Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption:

A Critical Assessment of Recent Developments

Nick Prior*
University of Edinburgh
Abstract
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has been an extraordinarily inuential gure in the sociol-
ogy of music. For over three decades, his concepts have helped to generate both empirical and
theoretical interventions in the eld of study. His impact on the sociology of music taste, in par-
ticular, has been profound, his ideas directly informing our understandings of how musical prefer-
ences reect and reproduce inequalities between social classes. But, recently his legacy has been
under question and newer approaches to the music society problematic have emerged. These have
made important claims about the nature of the sociological enterprise when confronted with the
specicity of cultural works, as well as how social change impacts on our relations with musical
forms. This paper takes stock of the impact of Bourdieus ideas on the sociology of music, the
debates sparked in their wake and the attempt at something like a post-Bourdieusian sociology
more faithful to musics material properties. It will ask to what extent Bourdieus claims about
social stratication and music consumption are still relevant and whether they are sophisticated
enough to deal with the specic ways that we interact with musical forms.
Introduction
Do you like jazz? If you do there is a strong likelihood that you will also like classical
music but be less well inclined towards hip hop. How about heavy metal? Chances are if
you are a fan of AC DC, Motorhead and Black Sabbath, then youll also like rock music,
but be less than enthralled with country and western. These, at least, are some of the
ndings from a recent large-scale study of the structuring of cultural tastes in Britain
(Bennett et al. 2009). People, it seems, not only tend to specify clear preferences for par-
ticular music genres, but do so passionately and in mutually exclusive ways. Strenuously
liking x is often accompanied by an equally strenuous disliking of y (Bryson 1996). Tastes
for certain types of music are also correlated with social variables, according to the
research. A preference for urban music is more likely to be found amongst 1824 year
olds, for instance, whereas the active pursuit of classical music is predominantly the
preserve of the educated middle classes.
These ndings might not be all that surprising. Not only do they echo the widespread
assumption that peoples tastes are inuenced by the social groups that they belong to,
but they also show that genre categories matter (Negus 1999a). When asked what kinds
of music we like, our recourse is normally to such categories, after all. We are, rst and
foremost, fans of techno, reggae, jazz, indie, rap and so on. But can the totality of our
music tastes really be measured so precisely with social scientic instruments? Is it possible
to encapsulate our attachments to music by mapping our preferences to social indicators
and taste clusters? As music lovers we might feel irritated by these ndings precisely
because we invest so much of our selves in music (Frith 1996). We gure music to be a
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personal expression of our individuality, to be inherently pleasurable and therefore
beyond rational measurement. There really is nothing like an academic study to suck the
fun out of music!
But this scepticism is increasingly shared by scholars in the social scientic community,
too. Some have argued that putting our tastes into boxes and matching them to socio-
economic categories neglects the ways our lives are intimately entwined with music,
including how it surprises us or modulates our tastes and emotions (DeNora 2000;
Hennion 2007). Others have suggested that musical tastes are open and uid rather than
attached to tightly dened groups, as consumers listen to and appreciate a diverse range
of styles (Peterson and Kern 1996). This is particularly so with the rise of digital technol-
ogies and the browse-click-store capabilities of devices like ipods (Jones 2006; Bull 2007).
When the whole history of music is available at our ngertips, arent our tastes always
undergoing redenition, mutation and expansion?
At the centre of these debates is the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. For it is
Bourdieu whose work has become the touchstone for sociological examinations of taste
and consumption. Bourdieus formidable tome, Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), in particular,
stands as arguably the most inuential study of cultural preferences ever conducted. Based
on data collected in France in the 1960s, Bourdieu shows that distinctions between goods
in the universe of cultural objects are also social distinctions that help crystallise inequali-
ties in society at large. Here, the selections that we make as consumers sh and chips
or foie gras are not irreducible personal discernments (we just like this or that dish,
band or television programme). Rather, they are expressions of our upbringing, occupa-
tion and whether we went to university or not in short our social class. Consumer
choices also have structural implications, according to Bourdieu, because they stack onto
already existing differences between higher and lower social classes and the relative afni-
ties they have for higher or lower culture. Personal tastes and cultural distinctions, in
other words, are signicant to the maintenance of social divisions in a stratied society.
