Raphaël Nowak

• PhD
• Lecturer at University of York

This article explores the concept of music discovery and seeks to provide a definition of the act of discovering music content. Research on music consumption has weakly theorized what the moment of “discovery” consists of, since it has been more preoccupied with debates about the conditions of discoveries, which either highlight the importance of i...

This book addresses the issue of music consumption in the digital era of technologies. It explores how individuals use music in the context of their everyday lives and how, in return, music acquires certain roles within everyday contexts and more broadly in their life narratives.

This collection presents a range of essays on contemporary music distribution and consumption patterns and practices. The contributors to the collection use a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, discussing the consequences and effects of the digital distribution of music as it is manifested in specific cultural contexts. The wides...

This article explores the ‘methodology of friendship’ and its wider potential within music research. Drawing on two research examples that made use of ‘friendship’ in distinct fashions – one that explores music listening practices in everyday life and the other, music as a site for racialisation – the article discusses how friendship can be incorpo...

Vaporwave, first emerging in the early 2010s, is a genre of music characterised by extensive sampling of earlier “elevator music,” such as smooth jazz, MoR, easy listening, and muzak. Audio and visual markers of the 1980s and 1990s, white-collar workspaces, media technology, and advertising are prominent features of the aesthetic. The (academic, ve...

Cette introduction au numéro spécial s’intéresse à la prolifération récente des discours sur la valeur de la musique. Si la question de la valeur sous-tend depuis longtemps nombre d’analyses sur la musique, ceux sur la supposée valeur déclinante de la musique s’inscrivent dans des perspectives contemporaines articulées à la numérisation et tendent...

The celebration of popular music can be an important mode of cultural expression and a source of pride for urban communities. This Element analyses the capacity for popular music heritage to enact cultural justice in the deindustrialising cities of Wollongong, Australia; Detroit, USA; and Birmingham, UK. The Element develops a critical approach to...

Cultural taste and practices are ordinarily analysed through pre-established lists of generic categories that are provided to participants in quantitative surveys. The French inquiry on cultural practices conducted in 2018 offers the possibility to examine categories given by participants to an open question about the “type of music” liked by Frenc...

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture provides a comprehensive and fully up-to-date overview of key themes and debates relating to the academic study of popular music and youth culture. While this is a highly popular and rapidly expanding field of research, there currently exists no single-source reference book for those intere...

The established conceptual frameworks in the sociology of music largely name forms of social collective, albeit emphasising different characteristics. ‘Scene’ and ‘neo-tribe’ are the principal contemporary examples of this. In this article, we describe scene and neo-tribe as conceptual responses to what questions (What kind of sociality is this? Wh...

Music Sociology critically evaluates current approaches to the study of music in sociology and presents a broad overview of how music is positioned and represented in existing sociological scholarship. It then goes on to offer a new framework for approaching the sociology of music, taking music itself as a starting point, and considering what music...

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture provides a comprehensive and fully up-to-date overview of key themes and debates relating to the academic study of popular music and youth culture. While this is a highly popular and rapidly expanding field of research, there currently exists no single-source reference book for those intere...

At the turn of the 2020s, music is largely distributed and consumed via streaming services. This new “moment” in recorded music has attracted a lot of attention from scholars, with the aim of identifying the nature of transformations that are occurring at an economic and/or cultural level. This chapter critically assesses scholarly analyses of musi...

Powerlifting, a competitive strength-based sport, offers a rich and compelling site for investigating the digital mediation of gendered subjectivities. The substantive implications of feminist knowledge as interventions in physical cultures are well documented. This article seeks to extend the onto-epistemological precepts of a Feminist New Materia...

This article examines knowledge production in the sociology of music. Focusing on the idea of cool music, we interrogate the nature of music researchers' relationship with their object of research. While the qualification and connotation of cool is widespread in popular music, sociology has largely neglected to engage with it as an object of resear...

This article explores the relationship between age cohorts and music taste. Drawing on quantitative data about the contemporary distribution of French music tastes, we note that a large majority of individuals are eclectic. Although social class remains a significant structuring variable, age appears as another critical factor in the distribution o...

This chapter questions how a turn to popular music heritage can be an important strategy for reinstating a sense of well-being for disenfranchised communities in post-industrial music cities. Focusing primarily on the case study of Birmingham (UK), we analyse popular music heritage initiatives deployed by the Birmingham Music Archive and reflect on...

Deindustrialisation contributes to significant transformations for local communities, including rising unemployment, poverty and urban decay. Following the ‘creative city’ phenomenon in cultural policy, deindustrialising cities across the globe have increasingly turned to arts, culture and heritage as strategies for economic diversification and urb...

Sounds of our Town: The Wollongong Edition is the first of three zines that reflect on a research project on popular music heritage and cultural justice in deindustrialising cities.

This article is interested in a techno-cultural moment usually summarized by the phrase ‘digital age’. We explore how people who belong to Generation Y and were young at the time of the development of digital music technologies have adopted and used those new technological possibilities while maintaining a relationship with other media and technolo...

Reviewed by Raphaël Nowak, Griffith University

Curating Pop speaks to the rapidly growing interest in the study of popular music exhibitions, which has occurred alongside the increasing number of popular music museums in operation across the world. Focusing on curatorial practices and processes, this book draws on interviews with museum workers and curators from 19 museums globally, including t...

