Sociology of popular music consumption: From early to new music sociology. A survey on online live music concerts after COVID-19 in Italy

Abstract

"Nowadays sociology perceives music as a cultural force that guides individuals in their everyday life. Music does not stand just for a mere anchoring device that helps people overcome daily difficulties; on the contrary, sociologists recognise in music consumption a dynamic medium that actively operates in the construction of personal and social identity. Therefore, greater emphasis is nowadays given to the dynamic and interactive processes, which bring to musical appreciation in everyday life (music-in-action). Such focus underlines the different points between popular music and classical music consumption: whereas the former implies the audience’s emotional and physical engagement, the latter is mostly appreciated by experts’ ears who privilege intellectual engagement. Starting from such assumptions, the present work aims at understanding how music consumption and musical appreciation have changed over time, to the extent that a forced interruption of the live music sector due to the COVID-19 pandemic has strongly touched the whole mankind. This objective has been reached by analysing first some theories by early music sociologists, e.g. Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Theodor W. Adorno, and Pierre Bourdieu. Secondly, the analysis widens its perspective to contemporary sociologists’ contribution, where an omnivorous gaze to popular music occurs. More specifically, the work analyses Howard Becker’s interactionism, Antoine Hennion’s pragmatics of taste, Tia DeNora’s affordances and human-music interaction. In support of popular music’s relevance, the work continues by focusing on the concept of liveness. The live music sector, which experienced its boom in 2006, represent a suitable occasion for music to express its potentiality, resulting in a powerful unifier of like-minded music amateurs and in the opportunity for audiences, as well as between audience and performers, to be temporally and spatially co-present. Finally, an investigation of digital liveness is provided, by referring also to the recent upheavals that the sector has undergone due to COVID-19. The fourth and last chapter, which reports the results of a survey launched in April 2022 in Italy, aims at taking into analysis audience’s inclination towards the digital live music consumption two years after the outbreak of the pandemic. Overall, the work brings to the surface that the pandemic, where uncertainties and demotivation dominated, has been an opportunity to remark the role of live music in contemporary Western society, as well as the reasons guiding individuals towards the live music experience. "