The following article traces the impact of Bourdieus ideas on the sociology of music,
specically that corner of sociological research focused on consumption and taste. Ten
years after his death, the legacy of Bourdieus thinking is still keenly felt in the way sociolo-
gists talk about and understand musical tastes. If not quite paradigmatic, Bourdieus concep-
tual apparatus has provided an important frame of reference for a critical sociology
concerned with showing how power and inequality are central to categorisations of music
(Prior 2011). But Bourdieus legacy is now under question and in this post-Bourdieu
moment, it is pertinent to ask two questions. Firstly, to what extent do Bourdieus claims
about social stratication and music consumption still hold up today? In other words, what
assumptions can we make based on available data about the relationship between social
inequalities and patterns of music consumption? Secondly, are Bourdieus ideas sophisti-
cated enough to deal with the specic ways that we interact with musical forms, their
active presence in our everyday lives and the meanings we attach to them? If not, what
alternative approaches are there and where do they lead us theoretically and empirically?
After a brief description of Bourdieus sociological conception of taste, then, the article
will examine what might be called the turn to Bourdieu in the sociology of music and
assess some of the key controversies and debates sparked in its wake.
Music, class and cultural capital
Bourdieu didnt have a great deal to say about music. What he did say, however, was
striking. In Distinction, he writes the following:
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nothing more clearly afrms ones class, nothing more infallibly classies, than tastes in
music (Bourdieu 1984, 18).
For Bourdieu, knowledge of music represents a distinctly pure knowledge because its
presence is marked less by an outward display (as with museum visiting or cuisine) and
more by an inner appreciation in the form of listening. It is in musics silence and rarity
that it expresses its symbolic potency. Here, Bourdieu is limiting his observations to clas-
sical music, but his broader point is that in separating itself from the real world, classi-
cal music is opposed to the immediate gratications of light or popular entertainment.
A distinction is immediately apparent, here, between high and low culture in the ways
that these worlds are organized and the connections of the former to the nest achieve-
ments of European civilisation. As legitimate culture, classical music gathers around it the
highest values of aesthetic formalism associated with Kantian disinterestedness. This is
the idea that in its dependence on form (how) rather than function (what), classical music
is nothing but itself, it says nothing and has nothing to say (Bourdieu 1984, 19).
But herein lies the ruse of the ideology of natural taste. For what Bourdieu shows is
that an appreciation for high culture is not a matter of pure aesthetic judgment at all, but
a product of privileged social conditions that are the foundation for the instillation of
stocks of cultural resources. These resources comprise what Bourdieu calls cultural capi-
tal, acquired as individuals undergo processes of socialization in the family and school
and which are manifest in the feel that they have for different types of culture. Whilst
those with high levels of cultural capital feel at home with esoteric culture and display an
understanding of the language needed to talk about it, those with low levels of cultural
capital are disenfranchised and feel out of their depth. Indeed, the lower classes often self-
exclude themselves from the game of high culture precisely because it feels alien to them.
Hence, the common phrase: its not for the likes of us.
Different class-based frames of reference for engaging with culture are embodied in what
Bourdieu calls the habitus. This is the system of unconscious dispositions which shape the
broad behavioural trajectories and life chances of individuals (Bourdieu 1992). It is Bourdieus
way of explaining how action tends to follow patterns without this being the result of either
willful strategising or mechanical determination. Instead, the habitus comprises a deeply inter-
nalized set of master patterns or mental habits that individuals resort to as part of the
social conditions in which they nd themselves. Formally dened by Bourdieu as a system
of durable, transposable dispositions (Bourdieu 1992, 53), the habitus can be understood as
something like cultural DNA. Though acquired, it is constantly activated in the minute details
of our bodily actions: what we say and how we say it, how we dress, our accent and deport-
ment. Whilst there is some disagreement amongst commentators about how much room the
habitus gives for deviation from rigid pathways of action, it is nevertheless a powerful way of
describing the consistent features of peoples lives (Jenkins 1992; Swartz 1997). It is able to
explain, for instance, why it is that people with similar educational backgrounds, who speak
the same language and see the world in a similar way, tend to partner up.
So how does music t here? Well, two points are worth extrapolating from Bourdieus
core ideas. Firstly, in terms of the development of a musical habitus, a child who grows
up in a household in which they are encouraged to play a noble instrument like the
piano or violin is already accumulating nascent mastery over legitimate musical culture.
