in the singular is a misnomer (Williamson & Cloonan, ), and it is better to see industrialised music as comprising a number of related sub-sectors: recording companies that commission and arrange for the recording and distribution of music; music 'publishing' companies, based on the exploitation of musical recordings and compositions as intellectual property; the live entertainment sector; music retailing; and musical instruments (manufacture, distribution and retail). The live entertainment sector has grown in many regions over the last 20 years, but recording and publishing have always been by far the largest of these sub-sectors in economic terms, and so it is these two sectors, and the retail function that brings music to consumers, that we mainly focus on in this article.

Accounts of recent change in music industries

Before 2000, there was a small amount of high-quality historically informed scholarship on the music industries, much of it coming from the subfield of popular music studies, which mainly drew on sociology, and on media and cultural studies (Frith, ; Laing, ; Negus, ). The digitalisation of music after 2000 seems to have pushed more and more academics to turn their attention to the question of change in the music industries. Copyright and intellectual property have rightly been treated as major issues, with some addressing music as part of broader accounts of problems concerning copyright in the digital era (e.g., Vaidhyanathan, ), and some devoting their attention to the particular struggles that have taken place concerning copyright in the wake of digitalisation of music (David, ; Hesmondhalgh, ). Eventually, a number of books appeared that attempted to understand the new configuration of the music industries (Anderson, ; Leyshon, ; Morris, ; Rogers, ; Wikström, ), with much talk of networks and new intermediaries. A recent wave of articles has examined the new streaming services, focusing on their implications for musicians and on the branded and monitored consumer experiences they offer (Kjus, ; Marshall, ; Morris & Powers, ).

There are many substantial contributions to knowledge and understanding in this now formidable body of literature, but there is a striking lack of systematic explanation of how and why the recent changes in prevalent ways of accessing recorded music have come about. It is true that there are implied explanations to be found, but they are often lacking. For example, there is a tendency to portray disruptive innovations as ultimately the products of amateurs, as when Leyshon (, p. 4) attributes transformation to software formats such as MP3 which, in his words, 'emerged from their various redoubts within relatively small computer-literate and hacker communities'. While such communities undoubtedly had an important role to play in the dissemination of disruptive technologies, as a recent well-researched book (Witt, ) shows, most of the technologies shaping music consumption in this century were developed by established engineering companies and/or by IT start-ups. The implied picture of heroic outsiders challenging powerful incumbents that emerges from many journalistic and some academic accounts needs to be qualified. The technological developments that have changed musical production and consumption were as much a product of capitalism as the music industries themselves, but of a new, emergent, often chaotic but increasingly powerful sector of capitalism, centred on IT. As we shall show, failure to incorporate this dominant force into analysis limits the wider implications concerning the place of music in contemporary economy and society that might be drawn from understanding recent changes.

Amidst the abundance of commentary, there are resources that help point to richer explanatory perspectives by paying much greater attention to inter-sectoral relations between the music industries and other sectors, notably IT and telecommunications. From a political economy of media approach, Burkart and McCourt () and Burkart () were unusual in directing critique not only against the recording industry, but also against the actual and potential role of IT companies in driving change. Gopinath's The Ringtone Dialectic () provides a rigorously detailed account of the tangled webs of telecommunications and tech companies, plus dozens of new intermediaries, involved in the creation of a briefly thriving global mobile ringtone industry. More recently, Morris's () work pays important attention to the role of IT companies in driving change in the 'digital music commodity', building on Sterne's () excavation of the origins of the MP3 format in sound engineering companies, and in the activities of organisations that seek to determine industry standards.

We draw on these resources here, but we also draw on three further bodies of research. One is scholarship on the history of the music industries (Laing, ; Marshall, ; Sanjek & Sanjek, ; Shepherd, Horn, Laing, Oliver, & Wicke, ), in order to put recent changes into longer term perspective, emphasising the important role of CE in these histories. The second is research from the critical political economy of the media perspective (e.g., Garnham, ; Winseck, ) that pays attention to relations between different sectors in explaining historical developments in media, communication and cultural industries. The third is non-reductive accounts of change that seek to recognise that technologies shape human action and experience, but in a complex interplay with other shaping influences such as sociocultural, economic and political factors; and that technological change is itself driven by a similarly complex web of factors (e.g., Williams, ; Winston, ).

Industrialised music consumption in the twentieth century: the central importance of CE

Changes in music consumption in the twentieth century were shaped by a complex interaction between sociocultural change and the strategies of capitalist firms, especially those in the CE sector. For Williams (, p. 26), the twentieth-century boom in cars, cameras, electric appliances, radio and television (and he might have added the gramophone or phonograph) was part of a process by which an earlier period of public technologies, 'best exemplified by the railways and city lighting', were being replaced by new technologies not only based on, but also contributing to, what he famously called 'mobile privatisation': a new form of modern living based on two contradictory tendencies, people's increasing mobility (whether in fact or in imagination) and the increasing commodification of domestic space, starting with the middle class and eventually penetrating working-class homes. In fact, while Williams is right to emphasise that the 'private' nature of these technologies does not preclude a sense of public connection (e.g., through broadcasting), it makes more sense to think of these then new technologies as primarily domestic ones, based on 'the apparently self-sufficient family home' (Williams, , p. 26).. The rise of the vast CE industries in the early twentieth century was a product of this commodification of the home, and in turn it helped to accelerate that commodification.

These CE industries were the main agents driving change in the prevalent ways in which musical experience was mediated in the twentieth century. We can identify a series of key dynamics of change in the twentieth-century music industries, each of which is linked with the dissemination of a particular technology of musical consumption by firms primarily based in the CE sector: phonography, radio, vinyl records, audio cassettes and compact discs. All are in an important sense primarily domestic technologies, even if their use undoubtedly went beyond the home, for example, to cars and some public spaces. We organise our account of the power of CE industries vis-à-vis changes in musical consumption by taking each of these in turn.

The linked group of technologies that we can broadly call phonography (including the gramophone, the phonograph and the cylinders and discs played upon them) achieved successful dissemination following the introduction of mass-produced phonograph playback machines from around 1906 (when the 'Victrola' was introduced). These were technologies developed, introduced and marketed by electronics companies, which were taken up by an expanding middle class and incorporated into the living rooms that were replacing Victorian parlours as the centre of the home (Sterne, , p. 204). Recordings were, from the start, primarily a way of selling the much more expensive and potentially profitable playback machines, and the first major recording companies were established and operated by electronics firms (Sanjek & Sanjek, ). The global record industry boom of the 1920s, partly made possible by improvements in recording technologies (notably the introduction of electronic microphones), was dominated by CE companies such as the Victor Talking Machine Company, the Gramophone Company (formed to exploit Emile Berliner's disc-recording patents outside the USA) and the Columbia Phonograph Company (with its origins in a US-owned business built on Thomas Edison's different patents).

