Collecting and media change, or: Listening to Phish via app

Author:

Kushner Scott1

Affiliation:

1. University of Rhode Island, USA

Abstract

Practices of collecting are constrained by media circumstances. To show how changing media circumstances can occasion changes in collecting practices, this article explores one case study, an iOS app developed by a Phish fan to allow streaming audio of fan-made recordings of Phish concert performances. Such practices are part of a history of unofficial music collecting that parallels the history of recorded sound. This case study shows how one collecting community’s practices evolved in the context of changing media conditions: from cassette tape to CD-R to MP3 to streams (and a parallel motion from print to online message boards to app). This progression illustrates the ways that different ways of listening to and accessing recorded music afford different possibilities of collecting music, different links between listener and music, and different relationships among listeners. More precisely, Phish concert recordings, which lent themselves to collection when circulated on cassette, are no longer available to collect when they circulate as streaming media, because streaming is characterized by a relationship of access rather than possession. Among devoted fans, streaming recordings provoke a cultural emphasis on knowledge about music, rather than accumulation of recordings. My argument is rooted in prevailing theories of collecting, which situate collecting as a component of consumer culture emerging from the capitalist expansion stimulated by 19th-century mass production. Ultimately, I argue that when an object of collecting is displaced by changing media conditions, new collecting practices emerge to fill the void.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous),Communication

Reference47 articles.

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