Their upbringing is preparing them for membership of a polite world, a world which,
according to Bourdieu: is justied in existing by its perfection, its harmony and beauty,
a world which has produced Beethoven and Mozart and continues to produce people
capable of playing and appreciating them (Bourdieu 1984, 77).
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Early attendance at classical music concerts is similarly the passing down of an aesthetic
family heirloom dressed up as good grace, the ultimate effect of which is to turn objec-
tive structures (stratied inequalities) into embodied conduct (everyday actions). In short,
an inheritance of cultural capital is a predicate for musical distinction. One only has to
witness the force and regularity with which privately-educated children are encouraged
by their parents to play a classical instrument to see the dispositions of a rened musical
habitus in gestation.
Secondly, however, the lower and dominated classes are, for Bourdieu, left to consume
less revered and challenging types of music. At the time that Bourdieu was writing,
distinct afnities existed between petite-bourgeois consumers and what he termed mid-
dlebrow music. The popularity of Gershwins Rhapsody in Blue amongst technicians
and engineers was a case in point. Lower class respondents in domestic or manual work,
on the other hand, tended to favour the popular waltzes of Strauss or music whose sim-
ple, repetitive structures invite a passive absent participation (Bourdieu 1984, 386).
Here, Bourdieu is alluding to what we now call popular music and whilst he fails to reg-
ister its inner complexities, his point is that in the 1960s, this type of music existed in a
structured eld of relations that was opposed in terms of its value and market position to
classical music. It didnt have the same legitimacy or credibility as the former. It was, in
fact, devalued by its very popularization and dependence on commercial logics.
1
The turn to Bourdieu
Its not hard to see why sociologists of music extract so much analytical value from
Bourdieus ideas. Not only do they provide a way of making sense of the macro-historical
and organisational differences between classical and popular music, but they also unveil
the hidden sociological signicance of micro-musical preferences. Very few competing
approaches in the modern sociological tradition have revealed how society ts together at
a structural level while linking this to empirical data on everyday behaviour. Little won-
der, then, that Bourdieus ideas have been deployed to examine musical phenomena in a
variety of settings, from Brazilian and Japanese pop music (Frota 2006; Ferranti 2002) to
Italian opera and British indie rock (Johnson et al. 2007; Hibbett 2005).
Bourdieus impact on popular music studies, in particular, has been striking in the years
since Distinction was written. His concepts have been crucial to the development of a
modern sociology grappling with how the whole music society jigsaw ts together in a
period that has witnessed the radical expansion of the pop-rock eld. Bourdieus termi-
nology circulates widely in the discourses of associated conferences, journals and text-
books, while a veritable Bourdieu industry has sprung up in the discipline of sociology
at large (Prior 2011). Bourdieus impact on the sociology of music production has been
equally noteworthy. Indeed, two of Bourdieus texts, The Rules of Art (Bourdieu, 1996)
and The Field of Cultural Production (Bourdieu 1993), have set the grounds for a possible
sociology of creativity, where genre and aesthetic position-takings only make sense within
a structured setting of semi-autonomous activity. Contemporary scholars like Jason Toynbee
have effectively combined Bourdieus eld and habitus concepts to explain how music
making takes place within a radius of creativity (Toynbee 2000, 40), for instance, artic-
ulating local acts of creative agency with a historically-bounded set of institutions, markets
and constraints.
Bourdieus is not the only game in town, of course. Competing perspectives anchored
in other traditions such as feminism, semiotics, interactionism and critical theory, have in
many respects been just as inuential in the examination of music consumption and
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production. A focus on the stylistic and class-based elements of subcultures, for instance,
is central to the development of an inuential strand of British cultural studies from the
1980s, albeit one that tended to celebrate every act of consumption as resistance (Fiske
1989; Hebdige 1979). Adornos neo-Marxist critique of popular music as a sensuous but
standardized commodity, on the other hand, has remained an essential reference point,
particularly for those interested in examining industry structures (Hesmondalgh 2007b).
(This time, the problem has been in caricaturing consumers as passive dupes, however).
