Composing Playlists, Conducting Streams: The Life of Classical Music in the Internet Age

Composing Playlists, Conducting Streams: The Life of Classical Music in the Internet Age Public Deposited

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Abstract

By focusing on classical music recordings and new ways in which they are disseminated and listened to, this paper examines the role of the internet in the changing relationship between classical music and its listeners. Despite frequent assertions by journalists and critics that classical music is dead or dying, the internet provides much evidence that it is, in fact, thriving. Taking this vitality as a starting point, I argue that the nature of classical music's relevance is being redefined. The forces of eBusiness, technology, and musical taste are changing the very notion of what it means to be a classical music listener. In order to better understand the cultural significance of these changes I put them into an historical and musical context using two websites, Pandora.com and eClassical.com, as case studies.

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