Digital Formations of Popular Music

The paper represents a broad attempt to take stock of some of the challenges, dilemmas and issues sparked by an engagement with digital formations in music, where formations are loosely configured amalgamations of discursive, technical and material practices. After navigating some of the problems of constructing a narrative of digitalisation sensitive to historical change and complexity in the post 1980s era, the paper seizes upon four overlapping areas of cultural production that require attention: producers, devices, styles and practices. If the rise of digitally-enabled non-professional musicians are raising questions about open regimes of expertise (as folded into the figure of the “new amateur”), then it is important to show how an engagement with digital devices implies a shift both in the expectations around what belongs in music (in particular, processes of estrangement and normalisation in the case of the laptop) and the everyday practices, movements and routines of production in the spaces of digital audio software. All of this implies a corollary opening up of styles and a liquefication of genre categories, including the rise of the mashup. By operationalising these four themes, we can better see the territory of cultural production and creative work as nudged and shaken by developments in “hypermodern” societies, where the concerns of cultural modernity are stretched, extended and radicalised by digital formations. The paper, therefore, exercises caution in attributing to the digital a modality of revolution, when a more circumspect, material approach is much better able to capture changing practices and conditions of production as a complex co-existence of old and new.