As far as the adoption of Bourdieus ideas is concerned, furthermore, it is far from the
case that popular music scholars have adopted Bourdieus ideas uncritically or in their
totality. Those who profess some sympathy for Bourdieus concepts have often pointed
to signicant shortcomings in his work, nding it overly rigid or lacking a convincing
account of technology and creative agency (Prior 2008; Born 2010).
On the other hand, a cursory glance at a handful of popular music studies texts illus-
trates Bourdieus canonical status in the eld (Rojek 2011; Bennett et al. 2006; Theberge
1997; Toynbee 2000). He is certainly a primary reference point for scholars collecting
empirical data on musical tastes as well as those with a more critical agenda looking to
explain how popular musics place in society is inseparable from questions of power and
inequality. Two notable works here are Simon Friths Performing Rites (1996) and Sarah
Thorntons Clubcultures (1995).
Frith begins Performing Rites, for instance, with a series of anecdotes that express the
centrality of judgment to the pleasures of popular music. To be engaged with popular
culture, he says, is to be discriminating (Frith 1996, 4). Arguments about the merits
of particular bands, genres and songs are the weft and weave of everyday musicking
(Small 1998) because they articulate with our desire to share with and relate to one
another. We assume, for instance, that we are likely to get on with someone with similar
tastes to ourselves and that someone with a comparable record collection or who makes
good playlists sees the world in a similar way to us.
Friths point, however, is that the claims made around knowledge of popular music are
also expressions of superiority and discrimination, just as they are in high culture and clas-
sical music. In other words, taste hierarchies dont just exist between high and low culture
but also within popular culture as well. Here, Bourdieus concept of cultural capital is
employed by Frith to show how a specic kind of capital native to popular music gener-
ates distinctions and struggles over what is aesthetically valuable. This plays out in claims
and counter-claims around whether certain bands are interesting or innovative, whether
their music challenges us or makes us think. Taking a value position on a bands progres-
sive credentials where terms such as edgy and alternative trip off the tongue are
simultaneously performances of ones discrimination and distance from overly-commercial
styles. Again, Frith is far from uncritical of Bourdieus conation of taste with class, not-
ing that pop tastes are not just expressions of class, gender or ethnic background but also
shape and potentially disrupt, extend and strengthen these sources of identication, a view
shared by Hesmondalgh (2007a). But still, that aesthetic valuation is central to musics
role as a social and collective identier is indisputable. After all, as Bourdieu (1993)
noted, there is symbolic prot to be made in knowing what is rare and exclusive.
This is a point developed more directly by Thornton (1995) in relation to the intricate
differentiations that operate in dance music. Based on a study of British rave culture in
the late 1980s and early 1990s, Thornton shows how the social world of clubbing is
structured around a deep division between chartpop and underground music. The
idea of the mainstream, in particular, is a potent device deployed by discerning club-
bers to distance themselves from consumers branded as fake. Here, the recurrent trope of
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Sharon and Tracy dancing around their handbags becomes an image of the tasteless
that structures the distinction strategies of the knowing raver. A clubbers hipness is
dened, instead, by a specialist insider knowledge of labels and genres, wearing the right
clothes and attending clubs perceived and constructed as authentic (see also Goulding
et al. 2002).
What is circulating here, for Thornton, is a subspecies of cultural capital she calls sub-
cultural capital. This she denes as being in the know, using (but not over-using)
current slang and looking as if you were born to perform the latest dance styles
(Thornton 1995, 1112). Though less moored in social class than age and gender categories,
subcultural capital nevertheless functions according to logics of social distinction. This is
clear in the way that clubbers wield their knowledge as a cultural weapon by articulating
a distaste for lower class females vilied as tacky and imitative. Such distinctions are asym-
metrical, for they involve both a claim to authority and an assumption of the inferiority
of others, according to Thornton. We are therefore back to the idea that musical prefer-
ences work in a structured eld of positions dened as much by dislikes as likes.
Indeed, Bennett et al.s (2009) far-reaching study of consumption habits in the UK,
which was itself modelled on Bourdieus investigations in Distinction, corroborates many
of Thorntons ndings. For instance, the authors describe a profoundly divided eld of
popular musical tastes in which people nd it hard to be neutral about their musical pref-
erences. When respondents were asked to report how much they liked or disliked a series
of eight different genres, for instance, the most common response on a sliding scale of
17 was 7, signifying extreme dislike. This included more than half of over 1500 respon-
dents expressing a deep aversion to heavy metal (see also Bryson 1996). I actually detest
R&B, one respondent says. I cant stand Abba, offers another (in Bennett et al.
