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Comunicar Journal 34: Musics and screens (Vol. 17 - 2010)
Music distribution in the consumer society: The creation of cultural identities through sound
Jaime Hormigos-Ruiz
Our behavior is determined by the characteristics of the culture in which we live. Culture imposes on us ways of thinking and perceiving, habits, customs and usages. Music is a form of cultural expression that has a very important role in the social construction of reality. Music has always accompanied man, is one of the oldest rituals of human kind. No one knows exactly how and why the man has started to make music but the music has been a means of perceiving the world, a powerful instrument of knowledge. Traditionally, creation and distribution of music has been tied to the need to communicate feelings and experiences that can not be expressed through common language. This paper describes how our society has generated a multitude of sounds that are distributed freely through the new technologies. This set of sounds is creating cultural identities that are unable to manage his current music and understand their communicative speech. To this end, the paper examines the profound changes that music is experiencing in a consumer society. These changes make it necessary to establish a new paradigm for analysis that allows structuring the diversity of sounds, analyzing their creation, distribution and consumption. Finally, the paper states that permanent contact with the music changes the way we perceive sounds. In contemporary society, music has gone from being a vital need to become an instrument of consumption. This has led to significant changes in their functions, significance and social use.
Keywords
Music, communication, music production, music distribution, speech sound, cultural identity, consumer society