The recording boom was diminished by a separate CE-led boom that was to have a huge influence on the music industries: radio. In the USA, RCA (Radio Corporation of America) was set up by its parent CE company General Electric in 1919, with the crucial backing of the US government, to counter the possibility of a non-US communications firm (British Marconi) achieving market dominance and political influence via the powerful new technology (Sterling & Kittross, , pp. 52-68). RCA sold the radios manufactured by its parent company, and in 1926 set up NBC (National Broadcasting Corporation), which immediately became a hugely powerful force in commercial broadcasting. Soon the previously booming businesses of gramophone manufacture and recording were under serious threat from radio, and the major manufacturers started to integrate radio receivers into their machines. Sales of recordings plummeted in countries where radio spread, initially because music could be heard for free (Laing, , pp. 34-37) - a pre-echo of what was to happen in the twenty-first century when file-sharing technologies spread. The global economic depression of the 1930s then devastated the recording industry.

The modern recording industry emerged only in the post-war consumer boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The increasing ideological and economic importance and size of middle-class homes, and related changes in the social and economic independence of young people (Frith, ), led to further booms in record players and smaller radios, and in records to play on them. The main innovations were not only smaller, cheaper machines (alongside high-end 'high fidelity' for the middle classes), but also vinyl records developed by CE companies: the aforementioned RCA and the CE division of the broadcasting giant, CBS (Coleman, , pp. 51-70). Meanwhile, television joined radio as a major way in which music was disseminated and publicised not only in domestic spaces, but also across many different homes, to constitute a sense of nation (Scannell, ).

By the 1950s, giant CE-based multinational corporations had emerged in the wake of booming markets for washing machines, fridges, televisions and other items in the post-war economic expansion. Two of them, Philips (Netherlands) and Sony (Japan), are central to understanding musical consumption in the late twentieth century. Philips introduced the compact audio cassette in the 1960s, in a successful attempt to diversify music consumption beyond the record player and the radio; although it made the patents behind the compact cassette freely available, it used its position as industry leader to sell millions of cassette player-recorders (Shepherd et al., , pp. 506-507). Then in the 1980s, in a joint venture with Sony (which also developed the first miniature portable cassette player, the Walkman), it developed the compact disc out of earlier video-disc laser technologies, and this helped to spur a recording industry sales boom over the years to the end of the millennium (Winston, , pp. 132-137).

The power of the CE companies over musical consumption is further indicated by the fact that many of the most significant recording and publishing companies of the late twentieth century were subsidiaries of CE companies. PolyGram Records, a dominant force in music from the 1960s to the late 1990s, and the basis of today's largest global record company Universal, had its origins in the merger of Philips' record company interests with that of the German electronics corporation Siemens (Shepherd et al., , p. 634). Sony took over CBS Records in 1988. As can be surmised from the name, RCA Records, famous for Elvis Presley and David Bowie, was a subsidiary of the RCA discussed above. The very name of EMI Records (Electric and Musical Industries) speaks to the imbrication of music with CE, and it was owned by electronics company Thorn for nearly two decades. These subsidiary divisions operated with a certain degree of autonomy from their parent companies, but their primary task in business terms was to ensure a supply of music to be played on CE devices, thereby generating profit from 'synergies' with hardware production.

The compressed history in this section shows how the experience of consuming recorded music was subject to a series of radical changes in the twentieth century. Moreover, even within periods where particular technologies prevailed, such as the era of vinyl records, broadcasting and record shops (circa 1950-1990), there was a constant emphasis on replacing or upgrading outmoded equipment to achieve higher levels of sound quality ('fidelity'), convenience or just newness. The CDs episode of the late 1980s and 1990s, where vinyl records and audio cassettes were rapidly rendered more or less obsolete (though of course vinyl enjoyed a cult afterlife), was a particularly striking instance of this (Winston, , pp. 132-137). The various musical playback technologies developed by CE companies, and other related technologies such as broadcasting, transformed the nature of musical experience across the world - although, crucially, consumption remained principally domestic. Even if many consumers appreciated these changes, and believed they represented progress in terms of accessibility and so forth, it would be misleading to believe that they 'chose' them; new technologies were pushed onto the market by powerful corporations 'outside' the music industries (though often tied to them via ownership of record companies) and, in effect, imposed on consumers via marketing and the strategic withdrawal of 'outdated' goods. These dynamics were all to remain present in the twenty-first century, but in an intensified form.

The twenty-first century: IT takes over

In the twenty-first century, consumers remain subject to regular and radical changes in the prevalent ways in how music is experienced, but new technologies have untethered listening from the home. Today, instead of CE corporations, it is mainly IT companies and to some extent telecoms companies that shape musical experience. The power of these companies derives from, and in turn contributes to, an interlinked set of economic, social and cultural changes in modern capitalist societies. Seeking new markets, businesses have moved the key frontier of commodification and consumption beyond the homes and cars of the era analysed by Williams (though of course these continue to be key markets), via his concept of 'mobile privatisation', to what we might call networked mobile personalisation. By reducing the pooling of resources and sharing of products among families and communities, this encourages greater purchasing and stronger individual affiliation. It permits burgeoning networked interactions between individuals that can potentially take place anytime, anywhere, and be monitored. No doubt this shift answers to desires for personalisation, mobility and connection, deriving from a new sense of individualism and even atomisation in modern societies. It is deeply shaped by advertising, marketing and the promotional industries. And it is a source of disorientation, expense and huge social waste.

The rise of the IT sector has its origins in the 1950s and 1960s when the CE industries, and the capitalist economies of which they have formed such an important part, faced challenges such as a levelling off of productivity and profit in traditional manufacturing sectors, and competition from newly industrialising countries, and saw opportunities in capitalising on Cold War Research and Development (Garnham, , pp. 117-118). Western governments, businesses and their gurus came to see telecommunications and IT as areas where they could maintain their dominance in an era when rising 'peripheral' economies, many in Asia, were challenging the 'core'. Government subsidy and finance capital increasingly moved towards these sectors and, while the big money in IT and telecoms was, at least initially, to be made in business applications, there were also considerable opportunities in consumer markets, as costs dipped. Two key technologies that brought together personalisation, connectivity and mobility developed out of the activities of these industries: the Internet-connected personal computer and the mobile phone. These technologies have been central to the transformation of musical experience, in combination with ancillary technologies such as those enabling ripping, burning, compression, transfer and so on.

Music had a small but early role in the shift in consumer capitalism's frontiers from domestic consumption to networked mobile personalisation, and in turn musical experience has been profoundly affected by the shift. For example, consumer headphones, introduced by CE firms such as Koss in the 1950s; transistor radios and portable cassette player-recorders in the 1960s; and miniature personal players (such as the Walkman and Discman) which spread from the early 1980s not only drew upon an increasing tendency towards individualised, personal experience in modern capitalist societies, but they also intensified that personalisation.

