Music and the Internet - University of Birmingham

Music and the Internet: Towards a Digital Sociology of Music is an interdisciplinary AHRC-funded research project that aims to provide the first comprehensive analysis of the changing cultural roles of the internet in music.

Taking as its historical focus a twenty-year period ranging from the early take up of the world wide web to the present day world of social media platforms, it responds to three overarching research questions:

Have uses of the internet contributed to greater boundary crossing between 'art' and 'popular' musics?
Has the internet affected an expansion or diversification of the geographical reach of contemporary genres?
To what extent have the institutions that provide for the production and distribution of music been reshaped by the internet?

Summary

This project takes off from the assertion that the range and diversity of uses of the internet since the popular take-up of the world wide web demand new approaches to the analysis and theorisation of music for which online practices are central. A major conceptual and methodological contribution of this research will be to analyse these genres using social data science methods. Informed by the research questions, and mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches, these tailored methods will analyse and visualise data from 'natively digital' mediums like forums, mailing lists, and social media platforms, thereby taking the analysis of online music beyond the reach of a single researcher.

Principal Investigator

Dr Christopher Haworth

Senior Lecturer in Music (20th / 21st Century Musical Studies)

Christopher researches the history of electronic music as it is practiced, theorised, taught and experienced, and he does this using a mixture of historical, ethnographic, interpretive and data-driven methods.

Christopher's profile

Outputs and engagement

Haworth C (2020) Network music and digital utopianism: the rise and fall of the Res Rocket Surfer project, 1994-2003
Haworth C (2020) How are public figures transformed/memefied?
Haworth C (2023) Post-punk, Industrial Culture Zines, and the Information Dark Age in Theory, Culture & Society
Spencer E (2020) "Why has God abandoned us?": On the Drop, the Fall, and the Harlem Shake meme of 2013

Key findings