Participatory Culture & Music Media

## **Participatory Culture and Music Media**

Today, music has the possibility to traverse across genres that have never been done before. Take a song from the 1950’s and converge it with a newly released track for an ultimate sound addiction. Mashups and mixtapes are just one of the many ways to express creativity within music media. Mixtapes are created by two already esteemed songs which are then transformed into one epic attempt of a mix of sounds. It takes skill and a good ear to find the correct places to mix in various genres and styles of music together. Sometimes these mixtapes or mashups have a humorous appeal. Overall, this unique type of music media of mixtapes and mashups are a form of digital rhetoric known as participatory culture.

### **What is Participatory Culture as related to Music?**

> Participatory culture is defined by Henry Jenkins as “culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways”  (Con­fronting the Chal­lenges p.8).
>
>

It is about active participation with existing media in order to create a new and unique form of that media. People can use their creative skills to contribute and create their own form of media content that may encourage online social connections with others who have done the same thing. Users do not have to be experts at creating a mixtape or cover song, but rather experienced creators pass on their work to novices for their own participation. People play an active role in media flows today and this is largely because of the participatory culture that it allows.

Additionally, Henry Jenkins article titled, “Sticky and Spreadable”, relates the media environment with this key term, spreadable. He rejects that the media environment is a virus, as some support, because he says that people make a conscious decision about what media they are passing along and the forms within they are circulating it. To actively participate within a media culture, there must be a spreadable element to then go on and create a personal addition to that media culture. A viral effect would look more like a creation of a media component out of necessity which we all know is not the case. Music is about as spreadable as it gets. Even songs we can’t stand can go from our computers/ipods/phones to being stuck in our heads for an entire day. For example: Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen. The catchy lyrics of her song is what got this song to seven hundred million viewers. A huge part of participatory culture are covers. Below the Carly Rae Jepsen, Lunity sings her own parody of Call Me Maybe. See More Covers and Parodies at http://networked-culture.wikia.com/wiki/Web\_Cam\_Covers,\_Covers,\_and\_Parodies

    Therefore, we spend hours working in garage band, playing guitar and practicing our dance moves with our music to create and add our new version of music media. Hwanho Choi and Bernard Burnes wrote in their article titled, "The Internet and Value Co-creation: The Case of the Popular Music Industry” about this dual relationship between the producer and consumer of the music industry. They use the words *open-innovation* and *co-creation* to stress the value of this formation relationship. Overall, music media can be used to artistically create our own versions of songs and videos of music.

    **YouTube** is just one example of users creating their own form of media. The structure of YouTube is about **YOU**, the creator, the thinker, the tech savvy dude ect. It encourages participation and creation of new ideas, innovative thinking, self-help videos and more from viewers like you; the ordinary joes and students. YouTube is a great example of music media and participatory culture clashing.

**Continue to Mixtapes and Mashups- What's up?!?**

##### *References:*

1)     Jenkins, Henry. "If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead (Part Two): Sticky and Spreadable — Two Paradigms." Confessions of an AcaFan. Wordpress, 13 Feb. 2009. Web. 24 June 2015. http://henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if\_it\_doesnt\_spread\_its\_dead\_p\_1.html

2) Choi, Hwanho, and Bernard Burnes. "The Internet and Value Co-creation: The Case of the Popular Music
Industry." Prometheus 31.1 (2013): 35-53. Chinook Plus. Web. 25 June 2015.

3) Jenkins, *Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture Media Education for the 21st Century*. MIT Press, 2009 (eBook). Web. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/confronting-challenges-participatory-culture