But music's imbrication with networked mobile personalisation has only really taken off over the last 15 years, and it has been the IT and telecoms sectors, rather than CE companies, that have driven the change (and in the process, IT and telecoms companies have entered into CE markets). Building on Mulligan's () analysis, we divide our account into three periods or 'moments' here, each associated with a set of transformative technologies, though change was by no means confined to those particular sets:

1999-2003: the rise of Internet-linked file-sharing and later peer-to-peer technologies (symbolised by the global success of Napster around 2000-2001) based on the PC;

2003-2008: the integration of copy-protection systems into coherently combined playback and retail interfaces, based on the PC plus iPod/MP3 player (embodied in the dissemination of the Apple iTunes Store from 2003 onwards);

2008-present: the popularisation of streaming services, especially as mobile apps (symbolised by the launch of both Spotify and the Apple App Store in 2008, but only really taking shape from 2012 onwards), based on mobile phones, laptops and tablets.

It is the latest development, mobile telephony-driven music streaming, that looks set to be the most important development, on a par with the introduction of the phonograph, vinyl records and the CD, and producing new dynamics of personalisation and mobility. Musical consumption has been transformed again, but not primarily by CE, as in the twentieth century, but this time by the IT sector, often working closely with telecommunication companies (telcos).

The Napster moment, 1999-2003

Changes to the cultural industries triggered by digitalisation hit the recording industry hardest and first. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, record companies faced a host of challenges: growing entertainment options competing for consumer dollars (DVDs, digital games and mobile phones); downward pressure on CD retail pricing set in motion by 'big-box' retailers; and the end of the 'CD replacement cycle' that had bolstered sales in the 1990s (Marshall, , pp. 60-61). However, the introduction of the MP3, whose highly compressed file format rendered it easy to download, and the corresponding spread of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing threw into question music's always uneasy status as a thing, as a commodity and as property (see Sterne, , pp. 184-226). The MP3 format was a technology essentially introduced by the IT sector. File-sharing would be condemned as 'piracy', on the one hand, and hailed as a gift economy, on the other (Morris, , pp. 101-105; Sterne, , pp. 208-213). Some argued that music was undergoing a process of de-commodification (David, , p. 38; Gilbert, ), while others saw an uneven process of creating new digital music commodities (Morris, ). There was evidence of both processes at work, but music's economic status and accompanying modes of consumption would ultimately be determined by the character of the IT businesses controlling music's circulation.

One vitally important IT company was Napster, a free, copyright-infringing P2P site. Introduced in June 1999, Napster was already facing legal action triggered by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) by December of that year, yet its user base continued to mushroom until 2001 before its eventual forced closure that year (David, , p. 33). Though 'lionized by users, techies, and cyberlibertarians', Napster was, in fact, a dot-com company buoyed up by venture capitalists, as Morris (, p. 95) points out. The service and software were proprietary: the circulation of digital files was wrapped up with the circulation of capital. A sea-change was underway, with other P2P sites (e.g., Gnutella and Kazaa) rising in Napster's wake, illustrating how difficult it would be to clamp down on unauthorised downloading through punitive legal measures alone. The situation was rendered more complex by the fact that file-sharing was good for business from the perspective of telcos: it drove consumer demand for broadband (Mulligan, , p. 72).

The Napster moment constituted the culmination of a series of innovations, with technologies originating from outside the music industries rewriting the rulebook by which record companies would need to operate, as they had throughout the twentieth century. As Mulligan (, p. 14) observes,

CE manufacturers of music players, Internet service providers (from the telecoms sector) and online digital media stores (IT industries) were the initial beneficiaries of this still highly unstable new music system. Napster primed users and audiences for the shift to consuming music as a digital file and, relatedly, mobile music consumption via the later-introduced iPod (Morris, , p. 129). The main victims of the shift to digital music were 'bricks and mortar' high street retailers, especially music specialists. Consumers were pushed online to experience recorded music.

The iTunes Store moment, 2003-2008

Although sales of physical sound recordings began to drop during the early 2000s, the CD nevertheless remained the primary source of recording-industry revenue. It was the digital makeover of (legal) music retail that hastened the decline of the CD format, which was largely displaced by the digital track. Apple was at the forefront of these changes. The iTunes Music Store proved tremendously successful at promoting Apple's iPod portable media player, and together, these technologies redefined music circulation and consumption. Because iTunes was used to transfer music files onto iPods, purchasers of these devices 'simultaneously became users of new software that organized, sorted, and presented their music collections' (Morris, , p. 146) - a situation that Apple leveraged into a position as the overwhelming market leader in a digital music retail oligopoly. By 'unbundling' the album, Apple undermined the core of the recording industry's business model: no longer would consumers need to purchase an entire album if they only wanted one song, a huge blow to record company revenues. Nevertheless, this system still centred on music ownership, functioning as 'an online perpetuation of a century-old retail model' (Kjus, , p. 129). As the first attractively and conveniently presented legitimate way of selling digital downloads in an integrated system, iTunes ultimately had to be embraced by the music industry majors (Mulligan, , p. 129). Apple lent order to the chaos, but on its own terms, and in its own interests. Against the wishes of record companies, Apple dictated the price assigned to music (initially $0.99 US for a track) - and even eventually removed Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology from iTunes (a process begun in 2007) (Mulligan, , pp. 75, 130-131). Apple was an agent of both stabilisation and destabilisation, then, at once revitalising and redefining the contours of the recording industry. From its IT base, Apple had entered into the CE and music markets, and transformed both.

The iTunes Store was launched in 2003, before 'the rise of a mature media ecosystem of smartphone platforms and the popularity of wi-fi and 3G data services that allowed for more ubiquitous networks. Without this ecosystem, subscription services simply were not mobile' (Anderson, , p. 75). Apple's iPhone and App Store platform for mobile apps, released in 2007 and 2008, were key shapers of a new, highly connected communication ecosystem. Apple's aim was to release music from the PC (and portable digital music players) and migrate it to the key device affording networked mobile personalisation: the cloud-connected cell phone. Subsequent business decisions have demonstrated how music was always just one small piece of a much larger pie. Apple's efforts to grow its digital media and app businesses seemed contradictory, when it involved inviting direct competitors such as Spotify into its App Store: 'Before the launch of the App Store the walls around Apple's ecosystem were impenetrable. The App Store created the gap that third parties eagerly leapt through' (Mulligan, , p. 139). Given the corresponding sacrifice to Apple's control of digital music sales via iTunes, controlling the app ecosystem was ostensibly more strategically advantageous than maintaining a monopoly over music alone.

