Contextual Marketing

The online distribution of music has altered its materiality, its presentation, and the practices of its interpretation. Participatory online environments empower listeners to rank, review, and classify music, adding new layers of meaning and context to the works in question. At the same time, popular streaming platforms provide the means for compilations by listeners, once again creating new and often arbitrary connections. This approach to music is accompanied by the concept of “contextual marketing” introduced in this chapter. The professional online contextualization of music complements the amateur approaches, leading to a new network of references and pop-cultural connections. The chapter shows how some of these labeling techniques work and how some of the related platforms are organized to provide a snapshot of the status quo of online music distribution and the resulting consequences for the way we perceive and construct musical affiliations in the digital age.