Social Networks and Music Worlds

Nick Crossley, Siobhan McAndrew, Paul Widdop, Nick Crossley, Siobhan McAndrew, Paul Widdop, Nick Crossley, Siobhan McAndrew, Paul Widdop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317964759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Social networks are critical for the creation and consumption of music. This edited collection, Social Networks and Music Worlds, introduces students and scholars of music in society to the core concepts and tools of social network analysis. The collection showcases the use of these tools by sociologists, historians and musicologists, examining a variety of distinct 'music worlds', including post-punk, jazz, rap, folk, classical music, Ladyfest and the world of 'open mic' performances, on a number of different scales (local, national and international). In addition to their overarching Introduction, the editors offer a very clear and detailed introduction to the methodology of social network analysis for the uninitiated.

The collection builds upon insights from canonic texts in the sociology of music, with the crucial innovation of examining musical network interaction via formal methods. With network analysis in the arts and humanities at an emergent stage, Social Networks and Music Worlds highlights its possibilities for non-scientists. Contributions hail from leading and emerging scholars who present social network graphs and data to represent different music worlds, locating individuals, resources and styles within them.

The collection sits at the nexus of sociological, musicological and cultural studies traditions. Its range should ensure a large scholarly readership.

1 Introduction

Nick Crossley, Siobhan McAndrew and Paul Widdop

As Christopher Small’s (1998) felicitous term, ‘musicking’, suggests, making and enjoying music are social activities, patterned by convention and involving multiple relays of interaction between those involved. These activities tend to cluster along stylistic and/or geographical lines. In much early sociological work on popular music this clustering was captured by the concept of sub-culture or, more precisely, ‘working class youth sub-cultures’ (Clarke et al. 1993; Hebdige 1988). This work remains important and instructive but the concept of subculture, at least in the dominant formulation of it, posited by members of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Clarke et al. 1993; Hebdige 1988), is problematic. It focuses only upon ‘popular’ forms of music, having nothing to say about the ‘elite’ forms against which the popular is at least tacitly pitted. It focuses almost exclusively upon the activities of audiences and consumers of music, abstracting them from and neglecting musicians and such ‘support personnel’ as promoters, managers, etc. And it is demographically skewed towards working-class youth (admittedly affording a focus upon racial and gender differences in later work (McRobbie 1991; Gilroy 1992; Jones 1988)), precluding any understanding of musical enthusiasm and participation among older and middle-class individuals (Bennett 2013; Bennett and Hodkinson 2012; Smith 2009). These limitations have prompted a number of attempts, in recent years, to devise a different model for theorising the abovementioned clusters, a model which incorporates the positives of ‘subculture’ without succumbing to its weaknesses (Bennett 1999; Hesmondhalgh 2005). Three alternatives in particular have achieved prominence: ‘scenes’ (Straw 1991; Shank 1994; Bennett and Peterson 2004), ‘fields’ (Bourdieu 1993; Savage 2006) and ‘music worlds’, a concept which builds upon Howard Becker’s (1982) work on ‘art worlds’ (Finnegan 1989; Lopes 2002; Martin 2005, 2006a, 2006b).

There are considerable overlaps between these conceptions and whichever one we opt for the literature on the others will remain a useful resource. There are differences between them, however, and in earlier work we argued in favour of ‘music worlds’ (e.g. Bottero and Crossley 2011; Crossley 2015; McAndrew and Everett forthcoming), a choice to which we adhere here. This book is intended to contribute to and expand the ‘music worlds’ research agenda. Individual contributors vary in their attachment to the concept but most work at least loosely within its parameters and all, in our view, have much to contribute to an understanding of music worlds.

As noted above, the identity and boundaries of a music world are often demarcated by reference to musical styles. We refer to the jazz world, the folk world and the punk world, for example, or to various sub-divisions within or cross-cutting these broader styles: e.g. the trad jazz world, the folk-rock world, the sludge metal world, etc. Beyond style, as we also noted above, worlds may be demarcated by geography: e.g. the Manchester music world, the French music world, etc. And style and geography often intersect: e.g. the Liverpool jazz world, the Birmingham metal world, etc. Indeed, even within the same broad style and city, we may find distinct music worlds, separated by sub-style and geography, as Samuel Gilmore’s (1987, 1988) fascinating work on art music worlds in New York demonstrates. Furthermore, as Bennett and Peterson (2004) say in their (complementary) work on ‘scenes’, worlds may be local, translocal (including but not exclusively national or global) and increasingly also virtual.

