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The purpose of this paper is to explore how music consumption communities remember their past. Specifically, the paper reports on the role of heritage in constructing the cultural memory of a consumption community and on the implications for its identity and membership.

Drawing upon insights from theories of cultural memory, heritage, and collective consumption, this interpretive inquiry makes use of interview, documentary, and artefactual analysis, as well as visual and observational data, to analyse an exhibition of the community’s popular music heritage entitled One Family – One Tribe: The Art & Artefacts of New Model Army.

The analysis shows how the community creates a sense of its own past and reflects this in memories, imagination, and the creative work of the band.

This is a single case study, but one whose exploratory character provides fruitful insights into the relationship between cultural memory, imagination, heritage, and consumption communities.

The paper shows how consumption communities can do the work of social remembering and re-imagining of their own past, thus strengthening their identity through time.

The study shows clearly how a consumption community can engage, through memory and imagination, with its own past, and indeed the past in general, and can draw upon material and other resources to heritagise its own particular sense of community and help to strengthen its identity and membership.

The paper offers a theoretical framework for the process by which music consumption communities construct their own past, and shows how theories of cultural memory and heritage can help to understand this important process. It also illustrates the importance of imagination, as well as memory, in this process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the qualities of a small town centre and how such centres can enhance their attractiveness.

A convenience sampling procedure was used to administer a web survey to visitors of a small Swedish town. Importance-performance analysis and statistical methods were used to analyse quality attributes and quality dimensions. Correlation analysis was run to measure the relationship between centre attractiveness and shopping loyalty.

The variety of retail outlets is what is most valued by visitors to a small town centre, followed by the provision of events and non-commercial activities and the design and maintenance of the physical environment in the centre. Surprisingly, the interpersonal behaviour has less impact on the perceived attractiveness than the aforementioned quality dimensions. Visitors’ shopping loyalty is significantly related to the perceived attractiveness.

The study is a one-off study based upon a small Swedish town, but it is indicative of global shopping trends.

Implications for town centre management to enhance the attractiveness of the business district of a small town.

Traditional town centres have been props for the surrounding societies, providing anscillary services beside retailing. When retail moves to out-of-town retail locations, this could lead to the erosion of interpersonal communications and central services for citizens.

Pioneering research on small Swedish town shopping.

The purpose of this paper is to address the question of cultural production, consumption and intermediation in the context of digital music.

This research adopts an interpretivist, ethnoconsumerist epistemology along with a netnographic research design combined with hermeneutic analysis. Interpreting both the text view and field view of an ethnoconsumerist approach, the netnographic research design includes participant observation across multiple social media platforms as well as virtual interviews and analysis of media material. The context of application is a digital music subculture known as Vaporwave. Vaporwave participants deliberately distort fundamental aspects of modern and postmodern culture in a digital, musical, artistic and storied manner.

Hermeneutic analysis has identified a critical and nostalgic narrative of consumerism and hyper-reality, evident as symbolic parallels, intertextual relationships, existential themes and cultural codes. As a techno savvy community embracing lo-fi production, self-releasing promotion and anonymity from within a complexity of aliases and myriad collaborations, the vaporous existentialism of Vaporwave participants skirts copyright liability in the process. Accordingly, Vaporwave is documented as blurring reality and fantasy, material and symbolic, production and consumption. Essentially, Vaporwave participants are shown to be digital natives turned digital rebels and heretical consumers, better described as cultural curators.

This research demonstrates a more complex notion of cultural production, consumption and intermediation, argued to be more accurately described as cultural curation.

As digital heretics, Vaporwave participants challenge traditional notions of modernity, such as copyright law, and postmodern notions such as working consumers and consuming producers.

Vaporwave participants present a case of digital natives turned digital rebels and consumer heretics, who are actively curating culture.

This interpretive ethnoconusmerist study combining netnography and hermeneutic analysis of an online underground music subculture known as Vaporwave shows digital music artists as cultural curators.

Understanding a prima facie attraction of retro pop-rock by a broad spectrum of people and the role of technology innovation in driving the importance of this genre. A key idea of this paper is that ongoing popularity of retro pop-rock music is associated with a confluence of demand-side and supply-side factors. The demand side is thought to be characterized by a combination of psychological factors contributing to individuals’ desires to enjoy, reflect on, or even “live in” the past. On the supply-side, technology has roles in the production, distribution and consumption of music.

The approach of this paper is to provide an extensive search and synthesis of relevant literature and to present and analyze findings from online surveys.

The literature supports the idea that attraction to retro music is heavily influenced by psychological factors as well as technology innovation. The survey provides supporting evidence. Of particular interest are findings related to correlations between nostalgia and technology.