2009, 88).
A deep social division between popular and classical music devotees is also apparent
from this data, with correlations between the latter and higher education. Graduates were
six times more likely to report a preference for classical music than those with no quali-
cations, for instance, whilst no working-class interviewees displayed a deep appreciation
for classical music, according to the authors (Bennett et al. 2009). Clearly, differentials in
cultural capital still work themselves out in divisions between classical and contemporary
music, as they did in Bourdieus study. Symbolic legitimacy still circulates around classical
music as an elite pursuit, with opera serving, in particular, as an outlet for respectable
socialising (Bennett et al. 2009, 92).
But two important qualications emerge from Bennett et al.s study. The rst implies a
subtle historical update of Bourdieus ideas. The study shows that it is no longer in the
eld of classical music that intense position-takings and attachments occur. Indeed, many
respondents viewed classical music as background music that they listened to for the sole
purpose of relaxation and therefore not music to get particularly animated about (Bennett
et al. 2009). This leads the authors to the conclusion that the symbolic power of classical
music may be declining among middle-class groups. Rather, it is in the eld of popular
music that the most potent and intense attachments take place, and where the most sig-
nicant internal divisions occur. Aesthetic judgments now mark out what are sometimes
quite narrow differences between groups in the contemporary eld, essential to which is,
contra Bourdieu, the circulation of forms of popular cultural capital. In other words, if
contemporary pop music was once the poor relation at the fringes of legitimate culture it
is now rmly at the centre of the eld of musical production.
The second qualication, however, implies something more contentious. For while
Bennett et al.s study contains some evidence of a relationship between social indicators
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and musical tastes, it also suggests changes to the way these tastes intersect with social
class and cultural capital. In particular, the study nds some openness and diversity in the
range of musical styles enjoyed by respondents, raising the prospect that certain consum-
ers are less univorous in their musical diets, sampling instead from across a range of
genres conventionally seen as high, low and middlebrow. In other words, certain music
consumers are more eclectic or omnivorous in their tastes than was assumed by
Bourdieu, undermining the central connection that he makes between taste and cultural
capital.
The challenge to Bourdieu
Known as the cultural omnivore thesis, this idea is associated with the work of the
American sociologist Richard A. Peterson and contains a direct empirical challenge to
Bourdieus ideas in Distinction. Petersons claim is that taste regimes in contemporary soci-
eties have undergone a shift away from a dichotomous model of elite-to-mass culture
(snob versus slob), to a situation characterised by a new openness amongst higher-class
consumers to a diverse repertoire of cultural goods. Such consumers no longer restrict
their tastes to elite forms of art, goes the argument, but participate in a heterogeneous
range of cultural practices and receive some degree of prestige from doing so (Peterson
and Simkus 1992). A looser set of connections is therefore implied between social strati-
cation and taste variables, casting doubt on any model that posits a tight and exclusive
relation between them.
The debates sparked by these claims have reverberated loudly in the eld of cultural
sociology, where a number of subsequent studies have attempted to critically engage
with, rene or elaborate on the omnivore thesis (Atkinson 2011). Outstanding questions
include to what extent the trend to omnivorousness is supported by the data at all,
whether it is a recent historical shift, local to the U.S. or designates a more widespread,
democratic cultural condition. There is also some discussion around what omnivorousness
actually means. Is it liking everything indiscriminately or something like an openness
to appreciate everything (Warde et al. 2008)? Peterson and Kern are careful to point out
that omnivorousness does not mean a complete indifference to distinctions. Rather they
say, its emergence may suggest the formulation of new rules governing symbolic bound-
aries (Peterson and Kern 1996, 904). But this still raises the question of what thresholds
of engagement must exist for omnivorousness to register empirically. Does a passing
knowledge for popular cultural forms count? And if so, what does passing knowledge
actually mean? Is it recognising, naming, buying and liking things or some deeper
engagement with cultural goods (Bennett et al. 1999)?