Beyond style and geography, worlds often vary in structure and other sociological properties. Some are enduring and institutionalised. Others are transient and informal. Some are big, others small and so on. The music worlds concept is intended to capture and facilitate analysis of this variation. It is not a prescriptive concept. It is a sensitising concept which invites open-minded empirical inquiry and comparison.

Underlying all of this variation, however, is collective action (Becker 1974, 2008). Music worlds are forms of collective action, akin to social movements. They entail interaction between a population of social actors with overlapping musical interests who conspire, in different ways and combinations, to make their preferred forms of music happen. Agency is central (music worlds involve people doing things together) but interdependence between participants and an unequal distribution of the resources typically involved in musicking generate constraints and power imbalances which they must work within and around. As such, music worlds assume a structure, albeit a structure which, due to the impact of inter-agency, is inherently dynamic and subject to change: structure-in-process.

Becker suggests various elements of music worlds that might be focused upon in sociological analyses, including their constitutive conventions, the distribution and mobilisation of their key resources (e.g. money, skills, equipment) and the physical spaces where music is performed, rehearsed and recorded. Other writers who take Becker’s conception as their point of departure, including Ruth Finnegan (1989) in her classic study of the distinct but overlapping music worlds of Milton Keynes, and Paul Lopes (2002), who analyses The Rise of a Jazz Art World in the USA, have added to this list. One very central component of any music world for Becker, however, which sociological analysis must address, is the network formed by the interactions of its participants. Music worlds have a reticular structure and this demands sociological investigation. It is the networked character of music worlds that we are particularly interested in this book.

Networks and worlds

All of the contributions to the book examine the role of networks in relation to music worlds, in most cases drawing upon formal ‘social network analysis’ (SNA). We offer an introduction to SNA in Chapter 2 (see also Borgatti et al. 2012; Scott 2000; Wasserman and Faust 1994), affording those unfamiliar with it the necessary background to engage fully with subsequent chapters. For present purposes we will elaborate at a more general level upon the significance of networks and network analysis for music worlds and our understanding of them. We begin by considering the various ways in which music worlds can be said to be networks.

Music worlds and networks

The first way centres upon a key theme in Becker’s (1982) work: the division of labour involved in most forms of musicking (see also Small 1998). As collective action, musicking typically requires coordination between multiple participants, running along various relays and forming a network. Different roles are performed by different people who must communicate and coordinate their respective contributions. The coordination between players in a band is an obvious example of this but musicians must also coordinate with a variety of ‘support personnel’, including managers, promoters and technicians, who must also coordinate with one another. And both musicians and support personnel must coordinate with audiences who also have a role to play, turning up to performances (in the right place at the right time), buying recordings (in both cases funding everybody else) and, often via the mediation of critics but not always in agreement with them, bestowing meaning and value upon what they hear. Listening and hearing, like all forms of perception, are activities. They engage with auditory stimuli, shaping and thereby contributing to the form of what is heard (Dewey 1980; Merleau-Ponty 1962). In this way they enter into the process of music-making. Furthermore, it is the audience who bestow the status of music upon what they hear (or not) (Dewey 1980; Small 1998; Becker 1982); audiences are among the actors who contribute to the classification of musical genres (DiMaggio 1987, 2011); and they give further life and meaning to music by means of the often innovative ways in which they use and deploy it (DeNora 2000; Willis 1990).

We could explore the division of labour involved in musicking much further, extending our focus to consider instrument-makers, music shops, the cleaners and administrative staff employed at venues and many more besides but the point is clear enough. Musicking is not a solitary activity. It involves its participants in a network of others with whom they must coordinate, and this network is therefore central to a proper understanding of it. It is also worth noting at this point that much of the importance which Becker attaches to ‘convention’ relates to the need of participants to coordinate their activities with others. Mutual adherence to conventions, from 12-tone scales and standardised tunings to outlets for ticket sales and pecking orders among roadies, makes coordination easier.

Beyond the division of labour involved, networks are implicated in music worlds in the form of various relations of influence, support, antagonism, etc. within the ‘communities’ which particular musicians, support personnel and audiences form; relations which impact directly upon individual ‘moral careers’ within the world and the career of the world itself. The existence of ‘musical communities’ has long been recognised within sociology, predating the above-mentioned work on youth subcultures. ‘Community’ is an unfortunate term, however, both because it suggests cohesion and cooperation, which we do find in music worlds but usually intermingled with competition, conflict and factions (dominant and subordinate), and because it fails to capture structural differences within and between music worlds: e.g. the different positions that participants occupy, such as being central or marginal, and variations in cohesion and centralisation both between different worlds and within the same world over time.