Museums have been central to the institutionalisation of popular music as heritage; yet, there has been little scholarly focus on the curatorial strategies behind the exhibition of popular music’s past. This article outlines an emerging typological framework of structuring concepts in curatorial practice in popular music museums. The typology bring...

Baker, Sarah. 2016. “Do-it-Yourself Institutions of Popular Music Heritage: The Preservation of Music’s Material Past in Community Archives, Museums and Halls of Fame”. Archives and Records 37/2: 170-87. Baker, Sarah and Collins, Jez. 2015. “Sustaining Popular Music’s Material Culture in Community Archives and Museums”. International Journal of Her...

This article discusses how the digital age of music technologies has contributed to the transformation of the activities of music listening, highlighting cultural participation in distinct worlds through adequate music.

This article discusses how the digital age of music technologies has contributed to the transformation of the activities of music listening, highlighting cultural participation in distinct worlds through "adequate music."

In parallel with a globally ageing ‘baby-boomer’ population, Western societies have seen an increase in the number of museums devoted to popular music. However, the discourse, design and display of traditional museums is at odds with the culture of popular music and its audience. This article explores how curators of ‘new museums’ of popular music...

This article looks at the Apple iPod as an iconic and hybrid music object and explores the multiplicity of iPod cultures in everyday life. It reviews the existing literature on the iPod and advances two main paradigms on iPod culture – the individual cognition enabled by the Apple object during private and mobile listening practices or the algorith...

A significant amount of previous academic research into popular music museums centres on critiques of the content, design and layout of predominantly authorised institutions. Throughout much of this research, authors consistently criticise the use, or rather, the perceived misuse, of music played within music museums, arguing that the music itself,...

As a form of leisure, music may have become more important than ever throughout the technological innovations of the digital age. Contemporary modes of consumption are currently transforming and music only seems to invade new territories in everyday life. The place that music holds within modern society needs to be questioned and scrutinized by the...

What is the value of music as a resource within contemporary modes of consumption and throughout everyday life? Is it in fact possible to account for the myriad of ways individuals interpret music and associate it with everyday contexts? The promise of the sociology of music establishes the mediated affects of music’s textuality throughout the cour...

Issues of music consumption are entwined with the technological means that play music. Since the advent of recorded music in the late 19th century, technologies have contributed to configuring the ways in which music is written, recorded, produced, marketed, and listened to. Over the last couple of decades, technological innovations that are usuall...

The concept of ‘taste’ is central to an analysis of music consumption. The concept builds an understanding of the underpinning reasons why individuals like the music they listen to, how they use it and associate it, and how they are affected by it. However, taste mostly remains quite a blurry concept. In fact, ‘taste’ is an umbrella term that alter...

The intertwinement of music with time does not only emphasize the necessary sociological investigation of the phenomenological relationships between individuals and everyday contexts as mediated by music. Research on music consumption must also allude to how the moments of interactions with music form a broader sense of musical accompaniment over t...

The intertwinement of music and everyday life is now widely accepted. It establishes the contextualization and mediation of any form of interaction with the sound of music. From Theodor Adorno’s (1990) skepticism of forms of musical enjoyment, there is now a general acknowledgment that individuals can feel pleasure from listening to popular music....

Digital music is heterogeneous: what is brought under or left outside of the umbrella of digital music differs. Nowak and Whelan demonstrate this with reference to three examples: the 2007 release of In Rainbows by Radiohead as a ‘pay-what-you-want’ download, the 2010 leak of Autechre’s Oversteps, and the fan videos set to the Phoenix song ‘Lisztom...

In the editors’ introduction to Networked Music Cultures, Nowak and Whelan present an overview of the collection and its contents, and situate the volume with respect to the existing field of research on music online. Emphasising the theoretical and methodological range contained within the collection, they argue for diversity and plurality of anal...

This book addresses the issue of music consumption in the digital era of technologies. It explores how individuals use music in the context of their everyday lives and how, in return, music acquires certain roles within everyday contexts and more broadly in their life narratives.

This special issue and its range of contributions, from both emerging and established scholars with interests in digital music distribution, provides a particular and novel depth of vision, into both developments in digital music in the time since Napster, and the current issues and discussions in the field. As illustrated by the content of this is...

This paper investigates the missing link between music and material studies in analyses of everyday music reception. In light of the increasing material fragmentation and heterogeneity of contemporary modes of music consumption, I interrogate how to theorize the materiality of music technologies within everyday interactions with music. Thus, I revi...

This article develops the notion of ‘sound environment’ as a new way of theorizing the relationship between music, audiences and everyday life. The article draws on findings from an empirical case study conducted with young people between the ages of 21 and 32. In focusing on this age range, we consider ‘mundane’ music consumption practices in cont...

When American student Shawn Fanning and his uncle John Fanning created the peer-to-peer application Napster in 1999, they probably knew little about the extent to which this innovation would change the face of music consumption on a global scale. Indeed, ever since the massive success of peer-to-peer applications that have all followed the path ope...

This review article develops a qualitative sociological analysis of the consumption of music in the digital age. Through a scrutiny of everyday sound environments, I argue that both 'ecological' and “constructivist” analyses are limited in the age of contemporary technological eclecticism that defines the reception of music. Indeed, heterogeneous m...