Music, Social Media and Global Mobility: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube

This book is about the relationship between media, communication and globalization, explored through the unique empirical study of electronic music practitioners#xE2;#xAC;" use of social media such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. To understand the significance of the emerging nexus between social media and music in a global context, the book explores various aspects of production, distribution and consumption among music practitioners as they engage with the online environment. Drawing on extensive interview-based research with electronic music artists, DJs, producers and managers, this study aims to capture a development taking place in music culture within the wider transformations of the global media and communications environment; from analogue to digital, from national to global, from largely a passive to more active media use. In doing so, it explores the emergence of a transnational media and communications landscape with increased mobility, movement and uncertainty. The numerous competing, and rapidly growing and fading social media exemplify the vitality and volatility of the transforming global media, communication and cultural ecology. This pioneering study suggests that the nature of the music practitioner#xE2;#xAC;"s relationship with social media, and these wider global transformations, alter aspects of our practical and theoretical understandings of the process of media globalization. The book deploys an interdisciplinary approach to media globalization that takes into account and articulates this relationship, and reflects the wider changes, but also the continuity with the past and enduring power relations, within the media and communications landscape.