‘Social network’, as defined in SNA, avoids these problems. It does not prejudge the nature of ties between participants. It allows for competition and conflict as well as cooperation, further allowing that cohesion and cooperation may have negative as well as positive effects, and that conflict, competition and marginalisation may have positive as well as negative effects: e.g. conflict may spur musicians on both to rehearse hard and innovate, producing better music, and relative isolation may remove musicians from strong social influences and demands for conformity, facilitating innovation. ‘Social network’ allows us to think relationally without committing ourselves to a cosy communitarian picture of the world or indeed any picture (Crossley 2011). Furthermore, it both allows that different worlds may be ‘wired’ in different ways, with different participants enjoying different patterns of connection within them, and allows us, by means of the tools of SNA, to capture, measure and analyse these variables (see Chapter 2).

We should add that the networked character of music worlds is not restricted to their human participants nor SNA to the analysis of human networks. The many sites of activity within a music world, which Becker (2004) begins to explore in his essay ‘Jazz Places’, for example, from rehearsal spaces to venues, festivals, record shops, studios and so on, are often linked, both through arrangements between their owners and the flow of bands, audiences and others between them. Similar styles may take root in spatio-temporally distant venues and events, for example, because of the flow of the same artists or audiences between them. To give another example, songs may be linked through practices of citation and borrowing. And the official bodies and corporate economic actors involved in a music world may be linked through shared members/directors. Each of these ‘nodes’ is important to a proper understanding of music worlds and so too are the interactions and networks between them.

Social capital

Music worlds do not just happen to be networked. Connection between participants, which, to reiterate, will vary both within and between specific worlds, involving ties which, as Simmel (1906, 1955) says of ties more generally, involve an ambivalent mix of positive and negative elements, is essential to the existence of a world. It is connection, for example, which facilitates communication and thereby coordination. Audiences arrive at the same venues as the bands they wish to see, on the same evenings, because communication allows for coordination between them. Furthermore, connection generates emergent properties which both characterise music worlds in particular ways and facilitate forms of action, on various scales, which would not otherwise be possible; forms of action which make the world what it is. Whatever its flaws, and there are many (Fine 2001), the concept of ‘social capital’ encapsulates much of this. For our purposes this concept can be understood in two ways.

On an individual level, participants may enjoy indirect access to certain resources necessary for their participation, by means of their connection to others who enjoy direct access, as in Nan Lin’s (2002) conception of social capital. Making the acquaintance of an individual who sits on a radio playlist committee may afford one the opportunity to indirectly influence that committee, for example, while befriending a studio engineer may be a route to free studio time.

Beyond this, as James Coleman’s (1990) more structural conception of social capital suggests, dense and closed networks in particular tend to generate incentives for cooperation, trust and mutual support among their members, even when those members might in other respects find themselves in conflict or competition. Members of such networks often depend strongly upon one another. This can be a cause of tension but it requires that they strive to maintain a good reputation as reliable, trustworthy, helpful, etc. They cannot afford to do otherwise because the costs, in terms of sanctions from others, will deprive them of what they need to achieve their own musical ambitions. Over time these pressures may be internalised, giving rise to a sense of duty and community (Mead 1967). Furthermore, participation in collective action may give rise to a collective identity, solidarity and esprit de corps (Blumer 1969). Even where actors remain purely strategic in orientation, however, it is often in their best interests to cooperate.

This, in turn, facilitates activities conducive to the flourishing of a music world that would not otherwise be possible: e.g. sharing of equipment, rehearsal space, know-how and information; ‘leg-ups’ for less established by more established artists; and acceptance of and support for experimentation with sounds, look...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What is social network analysis? An introduction for music scholars
• 3 Totally wired: the network of structure of the post-punk worlds of Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield 1976–80
• 4 Symbolic versus commercial success among British female composers
• 5 Music consumption: networks and omnivorism
• 6 Between social worlds and local scenes: patterns of collaboration in francophone rap music
• 7 Embracing difference in feminist music worlds: a Ladyfest case study
• 8 The enabling qualities of Manchester’s open mic network
• 9 Exploring music careers: music graduates and early career trajectories in the UK
• 10 Tastes, ties and social space: exploring Sheffield’s folk singing world
• 11 On jazz worlds
• Index