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This paper examines how unsigned musicians in two college towns (Ville and Polis) encounter the digital information and communication technologies that have caused a reorganization of the music industry. Specifically, I outline the meanings musicians give to their activities as performers and recording artists and the ways that they put digital technologies to use in their activities. I argue that the ethos of Do It Yourself (D.I.Y.), emerging from 1980s and 1990s indie and hip-hop music subcultures, and realized through increased access to self-recording and self-distribution, has become a central pervasive value that unsigned musicians use to orient their activities. However, the effects of digital technologies on the music industry have created a situation in which musicians have no choice but to do it themselves. The music industry has externalized the costs of cultural production to artists themselves, requiring musicians to deploy their own personal capital (financial, human and social) in order to support their musical activities and have to gain access to music industry organizations (such as labels and management). This means that personal capital, deployed in both creative and socially determined ways, may have a significant effect on who and what will be heard in the digital age. Such a situation redefines the traditional boundaries sociologists have used to analyze production and consumption within a vertical centralized organizational structure and suggests a model that examines the vanishing distinction between the creation and consumption of digital media throughout rhizomatic networks of individuals, grassroots music organizations, and new media companies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local musicians used to get gigs playing 'covers' of popular songs that would entertain local audiences. With access to self-made media and Internet distribution, local musicians now have new opportunities to create and distribute their own original music. In this ethnographic account of local musicians living in a college town, I examine how changes in technology and marketing inform the practice of grassroots cultural production. Specifically, I explain how musicians understand their identity as cultural producers, the ways that macro level changes in technology and the music industry shape local level institutions, and how musicians are engaging in new forms of work within their local, but globally mediated, social context. I find that local musicians have invested their leisure time and expendable income into the labor of creating local music scenes in which they create music for an imagined mass audience while building real-time social connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of consumer capitalism, is there any such thing as music that is produced outside of the culture industry? The distinction between mass culture and local or independently made culture is central to musician's evaluations of their craft and to sociologist's analyses of music making. This paper questions the salience of this distinction. It is an ethnographic project on the music scene of a small college town that has lofty aims as the self-proclaimed "center of the musical universe." Its thriving local scene is generated in large part by the financial and social capital of a group of local rock musicians and entrepreneurs who have gained national fame in the music industry. These men have invested their capital back into the local economy, tying their businesses to the city's experiments in new urbanism. At the same time, other music businesses and organizations form to resist the monopoly these men have on the scene. I argue that the tension between local monopoly and local resistance generates important resources for rock musicians and young college alumni entering into culture industry professions. Yet at the same time, those who play other genres such as metal, hip-hop and Latin music are sidelined within the local economy. As cultural resources are becoming synonymous with economic resources, access to making local culture is a new indicator of existing social inequalities in urban spaces. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For amateur musicians, the first trip to an instrument store can be enlightening. For others the trip can be alienating. For those steeped in rock culture and comfortable with demonstrating their technical knowledge, the experience can be a chance to solidify and demonstrate their identities as authentic musicians. Yet for others with different experiences, such as playing privately, knowing more about hip-hop than rock, or having classical training on the guitar rather than emersion in the rock music practice, the experience can be a struggle to comprehend the language and interactions of the environment. Finding themselves in this position, these musicians may defer to others to perform, speak and choose in their place. My interest in this paper has to do with how musical categories and technological knowledge are performed in the everyday setting of the music store in ways that are politically charged, lending some people considerable voice, presence and legitimacy and rendering other people silent, back-grounded and inauthentic. Through participant observation of three musical instrument stores, I construct an ethnography of the gendered and raced dynamics of rock music as they are constructed around the technologies used to make it. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major concerns of the sociology of culture has been the question of whether culture has relative autonomy in relation to economic structures. This debate mainly centers on an interpretation of Marxist base-superstructure theory that defines culture as merely superstructural, and, more specifically, as a simple reflection of economic interests and relations. This understanding leads to the conception of culture as relatively powerless rather than as a structuring force in its own right. Synthesizing and elaborating work in anthropology and social theory, we examine what it would mean to understand and to study culture as logical, coherent system of meaning. Further, we return to the Marxist concern for power and inequality by outlining the significance of the notion of cultural logic in these terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]