Mediating Musical Experience: Studying the Effects of the Remix on Patterns of Music Production and Consumption

This work investigates the musical remix as a mediator of significant changes to the production and consumption of contemporary popular music. Based on a fundamental assumption from the intellectual tradition of Media Ecology---that the form of a medium shapes its content---I argue that remixed music is responsible for the following changes: First, performance and compositional practices, the dissemination of music, and the ways in which composers are recruited and compensated for their work reflect the growing importance of remixing as a marketing tool for original music, as remixing has begun to occupy a more prominent role within the music industry. Moreover, the increased significance of remixed music has allowed intermediaries, specifically music bloggers, to carve out new roles for themselves in the digital music industry. Next, the ubiquitous nature of remixed music as it appears in both public and private consumption circumstances increases the likelihood that listeners will experience "reordered listening," or the act of coming into contact with a derivative version of a song prior to hearing the original version upon which the derivative is based. Because reordered listening results in an alteration of the traditional order of music consumption, where the original version is beard before the derivative version, listeners become more open to pursuing a path of discovery that leads to the remixer rather than the original artist. Finally, frequent exposure to remixed music via reordered listening results in a greater acceptance of derivative song production as an expression of originality and as an important component of contemporary music culture. 1 conclude that the effects of remixing on music production and consumption patterns are both significant and measurable, and encourage changes to patterns of music production and consumption that indicate the increasingly important role of remixed music as a component of the music industry and as a reflection of contemporary music culture.