The mobile telephony and streaming moment, 2008-

Just as consumers adjusted to iTunes and iPods as a dominant way to organise their experience of recorded music, the IT sector introduced another set of musical technologies. These were tied to cloud-based computing, with the rise of on-demand music streaming services such as Spotify 'heralding a significant reconfiguration of recorded music consumption, from being based on ownership of music to being based on access, renting rather than buying records' (Marshall, , p. 179). In terms of pre-digital predecessors, streaming bears more of a similarity to commercial radio (with 'free', advertising-funded streaming services) and cable television (with fee-based premium subscription services) than music retail in the 'record shop' model. This system is still premised on the generation of revenues from the ownership of rights. However, the new commercial model involves multiple transactions and new sources of revenue: rights-owning companies (mainly large corporations) are remunerated by streaming services via music licences and (often rich) advances; and music services capture consumer data, sell advertising opportunities and collect subscription fees from users. While streaming services have positioned themselves as agents of music discovery, be it via algorithm or via 'curation' systems that involve greater human input (Kjus, ; Morris & Powers, ), discovery within this system is not designed as a path to direct music purchases. What users pay for, with money or advertising exposure, is the music service. Streaming has elided the boundary between music promotion and music consumption, producing 'a new relation between exposure and sale, united within one and the same service' (Kjus, , p. 129).

The streaming ecosystem has been fuelled by a complex interplay between various entities: smaller IT start-up music services, of which Swedish company Spotify is the most important and emblematic; Big Tech powerhouses Apple, Google and Amazon; and the telcos that provide the platforms necessary for mobile consumption of music. Streaming services span from companies that seek to work closely with record companies on rights issues - Spotify, for instance, envisaged itself as a solution to 'piracy' (Kjus, , p. 130) - to companies that have tested the boundaries of copyright infringement, as in the case of Google's YouTube. YouTube is the most important force in music streaming, benefiting from the tremendous scale of its vast range of content. Spotify continues to benefit from its 'first mover advantage', and numerous smaller companies vie for users in a saturated market. Tidal (formerly Norwegian music service WiMP), for instance, offers high-fidelity streaming, 'exclusive' artist content, and claims to pay a fairer share of revenues to artists. However, the changing bases of revenue generation have provided Apple, Google and Amazon - transnational IT corporations whose businesses traverse a range of sectors - with considerable strategic advantages. Music functions as a means to an end for these corporations, helping to sell devices, apps and online advertising, and encouraging e-commerce more generally: 'all three have become established as clear control points' (Mulligan, , p. 102).

The trajectory from 1999 to 2016 charted above has involved an increasing acceptance on the part of IT companies that they will work with the music industries to offer services based on copyright observance, rather than copyright 'infringement'. Yet the recording industry nonetheless remains dependent on and must react to the IT industry. Apple's 2014 acquisition of the Beats companies, combining a consumer manufacturer of headphones and speakers, and an IT-based streaming service, captures the way in which the new music industries involve both CE and IT, but with IT in the driving seat. The Beats streaming service was turned into Apple Music in 2015, confirming that Apple had been playing the long game: 'Apple was happy for other companies to burn through their investors' cash while they established a market that, if it later looked inviting enough, Apple could jump into' (Mulligan, , p. 167).

An Apple-led corporate oligopoly has emerged from a period of intense disruption and innovation, and now exerts considerable control over the production, circulation and consumption of music. Apple, Google and Amazon are beginning to act as the equivalents to the increasingly ignored or forgotten roles of Philips, RCA, Sony and the like in the twentieth century. However, there is a significant difference. As we have seen, CE companies actually owned and operated recording and publishing companies. As yet, the Big Tech IT companies are not involved in the production of music. They are already putting considerable marketing money into the launch of products by superstars, but currently seem unwilling to take on the risks involved with the 'artist development' undertaken by record companies. Their intervention has been confined to the takeover of the contemporary equivalent of retail, which in the era of records, cassettes and CDs took the form of 'record shops' and music sections of larger retailers, such as supermarkets. These outlets have been largely destroyed by the tech companies.

Even more than in the twentieth century, then, recent developments in the distribution and consumption of music have demonstrated the power of large corporations to relentlessly shift the terms on which people experience recorded music. Led by the newly dominant IT sector, alongside the telecommunications industries, there has been a move towards personalisation, mobility and connectivity, welcomed by many consumers and hailed by many business commentators. However, the accelerating pace of technological change has also driven huge amounts of obsolescence, waste and expenditure of time by consumers as they are essentially forced to adjust if they want to be part of the new musical ecosystem. What is more, because of its narrow bandwidth and ability to act as an accompaniment to everyday life, music has been used as a kind of testing ground for networked mobile personalisation technologies, such as social media, just as the phonograph and radio helped lay the ground for domestic technologies in the twentieth century.

Implications for understanding music and culture's role in modern societies and economies

We have shown in this article how, since the introduction of recorded music, powerful companies - mainly based outside the actual music industries - have constantly shifted the predominant ways in which recorded music is experienced, and that digitalisation has brought about an acceleration and intensification of that tendency. We have argued that a necessary (though not sufficient) way of understanding change and continuity in the music industries is to recognise that there has been a move from a situation in which prevailing forms of consumption have been largely determined by interactions between companies in two sectors - the music industries and CE - to a more complex set of relations between companies in four sectors: music, IT, CE and telecoms, but with IT as now dominant. The dominance of IT reflects its ability as a sector to respond to, and shape, desires for mobility, convenience, speed, etc. As some critics (Lewis, ; Schor, ) have pointed out, there are costs to under-constrained and under-regulated efforts to pursue profit by answering to those preferences, at the expense of other human desires and needs (such as for safety, stability and sustainability). We would suggest that the increased instability over the last twenty years in how music is consumed may derive from the strong value placed on constant innovation and change in the IT sector. This is in turn related to an emphasis in government policy paradigms influenced by Schumpeterian frameworks that celebrate entrepreneurial innovation. The dominance of the IT sector, if it continues to lead to constant turnovers in prevailing forms of consumption, will only contribute further to endless cycles of change, obsolescence and replacement. The development of a green media and cultural studies critique of such tendencies is long overdue (see Maxwell & Miller, , for some starting points).

One striking feature of this history is that the recording industry and music publishing companies have consistently been relatively powerless to determine the conditions under which music was consumed (though they had great influence over how music was produced, especially how music sounded). In many cases, they were independent companies with no influence on broader patterns of consumption. Even the larger companies were limited. Some were part of broader entertainment corporations, with relatively little influence on consumption technologies. Record companies that were part of larger CE companies, meanwhile, were deeply subordinate to their parent companies, as the profits and power available from music were relatively small, compared with those afforded by CE. In the twenty-first century, record companies have been even more powerless in the face of IT and telecoms dominance (though they have arguably recovered some ground in the new musical ecosystem centred on streaming).

