ABSTRACT
The power of music to hold out against comprehensive description is simultaneously a cliché and a glaring reality when one tries to stay closest to its phenomenality. The development of science and technology studies as an international and multifaceted academic world, of sociology of translation in France, and, concomitantly, the emerging of sociology of mediation, has more or less directly helped to take this trouble seriously. A record shop emerges as a musical place from different practices—listening, record uses, gestures, conversations, shared attention, etcetera. Musical things, musical skills, and culture—music itself—as well as music lovers and the expert record dealer, as such, also emerge from these common and usual practices. Material record bins and record classifications design music scapes. Discogs embeds a recommender system, but its computation database is composed of backgrounders, which are the joint basic material of every platform section.
