Music, Digitalization, and Democracy

The purpose of this special issue of Popular Music and Society is to bring together a series of articles that deal with issues related to music, digitalization, and democracy. Since the 1980s, the impact of digitalization on the production, dissemination, and consumption of music has been immense. Scholars, artists, and policymakers have depicted this as a “digital turn,” which can simultaneously be both a potential enhancement of, and a threat to, cultural life. Business futurists and technological optimists have described the increasing financial possibilities created by the new lower cost structures, and visionaries have predicted a greater cultural and creative freedom for larger population groups (e.g. Anderson; Fox; Frost; Lessig). On the other hand, others have questioned the scope of the structural changes in the music industries, emphasizing the reintermediating forces at play and criticizing unfounded hopes of increasing creative activities (e.g. Elberse; Galuszka; Jones). While many of these writings offer a thorough description of technological, industrial, and economic developments, less has been written about the cultural dimensions of the changes.

In this connection, it is interesting to ask whether digitalization really has had an impact on, for example, the diversity, equity, access, participation, inclusion, or fairness of music cultures. These kinds of issues are often lumped together in discourses on “democracy” which, despite criticism of their vagueness (e.g. Hesmondhalgh, 2019), seem to persist in popular music studies. From this perspective, it is interesting to ask how music and democracy and the discourses surrounding these phenomena have been influenced by the introduction of digital technology. This includes approaching digitalization and culture not as separate entities linked by a deterministic causal connection but as two sides of the same coin, functioning in mutual interdependency. It is also worth making a division between a narrow “digitization,” or the technological methods of converting analogue material into digital bits, and a wider “digitalization,” which refers to the way in which many domains of social life are restructured around digital communication and infrastructures (compare, e.g. Brennen and Kreiss). Here we also follow Williamson and Cloonan in adopting a pluralistic model of the music industries which goes beyond a concentration on the recording sector to incorporate live music, the copyright industries, etc.

In this introduction, we will give a brief overview of some key approaches to studying the interplay between music, technological development, and democracy. Our aim is not to give a complete summary of the whole research field, but to consider some of the complex issues at play in the attempts to define and analyze the issue of democratization. Thus, we will start off by discussing the dystopian and utopian visions that have permeated much of the debates for a long time. We will then focus on how digitalization has been explained to increase accessibility to culture, often summarized in the concept “democratization of culture,” after which we move on to digitalization’s potential for so-called “cultural democratization,” which refers to greater possibilities for personal creation and self-expression. Finally, we will present briefly the articles included in this special issue.

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