ABSTRACT
Stressing the eminently social nature of musical experience, sociology as a discipline has contributed concepts and models useful for capturing the related phenomena of music production, consumption and appreciation: in short, the social organization of musical life. Three approaches or perspectives have hegemonized the sociological study of the arts in the last few decades, exerting influence on the field of popular music studies as well: the production-of-culture perspective, the art world approach and the cultural field theory. Others concepts or ideas, such as “subculture” and “scene,” have informed in recent times research on the social organization of popular music (Straw 1991, Gelder and Thornton 1997, Bennett 1999, Bennett and Peterson 2004). However, it is around these three principal concepts—production of culture, art world, and field—that the sociological debate on arts and music has been mainly articulated, and the most fruitful and influential insights have been developed (see Alexander 2003; van Maanen 2009).