What are the implications of the above arguments for understanding the relations between culture (specifically in this case music) and capitalism? Of course, the economic weakness of record companies compared with other sectors does not mean that music itself is culturally marginal. On the contrary, there are reasons to think that the commodification of music in the twentieth century, combined with sociocultural changes of the kind we have been discussing in this article (individualisation, new forms of mobility, etc.), led to a new cultural centrality for music. But the cost may have been to render music in some respects instrumental. By this pun, we mean that music became a particularly potent way to attract consumers to new technologies. These dynamics do not make music entirely subservient to capital, but they tie it to disturbing aspects of modernity such as forced obsolescence and waste, in ways that have not been sufficiently recognised in critical research on culture, media and music. In ecological terms, the IT sector is based, even more than other sectors such as CE, on the unceasing imperative to devote vast resources to the development of new devices, and the equally unceasing need to throw away old ones (see Good, ; Maxwell, Raundalen & Vestberg, ). Such an imperative in general terms is clearly having hugely damaging effects on the planet.

There are other reasons too to be concerned about the IT industries' influence on culture. Systems of monetisation based on surveillance of user data have worrying consequences in terms of power, surveillance and privacy (see Turow, ). There is evidence that the rise of networked, personalised mobile communication allows a more thoroughgoing commercialisation of culture (McGuigan & Manzerolle, ).

Proponents of capitalism as it currently exists might say that the constant turnover of ways in which musical consumption is organised shows how markets respond to human desires, and would point to the many pleasures experienced by users (experiences captured by some recent sociologists, e.g., in terms of the iPod - see Prior, ). Some users no doubt welcome regular change, and enjoy the process of readjusting to new ways of experiencing music. But, again, critics of capitalism - especially from the green left - might point to the destabilising aspects of such readjustment. 'Resisters' and non-users with other desires and values tend to be ignored and/or left to other businesses catering to declining markets.

What is more, these changes in how music is consumed may be having negative effects on the role that music plays in people's lives (see essays by Marshall and Toynbee in Marshall & Laing, ). Many music fans report a sense of loss regarding music's power. Some would say this is merely nostalgia, but the ubiquity of music, its constant presence as background, heard in a rather distracted way, seems to be connected to a loss of its cultural and emotional force. It is hard to say how much this derives from sociocultural and political changes as they affect what musicians produce, and how much from the new formation of musical experience itself, including which music comes to be circulated widely. It may well be both.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Lee Marshall for his comments and to Carly O'Neill for research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

1 We do not seek here to examine other important issues regarding the relationship between capitalism and culture, such as how changes in capitalism affect the nature of cultural and musical artefacts or texts, or affect relations between creative and commercial goals among musicians and intermediaries (Hesmondhalgh, ; Taylor, ). Such questions are worthwhile, but our focus is different.

2 Our concept of networked mobile personalisation differs significantly from Wellman's concept of 'networked individualism' (most developed in Rainie and Wellman, ), borrowed among others by Manuel Castells (e.g., Castells, ). Rainie and Wellman give a largely affirmative account of how contemporary networking allows a rich set of sparse but diverse relations, whereas our concept is intended to invoke, and build upon, Williams' more historical and ambivalent account of the relationship of media technologies to problematic features of capitalist modernity.

3 There are various full-length (Coleman, ; Katz, ; Taylor, ) or shorter (Théberge, ) accounts of musical technologies, many of them valuable, but these do not attempt to explain frequent shifts in predominant consumer technologies, or relate these shifts to capitalism-culture relations, as we do here. Our concern in this article is not with the question of how particular music-related technologies affect musical production and consumption, addressed by, for example, Katz ().

4 Williams's term 'mobile privatisation' is arguably much more apt for the portable music player and the mobile phone/cellphone than for television.

5 IT and telecoms are sometimes fruitfully understood as a single sector with different components, the ICTs sector (Fransman, ); but for our explanatory purposes here, they need treating as separate but conjoined entities.

6 Some telcos have experimented with the development of music services, licensing music from major labels (e.g., Telenor Music Station and Vodafone's UK MusicStation), but have generally left this to the IT industries and music industries to work out (Mulligan, , pp. 72-73).

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What the digitalisation of music tells us about capitalism, culture and the power of the information technology sector

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ABSTRACT This article examines a striking but under-analysed feature of culture under capitalism, using the example of music: that the main ways in which people gain access to cultural experiences are subject to frequent, radical and disorienting shifts.

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Music of Inequality

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Culture, especially popular culture, always has some relation to the conditions that surround it, and these days, there is no shortage of music that reflects our economic reality.

But that reflection isn't always quite what you'd expect. During the Great Depression, which saw widespread homelessness and US unemployment reaching 25 percent, popular films showed the very rich drinking cocktails in formal dress; cheery songs like "Pennies From Heaven" charted. And in the post-2008 decade of recession, instability, and income inequality, blockbuster acts spent a lot of time telling us the incredible time they were having.

The real story of the past decade has been harder to hear. A decade ago, as some Americans remember all too well, the US economy began to crumble, and took the rest of the world's markets along with it. First housing prices started to slide, revealing a nation caught in a deflating real estate bubble. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers came next.

The cascade of damage was worldwide, but it took on an especially fierce pitch in the world's largest economy: Beginning in late 2008, the US was losing more than half a million jobs a month. By 2009, the Great Recession's first full year, national unemployment reached 15 million people, or 10 percent - the first double-digit rate since the early 1980s. Trillions of dollars of wealth disappeared from the economy, and 4 million Americans lost their homes in just two years.

Meanwhile, the nation'sbiggest songs in the year after the crash were numbers by Flo Rida, Chris Brown, and Coldplay that had little to do with economic strain. It takes any cultural form - movies, books, visual art, whatever - months, sometimes years, to respond to social, political, or economic change. But pop music has less lag time than most other genres.

(In previous centuries, folk songs about hangings or train crashes could appear almost instantly. And it wasn't for nothing that Public Enemy's Chuck D once called hip-hop black America's CNN.)

By the end of 2009, though,the biggest-selling singles were songs like Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind," Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance," and various party-hearty numbers by the Black Eyed Peas. And so it went, into the teeth of the recession.

Popular music, of course, becomes popular partly because it takes people away from their lives. Be it the blandness of affluence or the pain of personal difficulty, there has always been an element of aspiration and fantasy to popular culture.

But from Woody Guthrie singing about the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression's devastations in the 1930s to rock and soul bands of the '60s and '70s writing about war and civil rights toBritish punks shouting about unemployment and the working class to rappers spitting about injustice and racism, popular music has always also delivered social critique - much of the time including economic issues.

What we see in the decade following the 2008 stock market crash, though, is a relatively tame popular music world in which best-selling artists and left-of-the-dial "alternative" musicians share an apparent lack of interest in the nation's economic state.

"Most people in the mainstream music world - whether it's pop, indie, or country - don't want to offend any of their fans," says Margo Price, a country singer-songwriter who has been outspoken about economic structures. "Their big labels don't want them to, either."

