"My House Is Your House": Genre Conventions, Myspace Musicians, and Music Genre Self-Identification

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 10. Digital Cultures

Abstract

Music genres provide a widely shared heuristic to draw symbolic boundaries and categorize music, musicians, and listeners. Building on Silver et al.’s (2016) big-data analysis of genre combinations and boundaries from every Myspace musician profile in 2007, this paper aims to understand the cognitive mechanisms at work when musicians decide on which genres to identify their music with. Theorizing a link between genre conventions, institutional logics, and musicians’ self-identification, this paper’s cultural cognitivist approach argues that musicians understand music genres through socially constructed music conventions. These cultural conventions are employed when musicians are faced with the problem of orienting their genres towards potential listeners with a limited selection of available genres, and shape how musicians may use and combine music genres to self-identify their profiles. As these genres play a large role in people finding and listening to their music, selecting genres is an important aspect of the identities (and success) of musicians. Though the data is becoming dated, the theoretical implications of this paper are salient in the search to better understand how people self-identify through widely shared cultural conventions and meanings, and how others are excluded from accessing these conventions and the resources they may bequeath.

Author

• Soli Dubash, University of Toronto