In the sociology of music, these debates have particular resonance because the thrust of
the omnivore thesis rests on the interpretation of data on music tastes. Peterson and
Simkus (1992) are quick to emphasise that more of the higher-ranking occupational
groups in their study preferred music genres conventionally seen as lowbrow, like country
and western, than those considered highbrow, like opera. The claim that higher groups
are more inclusive in their tastes is also evident, for Peterson and Simkus, in the way such
groups seek out and appropriate edgy popular forms (Negus 1999b). Nowadays, there
may be as much cultural cachet in name-checking a Kanye West track as recognising a
Shostakovich score. Indeed, Peterson and Kern raise the tantalising prospect that consum-
ers might be becoming more open-minded about other styles in general. They point out
that omnivorousness was more widespread in 1992 than it was in 1982, for instance. In
other words, the shift from exclusionist snob to inclusionist omnivore might be part of a
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wider historical trend towards greater tolerance of those with different tastes and values
(Peterson and Kern 1996).
The question remains to what extent these assertions rest on idealised assumptions
and or are specic to social stratication in the U.S. Social class and inequality are
uniquely congured in different countries, after all. Yet, in addition to Bennett et al.s
study, some further evidence for the omnivore thesis can be found in the UK context,
too. This is provided by Goldthorpe and Chan (2007) and is based on an examination of
data from the Arts in England survey of 2001 on rates of participation in the arts. Here,
the authors concentrate on music consumption in order to examine the social character
of respondents tastes. Although resulting in the testing of a very narrow range of genres
(the original survey itself divided up music into only four categories, opera operetta, jazz,
classical and pop rock), Goldthorpe and Chan argue that the data support crucial aspects
of the omnivore argument. For instance, they nd that those who are most likely to
attend classical concerts and opera are also most likely to attend musicals and listen to
pop and rock music. They also note a failure to detect a coherent musical elite who
ardently demonstrate high musical taste while rejecting more popular musical forms.
Again, the target here is Bourdieu since, the authors argue, the assertion that music is an
infallible classier is not borne out by the existence of a dominant class which seeks to
straightforwardly appropriate high culture (Goldthorpe and Chan 2007).
Where this leaves Bourdieus empirical legacy is a matter of some debate. On the one
hand, the omnivore argument still posits at least some relation of musical taste to strati-
cation. Lower class consumers are more likely to be univores, for instance. Being omniv-
orous might also just be the latest strategy of distinction amongst higher class consumers
a way of displaying ones voracious appetite for a range of cultural forms. On the other
hand, the omnivore thesis is predicated on a loosening of the relatively tight bonds that,
for Bourdieu, exist between social origins and musical taste. This highlights to what
extent Bourdieus model still works in societies where stratication is less rigid and classes
less clearly demarcated. More than one commentator has noted how Bourdieus model is
inexible and unable to properly register social change (Jenkins 1992). This is because,
for some critics, he conceptualises action as locked into class-based trajectories through a
series of repetitive habits that reproduce unequal social structures.
Two contemporary strands of social change are particularly noteworthy. Firstly, critics
of Bourdieu point to the expansion of secondary and mass higher education and its
potential impact on social mobility. For Goldthorpe (2007), for instance, in reducing
education to an engine of class inequality, Bourdieu neglects the ways that modern edu-
cational systems loosen inequalities and provide opportunities for children from lower
class backgrounds. Here, we might mention the state provision of music education in
secondary schools and various initiatives to encourage young people to play an instrument
(Green 2002). Secondly, there is the impact of new technologies on taste and stratica-
tion. The digitalisation of music, in particular, has had far-reaching implications for how
consumers access, distribute and listen to music. Digital formats and devices such as iPods
have not just made music more mobile (Bull 2007), but have potentially liqueed genre
categories (Sandywell and Beer 2005) and given users historically unprecedented access to
an ever-proliferating body of musical works (Reynolds 2011).
2
In such a context, it takes
a rather large leap in faith and logic to suppose that the musical habitus remains so static
as to resist processes of mutation, extension and deformation.