After the pain of the '08 crash, the nation experienced an economic recovery that shifted a massive amount of income from the poor and middle class to the very rich. The big banks got bigger; huge bonuses returned. Just two years after the crash, the nation's Gini coefficient, the standard measure of wealth distribution, was at 46.9, making the US among the most unequal of modern democracies.

We can call the past 10 years the decade of inequality. So what, then, does the music of inequality sound like?

The tropes of mainstream pop music are far removed from audiences' economic realities

Part of the paradox here is simply that monetary wealth gives musicians - at least, the tiny minority experiencing material bounty - something to sing about.

Musicians are not unique here: In the years since the Reagan administration, a reveling in what used to be called heartless materialism has become de rigueur. (The shift in personal style from an old-school rich man like Warren Buffett, who made his early fortune in the 1950s, to Donald Trump, a product of the gilded '80s, is hard to miss.)

Artists singing about how much wealth they had accrued fit cleanly into a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous culture. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Marvin Gaye were filthy rich, but it's hard to imagine them crooning about their money and mansions. Nor can we imagine Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, or Liz Phair posing in a bath of diamonds, as Taylor Swift does in the 2017 video for "Look What You Made Me Do."

Many of the songs about luxurious possessions and lavish lifestyles - the sonic equivalent of Keeping Up With the Kardashians - are the descendants of "Mo Money Mo Problems," the 1997 Notorious B.I.G. song. But in many cases, there seem to be no serious problems besides having too many women or possessions to choose from.

"When inequality is high, it's driven by the superrich, because [the poor] can't go lower than zero," says Keith Payne, a University of North Carolina psychology professor and author of The Broken Ladder, a recent book on wealth disparity. "People feel poorer but aspire to higher standards. This leads to a risk-taking kind of life: People are more likely to gamble, play the odds, use drugs or drink, commit crimes. It also orients people to the very wealthy as opposed to the poor."

These are the classic tropes of hip-hop, a musical style that, Payne points out, surged in ubiquity in the same years as the rise in inequality. A mixtape of conspicuous consumption and runaway consumerism could be assembled from songs like Post Malone and Ty Dolla Sign's "Psycho" ("got diamonds by the boatload!"), Lil Uzi Vert's "Money Longer" ("money got longer, speaker got louder, car got faster"), and Lil Pump's "Gucci Gang" ("Spend 10 racks on a new chain / My bitch love do cocaine.")

The style became so ubiquitous that the satirical trio the Lonely Island parodied the genre of gold-plated gloat with "I'm on a Boat," a 2009 rap song featuring T-Pain that makes "yacht rock" numbers like Christopher Cross's 1980 hit "Sailing" look modest and egalitarian.

More cutting is Lorde's 2013 song "Royals," which seems to be aware of how mismatched the music is to the times: "But every song's like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin' in the bathroom / Bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin' the hotel room / We don't care, we're driving Cadillacs in our dreams ..."

Part of what looking across the genres shows you is that the big-selling, celebrity-driven mainstream of just about every style of music offers very little social or economic critique. If that's what you're looking for, look to the edges.

Music engaging with inequality tends to be on the fringes of popular genres

Mainstream country music, a genre rooted in the rural red-state South, is no stranger to poverty or songs about risk-taking. But it very rarely deals with inequality, says Payne, a native of Kentucky. "The only economic theme is, 'We grew up poor, but we didn't know it at the time, and now we've got everything we need.' That's the theme of countless country songs," he says.

The country songwriters interested in exploring economics more assertively don't find a receptive industry, whether radio, country labels, or other gatekeepers. "They are so scared of coming out on an issue that offends Trump America," says R.J. Smith, a music journalist and author of a recent biography of photographer Robert Frank. What you get, instead, is "good short story-ish songwriting about how people are living, but with little sense of why poverty happened."

To the extent that there's been a consistent protest, it comes, curiously, from the fringes of country. Despite its recent political and cultural conservatism, country has been the music of the poor and working class since the days of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. And the alt-country movement, which has co-opted the folk tradition, continued the grit and social criticism of the old days after the big-hatted mainstream moved into formula and political reaction.

This has led to what we could call empathy songs and plutocrat songs: The empathy song looks at the plight of someone crushed under the economic wheel, sometimes speaking in his or her voice; the plutocrat song is typically more overtly political, targeting the damage done by the very rich.

Honorary Americana artist Billy Bragg (who is British but has made several albums of Woody Guthrie's music with alt-country pioneers Wilco) began performing Guthrie's "I Ain't Got No Home" after the '08 crash. (The song is explicitly class-based, describing a "rich man [who] took my home and drove me from my door.")

And Margo Price's songs are among the strongest economic critiques post-Great Recession: Numbers like " Pay Gap," " About to Find Out," and " All American Made " ("And I wonder if the president gets much sleep at night / And if the folks on welfare are making it all right") sometimes combine feminism with scenes from the class struggle.

Veteran singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III worked in a vaguely country-folk tradition with his 2010 album, 10 Songs For the New Depression. The songs alternated from despairing to lighthearted (the number "House" is both), and name-check Alan Greenspan and John Maynard Keynes. (One cheeky number is called "The Krugman Blues.") Peter Himmelman's " Rich Men Rule the World " is a brutal song in the same vein.

Two classics from the edges of country actually predate the Great Recession, perhaps because the rural South never quite caught the postwar boom like the rest of the nation did. James McMurtry's " We Can't Make It Here," from 2005,tells of a struggling, wounded Vietnam veteran, empty storefronts, a failing bar, and the pinch of a stagnant minimum wage. (The novelistic vision is appropriate for the son of Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry.) And while their most recent album is more about race and politics in general, Drive-By Truckers' 2005 album, The Dirty South, is a forceful look at American poverty and inequality, highlighted by the song "Puttin' People on the Moon."

"In our hometown," Drive-By Truckers leader Patterson Hood says of Florence, Alabama, "the economy collapsed in the early '80s: During the so-called Reagan boom years, we were like Flint, Michigan. They closed the Ford plant, and there was a domino effect."

Along with the songs of the late Merle Haggard, Bruce Springsteen's work serves as a template for bands like the Truckers. The Boss has written some of the best work about the way economics shapes and limits lives - songs like " My Hometown" and the Dust Bowl-inspired Ghost of Tom Joad LP. He has not quite matched these since; his energies have largely been elsewhere. But the 2012 Wrecking Ball LP, with songs like "We Take Care of Our Own" and the Wall Street-dissing "Death to My Hometown," is a solid stab at addressing what much of the country has been through.

And while the late, great soul musician Charles Bradley largely sang about racism and his personal travails, his "Why Is It So Hard," from 2011, may be the single most emotionally powerful recent song about poverty and income inequality.

