Chapter

Radio

Abstract

Since Lee de Forest’s first experimental music and voice broadcasts in 1914 (Douglas 1999: 51), music on the radio has meant many things: a Beethoven concert in a rural family’s parlor, Chuck Berry on a teenager’s transistor radio, Dionne Warwick underscoring a dentist visit, and Last.fm’s “Lorde and Similar” playing on computer speakers. Such scenarios embody an array of new social possibilities, as well as the ways that radio has profoundly reshaped music’s cultural role. In attempting to understand these changes, as well as the complex structural forces that shape radio programming, scholars have initiated numerous lines of inquiry. Cutting across a range of historical and cultural contexts, their questions cluster around four key concerns: 1. Audience: What individuals and groups constitute radio’s listeners? How are their identities understood in terms of gender, age, race/ethnicity, nationality, class and taste? What agency do they have in interpreting-and influencing-music that is broadcast? Should they be conceptualized as consumers of a product, a market for advertisers, citizens participating in the public life of a democracy, a community or a brainwashed mass?.

Authors

Baade C

Book title

Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music

Pagination

pp. 309-317

Publication Date

January 1, 2015

DOI

10.4324/9780203736319-34
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