Ole J. Mjos - Music, Social Media and Global Mobility: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube

Routledge Advances in Internationalizing Media Studies

E DITED BY D AYA T HUSSU , University of Westminster

1Media Consumption and

Everyday Life in Asia

Edited by Youna Kim

2Internationalizing Internet

Studies

Beyond Anglophone Paradigms

Edited by Gerard Goggin

and Mark McLelland

3Iranian Media

The Paradox Modernity

Gholam Khiabany

4Media Globalization and the

Discovery Channel Networks

Ole J. Mjos

5Audience Studies

A Japanese Perspective

Toshie Takahashi

6Global Media Ecologies

Networked Production in Film

and Television

Doris Baltruschat

7Music, Social Media and Global

Mobility

MySpace, Facebook, YouTube

Ole J. Mjs

Various individuals have contributed in different ways in making this book possible.

I thank my colleagues Hallvard Moe and Lars Nyre for reading and commenting on chapters and extracts and for help shaping the book, and Moe in particular for his continuous support and role in implementing a both humane and productive writing regime. I am indebted to Frode Guribye, Daya Thussu, Patrik Wikstrm, and John Urry for reading an earlier version of the manuscript and providing valuable feedback and suggestions for improvement. It goes without saying that any remaining inaccuracies and errors of fact or interpretations are entirely my own.

I am thankful to Monika Bscher as well as John Urry for letting me spend time and present my work at the Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University, UK. I thank Joseph Turow and Monroe Price for giving me the opportunity to reside as visiting scholar at the Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, US.

I would like to express my gratitude to Daya Thussu, series editor, for continuous counsel, and Kjetil Rommetveit, Espen Sommer Eide, Vegard Moberg Nilsen, Birthe Skotheim, Ketil Mosnes, Kristian Stockhaus, Aksel Mjs, Espen Ytreberg, Trine Syvertsen, Vilde Schanke Sundet, Karoline Ihlebk, Gunn Enli, Jostein Gripsrud, Dag Elgesem, Astrid Gynnild and Knut Helland for comments, help, or advice on various parts and aspects of the book project at different stages.

I am grateful to my current employer, the Department of Information Science and Media Studies and the Faculty of Social Science, University of Bergen (UiB), Norway, for generously giving me the time and resources to complete this book.

I am thankful to everyone who kindly let me interview them for this project, to Felisa Salvago-Keyes, Julie Ganz and Erica Wetter at Routledge, to Elizabeth Thussu for editing the manuscriptfor which I am most grateful, as well as Michael Watters at IBT, and Ingebjrg Braseth, masters student at the department, UiB, for great help with organizing the appendix and bibliography.

Finally, I thank my mother Kari, father Ole, and my sisters Hilde and Elisabeth Mjs, and all my dear friends for continuous encouragement and warm support over the years.

The idea for this book project came about when as a former electronic music practitioner, I started to think about how this practice seemed to have changed over the last decades. I was involved in this part of the music sector throughout the 1990s, both as producer and as administratorclose to a decade. I contributed on records released by record labels based in Europein the UK, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Since 1997 I have been living in Bergen, a small city on the west coast of Norway, first as a music practitioner, before moving into television documentary production and then into academia. Since the turn of the millennium, a number of electronic music artists, producers, and DJs based in Bergen have experienced success internationally. Media on both sides of the Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent , the BBC, Billboard , and MTV , have all given considerable attention to what particularly the press refers to as a Bergen scene. Today, still living in Bergen, but now working as a media researcher at the University of Bergen in the fields of international communication and global media studies, observing former colleagues and current friends involved in the electronic music scene, I have been struck by how different their music practice seems, particularly the increasing use of the internet. I observed how from the mid-2000s the internationally expanding social media, MySpace, seemed to have become a key tool and a new arena for many of them in a relatively short time. What fascinated me in particular was how MySpace facilitated audio and visual user participation for these electronic music practitioners in Bergen, while at the same time MySpace was controlled by the media mogul Rupert Murdochs News Corporation. This local music scene had suddenly become part of a global social media service owned by one of the worlds largest media conglomerates (for many years central in the international communications and global media discourses). News Corporations acquisition of MySpace in 2005 was one of the conglomerates key strategies for securing a position online. From these electronic music practitioners, I heard how they created profiles on MySpace to promote and access music and information, to get to know other musicians, to connect with music scenes, to distribute concert flyers and videos, and to communicate with fans and fellow practitionersboth in the local community and across the world in the UK, US, Australia, and Japan. At the same time, stories of the wonders of MySpace and its ability to break music artists internationally began to appear in the mainstream press worldwide. This was very different from my professional experience in the 1990s as a music practitioner.