Hip-hop, too, gets more political and anti-capitalist around the edges. The Coup, the Oakland hip-hop group led by Boots Riley, released a 2012 album called Sorry to Bother You, which would eventually lend its name to the new breakout movie. The album takes a far-left stance on issues of economics and inequality, heavily informed by Riley's communist beliefs, with songs like"Strange Arithmetic" ("Economics is the symphony of hunger and theft / Mortar shells often echo out the cashing of checks / In geography class, it's borders, mountains, and rivers / But they will never show the line between the takers and givers") and "WAVIP" ("I am with the people on the bottom, fella / We gonna riot, loot, rob till we rich as Rockefeller").

Meanwhile, much of mainstream hip-hop went from fierce anti-racist politics, decades ago, to celebrations of hedonism. Music historian Robert Fink of UCLA points out that in the years after the stock market crash, the nation experienced its first black president, who was widely popular, especially with black people. When Obama was replaced with a man with a reputation for antagonizing black people, alongside a rash of police killings of young African-American men, politically minded hip-hop and R&B artists increasinglyfocused their attention on Black Lives Matter and related movements, rather than economics.

"I can't think of a single hip-hop song about people getting subprime mortgages or that kind of thing," Fink says.

Inequality is not a natural driver for slick, commercial pop songwriting

"There is very little in the mainstream music business about economic hardship," says music historian Ted Gioia. "Are Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift trying to shake things up?" Some artists sing about race and gender, he says, but economics has largely been overlooked in the slick and commercial pop mainstream.

Gioia characterizes the lip service the music industry pays to social issues as a decades-old problem: MTV and the rest of the business largely slept through the AIDS crisis in the 1980s; this time, Gioia says, economic inequality has become the forgotten issue.

But some artists have made an end run around these forces.

One of the most realized looks at the Great Recession and its discontents may not be a political piece of hip-hop or an angry piece of outlaw country, but rathera musical. was an off-Broadway "folk opera" in 2016, relocating the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in a post-apocalyptic Great Depression with a wink toward the present. It's based on an album by folk singer Anais Mitchell that includes contributions from Ani DiFranco, the Haden Triplets, and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon.

Finally, there was a four-disc compilation in 2012 called Occupy This Album: 99 Songs for the 99 Percent. The styles and quality range quite widely, from Michael Moore singing Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" to songs by Yoko Ono, Toots and the Maytals, and Nancy Griffith. (The video for "United Tribes," a song by Thievery Corporation with rapper Mr. Lif, captures the energy of the movement it emerged from.) Still, it's hard to miss that many of the songs are old, or only obliquely related to Occupy itself.

One reason songs about the recession and inequality are hard to find may be psychological. The Brooklyn musician Pauline Pisano lost her job as a web designer when the recession hit, and has struggled financially since. But it wasn't until an NYU course and an exposure to the books of David Graeber that she focused on economic matters and the corrosive effects of debt. ("I feel like the people who cheated won," she says now. "And for the people who played by the rules, the rules changed.") She's since led a musical tour of the South talking to people across the political spectrum about the subject, and her work has been politically energized.

"I was hit by the recession very heavily - why didn't I put that in my art?" Pisano asks. "Maybe I thought, 'This is just the way things are.'"

As crucial an issue and as destructive a force as inequality is, it's not a natural driver for songwriting. "Inequality is the ultimate abstraction," says Keith Payne. "Art is not typically about abstractions - it tends to be about concrete images. Inequality is neither wealth nor poverty, but the distribution of resources. And who wants to sing about that?"

What does it mean when popular music does not really express most Americans' lived experience?

One glaring irony here is that the past decade has also seen the vast majority of musicians struggling even more than they did previously: The collapse of the sale of recordings has made most of them all too aware of income inequality, especially when they compare themselves to one-percenters of the past (the Eagles) or present (Lady Gaga).

Alan Krueger, President Barack Obama's chief economist, gave an important speech about the way the winner-take-all economy devastated many rock musicians in 2012, and there are few signs that the musical middle class has been restored.

The larger issue here - the lack of genuinely popular songs about the biggest economic event since 1929 - is pop culture's claims of being a democratic art. What if popular music does not really express and describe what the mass of Americans is experiencing? And in an era when the phrase "check your privilege" has become commonplace, does it matter if the biggest hits are being made, in many cases, by fantastically privileged people?

Taylor Swift, for instance, comes from a long line of bank presidents; her father relocated to Merrill Lynch's Nashville office and later bought a share of a record label to help her career. (See also "Uptown Funk" producer Mark Ronson, from one of Britain's wealthiest families.)

"If it becomes clear that our popular culture is a rich kids' project, it loses its legitimacy," UCLA's Fink says. "Even more than in Britain, we have Horatio Alger pretensions here." Once we get a sense that our popular culture is the preserve of the very rich, it's not quite "popular" in the democratic way we typically use the term.

But it also may be that the unpopularity of a president who himself comes from the plutocrat class will finally focus musicians and their handlers on inequality and other pressing issues. "I think that we are living in a very dangerous time," says Price. "People as a whole are distracted by social media, celebrities, unattainable wealth."

But things can change, and Price believes they might: "We're in a turning point right now, and musicians and visual artists have a chance to move mountains with their words. If they would only use them."
This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

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How music has responded to a decade of economic inequality

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Culture, especially popular culture, always has some relation to the conditions that surround it, and these days, there is no shortage of music that reflects our economic reality. But that reflection isn't always quite what you'd expect.

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JOB ALIKE MARC PRENSKY 05: 'Digital Natives' Understand, Comprehend World Through Technology

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Impacts of tech on Creative Industries

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Mike Pinder: Innovation Expert, Author & International Keynote Speaker

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ABSTRACT

Digital technologies are have significant effects on creative organisations especially as the relationship between end-user and producer is in a state of change. This paper maps out significant key issues and impacts on the creative industries, followed by primary research to test out the major themes and effects from a spectrum of industry sources and viewpoints. Literature revealed that dramatic changes in strategic management may be required as a result of emerging digital technologies. Primary research was undertaken in the form of twelve qualitative interviews (with design management consultants, graphic designers, art directors, technology strategists, product development managers, patent and IP lawyers), the results of which generally contrasted with the literature, revealing conflicting opinion around the significance and overall impacts of digital technologies. Findings suggest actors in the creative industries are aware of basic impacts, are confident of trained abilities to provide better creative output, but are equally fearful of present and future paradigm shifts already taking place.

1. INTRODUCTION

The global explosion of digital technologies has brought with it implications on innovation, creativity, and business models for the creative industries. Creative businesses and organisations will need to explore ways in which to take advantage of innovation from new areas within an open-network with constantly changing and evolving digital technology and business environments. This may have implications on existing hierarchy-based business models as technologically informed groups of people explore new ways to create value. There is a new generation of distributed, interconnected and mass-communicating end-users who impact upon traditional value creation processes and can provide new resources within the industries.

