The Production and Consumption of Music in the Digital Age. Edited by B.J.Hracs, M.Seman, and T.E.Virani, New York, NY: Routledge. 2016. 278 pp, $115.00 (hardback edition). ISBN 9781‐13885‐1658.

Music geography has enjoyed significant theoretical and empirical advances since the 1980s, in part due to emerging digital technologies and the spatial impact of globalization forces. Music has always been inextricably intertwined with the constantly shifting cultural, economic, political, and social relationships that shape who we are, what we produce, and how we consume. Music reflects social values, hopes, and aspirations, and serves as a mirror for societies in myriad spatial settings. This welcome volume brings scholarship on music firmly into the new millennium, with the goal of explicating recent transformations in the production and consumption of music across today's rapidly changing marketplace. In an introductory overview, the volume's editors contextualize the following 17 chapters by arguing for an economic geography framework that shows how an “interconnected sonic ecosystem” (p. 3) is emerging at multiple scales and across diverse musical landscapes. Collections of essays are notoriously difficult sometimes to link together with consistent themes and approaches. The editors divided the contributions into five sections: recording, working, playing, distributing, and promoting and consuming. At first glance, this approach does not seem appropriate, as distribution would logically follow recording, while working and playing should, perhaps, be at the end, with production and consumption positioned in the middle of the five sections. This is a minor quibble, though, as the individual essays do fit well within each section and there is a coherent interconnecting structure to each essay and to each section. A larger concern is the noticeable absence of maps and graphics, with the exception of the very engaging chapter on musical venues in Pittsburgh and Nashville. Chapter 8, for example, examines the local music scene in Dalston, London, with no visual evidence at all of the place, context, culture, or built environment. Essays like this one cry out for visual support to show the where, how, and why of music consumption. Two essays in the recording section (Chapters 2 and 3) offer empirical evidence of the challenges facing music production in a digital world. At the micro-level, Watson examines freelance music producers and their working conditions within a framework created by the significant mobility and plasticity of contemporary digital recording technologies. His argument is that this type of labor leads to a merging of regular work hours with leisure time, something he calls labor “extensification,” as well as an increase in demand for the producers’ time in a 24/7 production environment, which Watson describes as the “intensification” (p. 18) of labor demand. Ardita argues that, at the macro-scale, the dispersal of recording studio locations away from traditional central-city sites in London, New York, and Los Angeles, for example, driven by a wave of new digital audio workstations, has disrupted traditional labor relationships. Ever-cheaper recording equipment has opened up the industry to competition by circumventing traditional but costly recording studios. This chapter hit home for me because my younger brother in the UK has a very successful business designing and constructing recording studios, and his business has witnessed a profound spatial reconfiguration of studios across the European landscape over the past two decades. The next four chapters in the section on “working” explore the experiences of performers and producers in the music industry. A key theme in all four essays is how precarious are working conditions at various levels of production and performance. From independent musicians in Toronto, rappers in London, and Dutch hip-hop performers, to employees of major record companies in New York, the challenges of making a living in this dynamic and fast-changing industry are exposed in stark terms. One very interesting theme examined by Frenette (Chapter 7) is the concept of “aging out” in the industry, as musical styles and consumption patterns are shifting so rapidly. This aging-out theme would probably amuse the Rolling Stones and other performers and producers from the classic rock‘n’roll era of the 1960s/1970s who keep on working quite productively. Four essays in the section on “playing” focus on the role of live performances, festivals, and various music venues in the digital age of music production and consumption (Chapters 8–11). This section offers the most spatially explicit analysis of the entire volume, with intriguing discussions of how festivals and venues remain profitable, resilient, and competitive in the fast-changing world of digital music. Johannsson et al. (Chapter 9) demonstrate that live-music venues have embraced the digital world through social media and other digital technologies, and suggest that the relationship between music venues of all styles and the internet can only enhance the diversity of production and consumption opportunities. Festivals continue to play a significant role as congregation points for producers and consumers, and as venues that promote important economic and social exchanges between and among musicians and consumers. Product distribution has changed profoundly in the digital age, with streaming services, online distribution, and YouTube music videos reshaping traditional revenue models in the industry. A case study of Highland Park, Los Angeles (Chapter 14) for example, highlights both the nostalgia for vinyl records and the consumers’ emotional attachment to place, whether real or imagined, and shows how the market for vinyl has grown tremendously in recent years. The internet has proven to be critical to the revival of vinyl and its growth in market share. Pratt's Chapter (15) on the geography of music copyright is intriguing in that it examines the conundrum of a democratized global “sharing” of music within the context of the legal rights of producers and performers. When does sharing become theft or copyright violation? The final three chapters tie together some of the themes discussed in previous essays through an examination of music promotion and consumption. For example, Lange (Chapter 17) argues that the historical influence of music critics and journalists as “tastemakers” (p. 238) is being contested by digitally based music evaluation systems. Blogs, websites, “foafing,” and fan magazines, among other forums, are serving as cultural intermediaries that help to mobilize the effects of fandom and reshape the emotional attachment to music that drives the economic cycle of production and consumption. Musicologists should enjoy this edited collection, as it connects some of the important themes and trends in music production and consumption that have emerged in recent years, such as the evolving lives of musicians and industry workers in the post-MP3 world. Other important issues include the precariousness of employment in the industry, the role of social geographies in networking, musical collaboration, and product promotion, and the more effective engagement of the internet through a wide range of production and consumption strategies. A weakness of this collection is the lack of a more finely tuned analysis of the individual and group experiences of music consumers against the backdrop of digitized production. More questions about the where, how, and why of music consumption need to be answered, especially in the broader context of cultural globalization. Nonetheless, for an academic audience intrigued by the changing relationships between the contemporary music marketplace, digital technologies, the internet, and the socio-spatial dynamics of making music, this volume presents some excellent material that sheds light on these issues. For a more general audience, especially music producers and consumers who wish to round out their knowledge of changes in their milieu, these essays are eminently readable and insightful.

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