Downloading, Music Sales, and Research into Same: A Kerfluffle.

“The most striking thing to me about this isn’t: Downloading possibly leads to sales. But: Over the course of the past decade, a lot of people just stopped giving a shit about music altogether. Yet the survey, its results (from what I’ve seen) and the discussions of it don’t seem to consider this at all.”

This is Scott Plagenhoef’s response (scroll down to the comments) to my response to Maura’s response to that study attempting to causally link downloading habits to other forms of consumption. One of the things I wasn’t really able to get into in the ridiculously quick conversation I had with Maura over IM that afternoon is exactly the quandary that Scott raises above. Which can be answered pretty briefly, actually: The reason that no one really discusses why “people stopped giving a shit about music altogether,” if this is in fact the case, is because the sorts of research that end up in newspapers and on tech blogs aren’t designed, from the beginning, to answer questions like this.

I mentioned this in an earlier post here, but it bears repeating. It’s not an issue of a study being “longitudinal” or not. Both quantitative and qualitative research are both perfectly equipped to conduct research over time. What is the issue at hand is the questions and problems that different forms of research are equipped to address. This particular survey, like others that get picked up by wire services, seeks to place the messy, chaotic activities involved with mundane music consumption within a framework that reifies the market categories that we all find so frustrating to begin with. These researchers, from what I can tell, are interested in making connections between downloading and buying habits, and are thus asserting that those are the most important considerations to take into account when talking about music in everyday life.

Which is fine, don’t get me wrong. There is plenty of utility in this sort of research, namely the capacity to accumulate data from nearly 2,000 respondents in a quick amount of time. But this sort of research also tells us little to nothing about the myriad other functions and roles of music in people’s everyday lives. It tells us nothing about the ways that people engage with music in situations that have nothing to do with market ideologies. We don’t hear the voices of individual Norwegian 15-year-olds, whose responses to questions about what they think of music’s purpose or utility might address Scott’s above question in illuminating ways. But also in ways that don’t necessarily travel well through venues like newsapers and tech blogs, which, even though online, are still burdened by the tyranny of word-count and simple, easy-to-follow facts. Quantitative research travels well because it’s easily translatable into dichotomies, because it can be made to hew closely to simple arguments about right and wrong.

This is a research topic I’m preparing to embark upon in the fall, and a topic I will summarily blog the fuck out of, either here or elsewhere. At this point, I’m inclined to disagree with Scott’s assertion, but only because it’s predicated on the assumption that there’s one particular way to “give a shit about music”, and that it’s also possible for everyone to suddenly stop doing that. Talking to people about what music does for them when it’s mediated through the Web and Internet will hopefully reveal new paradigms through which we can understand how people invest meaning in art that’s become infinitely accessible, replicable, and freshly sedimented in the most mundane of everyday activities (answering one’s phone, for instance).

Scott’s been thinking about this stuff for quite some time, and has even expounded upon his ideas in a very entertaining book. But let’s think about the data he’s using to support his claim:

“dwindling shelf space given to music at big boxes, the number of indie or chain record stores closing, the relative amount and variety of music on U.S. TV/MTV/radio vs a decade or two ago …plus the factual and quite striking shrinking record sales.”

If “not giving a shit about music” means “not buying or engaging with music in the ways we did in the 80s and 90s,” then yes, his point is fine. But it’s also tautological. We need to consider the vast amount of other ways that people are imagining their connections with music, occasioned by the new technologies through which they’re experiencing it. Once audiences have broken an imaginary tether to the traditional musical commodity, what new forms of relationships are going to emerge?

Filed under: downloading  fandom  Idolator  Maura  music's value  piracy  Pitchfork  research  Scott Plagenhoef  selling culture