Bandcamp

Mémoire de musicologie (Master I recherche), présenté par Gabriel ROUET au sein de l'Université de Bourgogne.

Ce travail est basé sur l'étude d'un milieu social et musical sur internet, la vaporwave. Mon but a été de décrypter et de comprendre comment ces espaces de vie s'organisent, et ce que leurs spécificités engendrent sur la musique et les comportements autour de celle-ci. En effet, au début du XXIème siècle, grâce à l'ordinateur et internet, la musique est devenu malléable et hyper-accessible. Ces objets ont redéfini nos rapports avec la musique, et la vaporwave, en tant que premier style musical à naître et perdurer sur internet, a incarné cela. Ces nouveaux moyens de communication ont révolutionné les manières de s'organiser, de créer et de vivre ensemble. Les places virtuelles publiques sont nombreuses et les conversations privées sont mondialisées. Cette redéfinition des objets, et donc des espaces, laisse place à de nouvelles pratiques musicales et sociales, et met en avant les relations de pseudonymat ou d'anonymat. Ma méthode a consisté essentiellement en une étude de terrain virtuel basée sur l'observation des espaces du web et des entretiens individuels, par webchat, auprès d'artistes, médiateurs et auditeurs du monde entier. L'outil sociologique s'est révélé très pertinent pour analyser ce mouvement musical. Etant le premier style s'organisant fondamentalement en ligne, la vaporwave est un bon exemple pour explorer les interactions entre chaque monde, les sites, comme éléments d'un seul univers, le web.

Contact : gabriel.rouet@gmail.com
------------

The following work is based on the study of a musical and social environment on the internet, known as the vaporwave. My focus was to decrypt and understand how these living spaces are organized, and how their specificities generated singular music and behaviours. Indeed, at the beginning of the XXIth century, thanks to the computer and the internet, music became adaptable and hyper-available. Those devices defined our relations with music, and vaporwave, as one of the first musical genre that was born and prospered on the internet, embodies this idea. Those new means of communication revolutionized our way of organizing, building and living together. The public virtual plazas are numerous and the private conversations are international. This redefining of the objects, and thus the space, give way to new musical and social practices, and highlights the anonymity and pseudonymity of relationships. My methodology was to do a virtual field study based on the observations of the internet spaces and to interview, via web chat, artists, mediators and audiences all over the world. The sociological tool proved to be relevant to analyse this musical movement. As one of the first genre of music organized online, vaporwave provided a suitable example for exploration of the interactions between each world, the websites, as part of one universe, the web.

Contact : gabriel.rouet@gmail.com

We examine two 'producer-oriented' audio distribution platforms, SoundCloud and Bandcamp, that have been important repositories for the hopes of musicians, commentators and audiences that digital technologies and cultural platforms might promote democratisation of the cultural industries, and we compare their achievements and limitations in this respect. We show that the emancipatory elements enshrined in SoundCloud's 'bottom-up' abundance are compromised by two elements that underpin the platform: the problematic 'culture of connectivity' of the social media systems to which it must remain integrally linked, and the systems of intellectual property that the firm has been increasingly compelled to enforce. By contrast, it seems that Bandcamp has been relatively stable in financial terms while being at odds with some key aspects of 'platformization', and we explore the possibility that some of the platform's apparent success may derive from how...