This study is, to the authors’ knowledge, one of the first to provide a survey-based link between the attraction to retro music to nostalgia and technology.

Since the arrival of mass production, commodification has been plaguing markets – none more so than that for music. By separating production and consumption in space and time, commodification challenges the very conditions underlying economic exchange. This chapter explores authenticity as the institutional response to the commodification of music, rekindling the relationship between isolated market participants in the increasingly digitized world of music. Building upon the “Production of Culture” perspective, we unpack the commodification of music across five different institutional realms – (1) production, (2) consumption, (3) selection, (4) appropriation, and (5) classification – and provide a thoroughly relational account of authenticity as an institutional practice.

Reports on the use of subjective personal introspection. Offers a brief overview of subjective personal introspection and then describes the technique used to inform an ongoing piece of research that is being conducted into popular music consumption. Concludes by assessing the usefulness of the technique and highlights how it may be of use to practitioners.

The purpose of this study is to focus on analyzing the role of music subcultures in the communication and promotion of conspicuous consumption practices. The object of study is the “altered movement” as the music style of the drug subculture in Mexico.

A qualitative content analysis of 78 lyrics and music videos of “altered movement” was carried out between August and December 2018.

The analysis of lyrics and music videos leads to the identification of four narratives (from poor to rich, power through violence, lavish lifestyle and power over women) and diverse symbolic markers (luxury brands mainly) that together, display messages aimed at promoting conspicuous consumption practices.

The current research expands the body of literature of music subcultures in the consumer research area by contesting the common conception of this phenomenon as a healthy source of self-identity formation and deepening into its role as a source of conspicuous consumption practices.

In the past decade, smartphone adoption has reached almost 100% in industrialized countries, which is predominantly due to advancements in capabilities. Given the increasing number of people who are addicted to the smartphone and the significant growth of people who consume music via the smartphone, the purpose of the study is to explore the underlying mechanisms through which musical consumption affects smartphone addiction.

Based on dual-systems theory, a research model was developed to determine the impact of System 1 (emotion related to music) and System 2 (self-control) on smartphone addiction. A partial-least-squares approach was used to test the model with 294 survey participants.

The empirical data confirmed the research model. Regarding System 1, musical emotion positively influenced smartphone addiction through musical consumption and musical response. Moreover, musical preference significantly affected musical response. Regarding System 2, self-control negatively predicted smartphone addiction.

The study is limited, as the participants were college students who are not representative of all populations.

The study extends the literature on the dark side of information technology use and complements a research agenda by Gefen and Riedl (2018) on consideration of music in information systems (IS) research.

The purpose of this paper is to further develop the conceptualization of music consumption in the digital age by examining how contemporary music listening is interweaved with other practices, how it shapes those practices and how it is in turn shaped by them.

The paper draws on extensive, qualitative interviews with 15 Swedish music consumers. During the course of these interviews, specific situations of everyday music listening were discussed in detail.

Drawing on practice theory and more specifically the concepts of dispersed and integrative practices, the authors identify and explore a mode of music listening that they term soundtracking, which involves choosing and listening to music mainly to accompany other everyday practices.

As soundtracking grows in importance, music is increasingly consumed as an affective-practical resource. Its significance is then not derived from its ability to demarcate difference and construct consumer identities but from its capacity to evoke emotions and moods than enable and enrich a set of everyday practices.

When music is consumed as part of soundtracking, issues such as the audio quality of music or ownership of material music media become less important, while aspects such as mobility, accessibility and the adaptability of music increase in importance. This has important implications for how and what music should be produced and marketed.

This paper offers an alternative view of contemporary music consumption compared to previous research, which has considered music listening primarily as an integrative practice on which the practitioner is fully focussed. The paper also contributes to practice theory by offering an empirically based understanding of a dispersed practice, showing that such practices are neither without shape nor necessarily very simple in their structure.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the material nature of legacy technology makes its users passionately prefer it over its digital alternatives.

This ethnographic study uses data from 26 in-depth interviews with vinyl collectors, augmented with longitudinal participant–observation of vinyl collecting and music store events.

The findings reveal how the physicality of vinyl facilitates the passionate relationships (with music, the vinyl as performative object and other people) that make vinyl so significant in vinyl users’ lives.

As this study examines a single research context (vinyl) from the perspective of participants from three developed, Anglophone nations, its key theoretical contributions should be examined in other technological contexts and other cultures.

The findings imply that miniturisation and automation have lower limits for some products, material attributes should be added to digitised products and that legacy technology products could be usually be reframed as tools of authentic self-expression.

This study explains what can happen beyond the top of the “S” curve in the Technology Acceptance Model, furthering our understanding of consumers’ reactions to the proliferation of digital technology in their lives.