A musical genre’s distribution infrastructure shapes whether it stays hyperlocal or goes global

Evidence

That London-centric system focused around illegal radio stations seems to be gradually disintegrating. It is still what fuels the funky house scene, its primary audience is still “locked on” to the pirate signal. In fact I’m told that there aren’t many funky raves or clubs at all, and hardly any vinyl releases or compilations, so the only way to hear funky is through the pirate transmissions. But dubstep, like drum ‘n’ bass before it, is much more of UK national scene, and also an international scene. Martin Clark, a leading journalist on the scene and also a DJ and recording artist using the name Blackdown, told me something interesting. The Rinse FM show that he and Dusk do, which is eclectic post-dubstep in orientation, gets a high proportion of its audience responses, message and requests, through the internet, from as far afield as Finland or New Zealand (the Rinse FM signal goes out on the internet as well as broadcast through the air). But the pure funky house shows get most of their requests and calls as texts from cellphone users who live within the terrestrial broadcast range of the pirate stations. So funky is still a local scene in the traditional hardcore continuum sense, it is very much East London. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1261

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to ideas about how media infrastructure and geography shape underground music scenes, resonating with the soundscape material in the reader’s library about how communications tech shapes culture. — connects to: A music culture’s vitality can depend on intense local territorialization rather than global flow — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1262; Popular music scenes depend on discrete physical spaces and temporal occasion that cyberspace erodes — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1264; A globally-marketed app flattens local music markets into Western playlists — Crystal Abidin and Megan Lindsay Brown (eds.), Microcelebrity Around the Globe:…, 473
• QUESTION: Worth asking whether community radio digitization elsewhere has triggerred comparable splits between hyperlocal and globalized circuits of the same scene.
• SHARE: A funky house scene circulating almost entirely through illegal pirate broadcasts — no raves, no vinyl — is exactly the sort of media-geography detail a music-obsessed friend would want.

Broader Connections

• A music culture’s vitality can depend on intense local territorialization rather than global flow #corroborates (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1262
• A globally-marketed app flattens local music markets into Western playlists #contradicts (0.75) — Crystal Abidin and Megan Lindsay Brown (eds.), Microcelebrity Around the Globe, 473
• Popular music scenes depend on discrete physical spaces and temporal occasion that cyberspace erodes #expands (0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1264