ABSTRACT
This chapter offers insight into how music is used by young people within their digitized day-to-day lives. Starting from a perspective of everyday life as a significant backdrop to music use, it provides a detailed picture of music habits in the two contexts, explaining and analyzing participants’ overall practices around music, and showing how the Internet is largely integral to these – but also emphasizing how specific online sites for music, in particular VK, Spotify and YouTube in their respective contexts, carry particular meanings for the research participants. Seeking to shed light on how online music use is integrated into daily routines and settings, the chapter looks at similarities as well as differences between the cultural contexts, for example in terms of Internet access and tastes in music, but also foregrounds mobility and connectivity as central features. Importantly, it brings attention to dominant experiences of online music use as constituting a defined break with previous forms of engagement with music, with user conceptualizations balancing between notions of a heightened engagement with music, as a highly valued form of communication of significance to the management of the self and daily life, and ideas of “lazy” music use, with music considered to be a taken-for-granted resource alongside experiences of musical abundance. Such ambiguities open up for further examination in the following parts of the volume, which are of pertinence to a developed understanding of music streaming.
