How the experience of popular music is changing

Professor of International Politics at Richmond, Dr Paul Rekret, has had a new article published in the journal Critical Quarterly. 

Entitled, ‘Melodies wander around as ghosts’: on Playlist as cultural form, the article explores how people’s experience of popular music is changing through playlists on the internet.

Here is an abstract:

This article examines changes to the experience of popular music given its consumption through mood-based playlists on internet streaming platforms. By displacing the ‘single’ and the album as a form of music distribution the platform represents a new mode of value production for the music industry, one where music sales are secondary to the generation of user data, branding, device and bandwidth sales. The ubiquity of music across time and space that music streaming involves further entails changes to music’s social function and its aesthetic form. In creating a frictionless harmony among sonic elements, genres, cultures and epochs, the playlist generates an imagined unity into which it interpellates the subject of interminable production and consumption.

Dr Paul Rekret, who teaches political theory at the University, is the author of Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence as well as the book Philosophy, Politics, Polemics: Derrida and Foucault.  His work has appeared in Frieze, the New Inquiry and the Quietus, among others.