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Purpose – The aim of this chapter is to theorize and describe the main characteristics of the social construction of the policy of electro-amplified popular music (EAPM) in the French context.

Design/methodology/approach – To explain the significance and the institutionalization of EAPM through the conflict and mediation between two modes of legitimation of the rebellion and recognition of identity: deliberative rationality and verbalization of protest, on the one hand, and “musicalization” of revolt and globalization of the rebellious feeling attitude, on the other hand.

Findings – The meaning of the so-called “musicalization of revolt” is defined. This phenomenon emerged, in France, at the end of 1960s, after a long and traditional period of “politization” and rationalization of protest. The main sociological and economic dimensions of this new historical process are designated: a special standardization of the emotional expression and a transcultural and global matrix of rebellion. Then, the public policy of EAPM is examined in depth. The paradox of the French voluntarism (the regulation of EAPM practices) is accentuated. What to do with the liberal origin of these styles and the institutional policy that began in 1982? Why and for what reasons has this public policy been still going on? What are the advantages of the public support from musicians’ as well as local and national authorities’ point of view? What are the topics of EAPM public policy (support for social creation, status of drugs, and ritualization of violence)?

Originality/value of chapter – This academic text offers some key concepts explaining the normalization of the emerging and anarchistic musical cultures.

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.

This chapter analyses the different ways in which metal album covers draw upon medieval media. The analysis is situated within the broad theoretical frame of intermediality, and more specifically view the process where medieval media cross the borders and find their way into metal album covers as media transformation. Four different types of media transformation are analysed, and it is argued that the medievalism of album covers can be defined in terms of media transformation. Likewise, neomedievalism is defined in terms of second-order media transformation. The album cover is described as a media patchwork, and the chapter gives examples of the patches in terms of relationship and properties.

Using a novel measure incorporating stylistic and acoustic data on recorded music from 1967 to 2017, we search for trends in the evolution of musical diversity in 125,340 albums. We find that temporal patterns of diversity differ for stylistic and acoustic data. We also find that the patterns differ dramatically by genre. Some genres, such as blues, jazz, and pop-rock, decrease in diversity over time; most other genres increase in diversity. The causes of these different trends present a puzzle for future research. We also find different patterns for recordings that made the Billboard 200 charts compared to all recordings, suggesting an association between selection processes driven by consumer popularity and diversity. Moreover, associations of diversity and industry structure found in prior research do not hold when we analyze data beyond the smaller sample of the more popular recordings found in Billboard. These findings have implications for many prior studies based exclusively on best-selling recordings

While the spatial dimensions of augmented reality (AR) have received significant attention in the marketing literature, to date, there has been less consideration of its temporal dimensions. This paper aims to theorise digital timework through AR to understand a new form of consumption experience that offers short-lived, immersive forms of mundane, marketer-led escape from everyday life.

The authors draw upon Casey’s phenomenological work to explore the emergence of new dynamics of temporalisation through digitised play. An illustrative case study using AR shows how consumers use this temporalisation to find stability and comfort through projecting backwards (remembering) and forwards (imagining) in their lives.

The proliferation of novel digital technologies and platforms has radically transformed consumption experiences as the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, fantasy and reality and play and work have become increasingly blurred. The findings show how temporary escape is carved out within digital space and time, where controlled imaginings provide consumers with an illusion of control over their lives as they re-establish cohesion in a ruptured sense of time.

The authors consider the more critical implications of the offloading capacity of AR, which they show does not prevent cognitive processes such as imagination and remembering but rather puts limits on them. The authors show that these more short-lived, everyday types of digitised escape do not allow for an escape from the structures of everyday life within the market, as much of the previous literature suggests.

The authors argue that corporations need to reflect upon the potential threats of immersive technologies such as AR in harming consumer escapism and take these into serious consideration as part of their strategic experiential design strategies to avoid leading to detrimental effects upon consumer well-being. More nuanced conceptualisations are required to unpack the antecedents of limiting people’s imagination and potentially limiting the fully fledged escape that consumers might desire.

Prior work has conceptualised AR as offloading the need for imagination by making the absent present. The authors critically unpack the implications of this for a more fluid understanding of the temporal logics and limits of consumer escapism.

Understanding customers is critical for service researchers and practitioners. Today, customers are increasingly active online, and valuable information about their opinions, experiences and behaviors can be retrieved from a variety of online platforms. Online customer information creates new opportunities to design personalized and high-quality service. This paper aims to review how netnography as a method can help service researchers and practitioners to better use such data.

A systematic review and analysis were conducted on 321 netnography studies published in marketing journals between 1997 and 2017.

The systematic review reveals that netnography has been applied in a variety of ways across different marketing fields and topics. Based on the analysis of existing netnography literature, empirical, theoretical and methodological recommendations for future netnographic service research are presented.

This paper shows how netnography can offer service researchers unprecedented opportunities to access naturalistic online data about customers and, hence, why it is an important method for future service research.

Netnographic research can help service firms with, for example, service innovation, advertising and environmental scanning. This paper provides guidelines for service managers who want to use netnography as a market research tool.

Netnography has seen limited use in service research despite many promising applications in this field. This paper is the first to encourage and support service researchers in their use of the method and aims to stimulate interesting future netnographic service research.

The relationship between musicians and the music industry has often been depicted as a dichotomy between creativity and commerce with musicians conflicted between their roles as artists and their roles as marketers of sound. Recently, marketing researchers have problematized this dichotomy and suggested musicians perceive these roles as inevitable and indivisible. However, the processes of how musicians market their sound to the industry gatekeepers remain unclear. This study seeks to find the key industry gatekeepers for musicians and how musicians sell their personal sound to them.

Using an interpretative phenomenological approach, ten interviews with professional musicians across different music genres provided insight into the strategies musicians use to market their sound to industry gatekeepers.

In total, three key gatekeepers and the five strategies that musicians use to sell their sound are identified. The gatekeepers are record labels, other musicians and consumers. Musicians sell their sound to these gatekeepers through the externally directed strategies of using social media to build relationships, defining their personal sound through genre and creating a unique sound, and through the internally directed strategies of keeping motivated through sound evolution and counting on luck.

The findings are limited by the small number of musicians interviewed and the heterogeneous representation of music genres.

The study contributes to theoretical understandings of how musicians as cultural producers market their sound in a commercial industry.