Digital dilemmas and promotional possibilities: Circulating music in the late age of the mp3

This project investigates promotional strategies adopted by music fans, artists, record labels, and retailers to account for the 21st century circulation of recordings through digital music media and networks, and considers the effects of these strategies on the nature of the music commodity. Never a stable object in its century-plus existence, the recorded music commodity has consistently undergone mutations in form and function due to the implementation of new media and technologies of circulation, from radio broadcasts to jukeboxes, 45-rpm records and compact discs. The digital era of mp3 files and Internet circulation has introduced a number of unique dilemmas and possibilities for music promotion, however, and the strategies developed to deal with them mark a new phase in the music commodity's history. Through four interrelated ethnographic case studies conducted between 2008 and 2011, I consider the ways in which social actors wield available technologies to reconfigure promotional and exchange relationships, tracing music commodities through the processes of production, promotion, and consumption in on- and offline contexts. I study the contested dialogues between online music fans and record labels about the leak of a forthcoming album, revealing the new frameworks of illicit demand driving music promotion in the digital age. I trace the online marketing campaign for an untested new band, in which an established record label disguises its involvement, playing to the desires for discovery and promotion amongst music bloggers. I consider the trend of using vintage amateur photographs for album packaging as a promotional effect of digital music circulating through the same online networks as countless digitized images. Finally, I trace the rise of Record Store Day as a nostalgic counterbalance to the rapidity, immateriality, and placelessness of digital music circulation, through the creation of a consumer holiday focusing on local music retail and the pleasures inherent in vinyl records.