Youtube and the user-generated music categories

Music, as well as any other cultural form, has always been segmented into categories (e.g. highbrow vs popular) and genres. Although, according to literature (e.g. Lena & Peterson 2008; Middleton 1990), musical styles are socially and culturally co-constructed by the contexts of production and consumption, sociological studies have often assumed artistic divisions being “natural” (Di Maggio 1987:441), without adequately problematizing the categories used to record and label cultural consumption patterns. However, music “is always in movement” (Middleton 1990:7), and many scholars in sociology stress the need for inductive approaches in the study of cultural consumption (e.g. Savage et al. 2013), in order to better understand the grassroot ways in which music is perceived and semantically clustered by listeners themselves. The massive penetration of digital technologies and social media into our daily lives has sharply reshaped the patterns of music consumption. The diffusion of platforms like YouTube and Spotify has originated a fragmented scenario where production, circulation and consumption collapse in a unique domain. This contribution aims at intervening in this debate by questioning the extent and boundaries of music genres in the age of digital music consumption. This will be done through the network analysis of YouTube’s user-generated music associations, retrieved from a large dataset of more than 22k (22141) music videos.