Woods, Christopher 
ORCID: 0000-0001-8494-935X
(2023)
Orchestrating the Ecosystem: How Music Making is Transformed in the Digital Age.
Doctor of Philosophy thesis, University of Liverpool.
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Abstract
This thesis aims to understand how digitalisation transforms musical production. Following a process of theory retroduction, this investigation draws upon and contributes to management literature in accounting for and explaining recent changes in practices of music making. Principally autoethnographic, this study pragmatically fuses personal experiences of being an active musician and consistent band member for over a decade with an ethnography built from pragmatic applications of netnography and semi-structured ethnographic interviews. An initial round of grounded theory analysis found that digitalisation has empowered musicians and helped constitute a hypercompetitive marketplace. The effect of this is that musicians are despondent, awash in a sea of uncertainty and unable to grasp hold of their digital futures. In seeking means of understanding these impacts, the process of retroduction takes us to the field of digital entrepreneurship, where a digital technology perspective of entrepreneurship considers the affordance of entrepreneurial ecosystems, representing a valuable addition to this investigation's initial cultural entrepreneurship framing. Once again, however, the data suggests limitations in the core assumptions of digital entrepreneurship and instead formulates a critical theory of the digital which deepens our understanding of digitalisation. Data shows musicians in the digital age are experiencing alienation supercharged by the formal rationality which underpins the logic of digital and computational technologies. The conceptual refinement achieved in this study culminates with a final turn to the field of Information Systems, operationalising fresh insights such as digital object theories and the idea that digitalisation results in processes of ontological reversal in developing a digital-first framing. Reinterpreting the data using the properties of digital objects (embeddedness, interactivity, malleability and sociomateriality), this research produces a novel means of exploring and re-theorising digitalisation contributing a digital technology perspective of cultural entrepreneurship, a renewal of the digital technology perspective of entrepreneurship (more broadly) by drawing upon the latest insights from Information Systems as well as suggesting critical theory as an approach that deepens our understanding of digitalisation, lacking in most mainstream management accounts. The final contribution of this thesis is a novel empirical-ethnographic account of music making within a contemporary digital milieu.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctor of Philosophy) |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Management |
| Depositing User: | Symplectic Admin |
| Date Deposited: | 30 Jan 2024 09:11 |
| Last Modified: | 30 Jan 2024 09:11 |
| DOI: | 10.17638/03176627 |
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| URI: | https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3176627 |
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