The aim of this paper is to understanding the effects of the global expansion of digital technologies and the implications on innovation, creativity and business models within the creative industries; and to analyse the impacts of the democratisation of digital technologies and tools as value-creation enablers for the creative industries.

2. LITERATURE

Digital tools are being democratised and becoming widely available to everyone for free. The 20th century represented a period of mass-consumption and there is now the possibility that the 21st century will represent mass-innovation via digital tools. There is a shift from a Cathedral with priest, to a marketplace, with everyone participating and traditional creative organisational hierarchies being dissolved.

One of the main areas identified in this field by Sapsed et al, 2008 is, „understanding how innovation changes business models and markets,‟ whilst looking at the effects of new technologies and new business models on sectors of the creative industries. Sapsed et al, 2008, argue that digital technology poses new opportunities for innovation for organisations, but also that they challenge existing business models as users develop innovation for themselves.

2.1 Literature summary

Conducting the literature review identified some of the most significant issues, changes and challenges facing creative organisations as well as revealing a number of underlying, linking themes. Fundamental impacts of digital technologies include: facilitating mass-collaboration; open creativity and innovation, the transition from push to pull marketing; consumers performing professional creative tasks and; new design resources and processes being explored and created. These themes form the focus of the primary research in order to further investigate, analyse and synthesise them against the literature from the perspectives of those within the creative industry. Some potential industry responses to such impacts could include: abilities to adapt current strategies and business models; increasing the open- organisational mindset, resistance and reluctance to new changes, unawareness of potential future effects and future government level engagement in research.

The underlying themes isolated indicated potential for immanent and rapid traditional paradigm inversions, brought about by the fundamental user-empowering characteristics of digital technologies that can flip traditional thinking and practice around on its head. This phenomenon underpins most situations analysed where cases of significant change are brought about by sudden shifts from one situation to the opposite; and occurring in relatively short periods of time.

2.2 Proposed model

A conceptual model to explain the phenomena is proposed in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Model highlighting the underlying impacts of digital technologies on the creative industries and the changing relationship between producers/designers and users/consumers.

3. PRIMARY RESEARCH

3.1.1 Methodology

Empirical research was based in grounded theory as data collection commenced without any previously established theoretical framework (due to the complex and overlapping nature of the issues. The research sought the opinions of expert participants; through their experience and observations. An interpretivist stance was used as it helps to uncover deep, hidden attitudes and beliefs around the key themes.

3.1.2 Data collection and analysis

Interviews targeted professionals from different disciplines within the creative industries and general themes for interviewing were used to ensure that the same areas are explored throughout (to allow for triangulation).

4. CONCLUSION

The literature narrowed-down to some of the most influential and impacting key issues affecting the creative industries. This demonstrated that there is a need for open-organisational thinking and an awareness of the dramatic opposing shifts to traditional business thinking, willingness to experiment with business models at all industry levels, embracing of mass-innovation, creativity and resources as well as calls for further research in the area.

The review took in a broad range of actors‟ viewpoints at varying levels of organisation within the creative industries and provided a relatively different picture to the literature. Creative organisations generally felt that digital technologies were extending, not shifting traditional ways of creating value; although there was clear acknowledgement of a general shift to user-generated content and thinking. The idea of design training, skills and education provided the main defence against the „mass audience taking the stage,‟ claiming that the audience simply lacks the knowledge to be a serious threat and that it merely provides and extension to trained designers‟ tools and was subsequently not taken too seriously as capable of replacing current job roles, functions and creativity.

This seemingly confident outlook rather out-shadowed underlying fears that were clearly evident. There were deeply-held views, demonstrating resistance to embracing, adopting, experimenting and taking advantage of digital technology as it was seen to be a perfect way in which to lose control of the audience, who would then start dictating, (via untrained voices) back up through established and traditional creative design processes. Openness was held with instinctive fear as it simply goes against traditional business thinking, but was something that creative organisations could see as the inevitable future; that they would reluctantly be drawn into at some point soon. The initial steps and competitive- lead advantage are happily surrendered to the to the largest organisations to experiment and test-out the best ways in which to exploit digital technologies (as well as absorb the initial financial investments and risk) for the future benefit of remaining organisations further down the line.

This interpretation looked at a number of existing implications of digital technologies and extended them to a largely unexplored and specific context within the creative industries. Opposing viewpoints have been highlighted between the literature and the primary research and looked at possible causes for these disparities. The literature review took in a wider-span than primary research which is based upon individual industry perspectives of occurring phenomena. Possible causes of these opposing viewpoints could indicate that the creative industries are not yet experiencing the observed effects of digital technologies or are not fully aware of the extent of these implications. It may also be the case that the literature is over-emphasising the significance of the perceived current and future impacts; but due to the variety and number of well-informed sources indicating the contrary, it seems logical to draw a conclusion that the creative industries are perhaps in a state conscious dismissal of impacts, by discrediting the significance or by simply burying heads on awareness and engagement in these current and future issues. Possible reasons accounting for dissonance between the literature and primary research could include mean the industries are relatively knowledge-unaware and future foresight is lacking due to the "newness‟ of the issues.

The industries are aware, but do not see the impacts as important yet and are waiting for lead organisations to test things out first.

Impacts have not yet been felt or experienced at more general industry levels, suggesting an ideal situation in which to start experimenting before changes are wider-influencing.

4.1 Further research implications

If creative organisations are in a state of unawareness or appreciation of potential future challenges, then how do the industries become more aware, whilst combining new technologies with new business models? And how do we proliferate this knowledge to dispel fears?

5. REFERENCES

[1] Andrews, A., & Bevelo, M. (2004). Understanding Digital Futures. Design Management Review , 50-57.
[2] Birkinshaw, J., Bessant, J., & Delbridge, R. (2007). Finding, Forming, and Performing: Creating Networks for Discontinuous Innovation. California Management Review , 49 (3), 67-84.
[3] Chesbrough, H. (2006). Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Academy of Management , 87-88.
[4] Sapsed, D. J., Mateos-Garcia, J., Adams, D. R., & Neely, A. (2008). ESRC Business Engagement Project: A scoping study of contemporary future challenges in the UK creative industries. AIM Research.
[5] Reform, B. D. (2008). Creative Britain - New Talents for the New Economy. London: Crown Copyright.

Mike Pinder
EUROMED Management Toulon
Campus de la Grande Tourrache
Toulon, France
Digital Futures'10, October 11 - 12, 2010, Nottingham, UK.
(Adapted from Author's Masters Thesis)

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Impacts of Digital Technologies on the Creative Industries - Mike Pinder: Innovation Expert, Author & International Keynote Speaker

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ABSTRACT Digital technologies are have significant effects on creative organisations especially as the relationship between end-user and producer is in a Mike Pinder: Innovation Expert, Author & International Keynote Speaker Mike Pinder is Innovation Expert Consultant who guides Fortune 500 teams across strategy, innovation, design & business

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Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants - Towards a Model of Digit