ABSTRACT
From the late 1990s, but especially the early 2000s onwards, digital tech-nology has increasingly shaped the music ecosystem. It impacted music creation through new technologies for recording and editing, thus broadening access for musicians to studio technology, previously mainly accessible through record labels—that is, corporate entities that had adequate material resources as well as immaterial ones in the form of professional personnel. In the UK, for instance, such changes fueled the emergence of a relatively independent, decentralized electronic dance music scene in the 1990s, consisting of a multitude of microenterprises (Hesmondhalgh 1998; Maughan and Smith 1998). Digital technology also shaped music consumption via new formats, such as CDs, DVDs, CD-ROM, and writeable disks; along with new devices, including personal computers, on which listening to MP3s and other digital formats was enabled via software such as Winamp (Morris 2015, 30–65). New devices also included the MP3 player, which enabled widespread mobile listening to an unprecedented selection of music and, along with Winamp, helped solidify the (interactive) playlist as a new logic of listening (as opposed to the album or single, radio or music television, where the listener has no power over compiling the playlist) (Morris 2015, 50–51). Internet technology also helped create new spaces of interaction around music, from mailing lists, websites, and message boards to, from the early 2000s, music blogs and social networking sites (e.g., Bennett and Peterson 2004; Baym 2007; Kruse 2010; Jetto 2010). These changes significantly shaped the ways in which musicians— active music consumers themselves—work across the globe.