3
As the French sociologist Bernard Lahire notes, individual dispositions are not always
internally coherent because individuals are subject to various experiences across plural
contexts. The irregular and bumpy contours of our worlds trigger what he calls
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intra-individual behavioural variations (Lahire 2008:166) which result in often disso-
nant cultural proles. Our musical pathways as consumers, for instance, are subject to
multiple determinations, including those of a more contingent nature. I look at my own
record collection and I recognise variable and temporary musical encounters: a brief irta-
tion with acid techno on the recommendation of a friend of my brothers; a Portishead
CD that I can no longer listen to because of its associations with illness; a Mighty Lemon
Drops LP that I listen to through the (excruciating) prism of having my teeth knocked
out at one of their gigs; a collection of Swedish childrens songs bought on a whim from
a charity shop; and barely a single jazz or classical CD. Not that these musical choices are
entirely random or disconnected from my social background. But neither are they prod-
ucts of a unied dispositional set. They are, instead, indications of the crossings into mul-
tiple socio-musical worlds, some momentary, others more durable, but always constituted
through heterogeneous and sometimes contrasting experiences.
Beyond Bourdieu
Indeed, for some sociologists, if we start from the idea that music taste is a marker of
group identities or dependent on stocks of cultural capital we ask the wrong kinds of
questions. This is because music itself and our encounters with it are far more complex
than can be conveyed through the idea of social origins, let alone statistical data sets and
genre categorisations. Survey measurements, after all, tell us very little about why people
like music and the uses and meanings they make of music in their everyday lives.
For Tia DeNora, sociologists have been too quick to discard the musical properties of
music. Theyve ignored the multifarious ways that music gets into action (DeNora
2000, 8), including how it activates our memories and emotional states. To take music
seriously means to avoid reducing it to an indicator of some hidden structural social force
or distinction strategy. Music is more dynamic than this, for DeNora. It modulates emo-
tions, evokes senses and equips identities. In the ow of everyday life, music affords an
inner sonorous life (DeNora 2004, 217), acting with and upon our phenomenological
worlds, colouring our loves, desire and feelings. Drawing on insights from interactionism
and ethnomethodology, DeNora agues that if we ground our sociological analysis in the
local situations in which music is used, we are able to properly recognize musics powers
(DeNora 2000). This means shifting the level of examination from a general sociology of
music to a specic sociology of people doing things with music; from the idea of con-
straining social structures to the constitutive effects of musical meanings.
Indeed, the idea that music is a technology that helps constitute our selves (DeNora
1999) is consonant with the way consumers themselves articulate their musical relations.
Lovers have our songs, DJs speak of the music that makes me who I am, while lis-
teners in general talk of the soundtracks of their lives. The pragmatist recognition of
musics affective presence suggests that the model of attachment offered by the enthusiast
is more faithful to musics intensities than many clinical sociological studies. As the
French sociologist Antoine Hennion argues, music lovers are never passive, they are
engaged and inventive in how they allow music to enter their lives. This leads him to call
for an alternative sociology of music to Bourdieus, one which draws on Actor Network
Theorys recognition of the agency of objects and the ongoing adjustments that occur as
music exchanges its properties with us (Hennion 2008).
For Hennion, music taste is not a property but an activity. It is a dynamic set of
engagements that have sensuous, physiological components and which unfold moment to
moment (Hennion 2007). Here, the music itself matters because it is the sum of its effects
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and reactions. Our taste does not come from an external mechanism of distinction, for
Hennion, but is in the stirring of bodies (Hennion 2008, 41) and savouring of plea-
sure[s] (Hennion 2008, 44). Like DeNora, Hennion asks us to return to peoples own
accounts and inventive strategies of meaning-making, including the practical effects of
musical materials on listening as a practice. Not so much a sociology of distinction, then,
as much as a phenomenology of dedication, where music is a ceremony of pleasure, a
series of little habits and ways of doing things in real life a group of routines, arrange-
ments and surprises (Hennion 1999, 7).
Indeed, one of the key implications of a post-Bourdieu rebellion is that an orthodox
sociological approach alone is insufcient and in need of disciplinary supplementation.
The work of Georgina Born (2010) is signicant here, in the way it registers the specic,
material properties of music as it mediates and constitutes the inner lives of musicians and
listeners. Borns call is for a broader, non-reductive model of cultural production that
moves beyond Bourdieus overly structuralist account by accounting for the agency of
creators and their objects. But this can only be achieved, for Born, through an act of dis-
ciplinary augmentation. Specically, sociology needs to take seriously the attempt to rec-
ognise aesthetic autonomy and the force of the object found in the anthropology of art.
For anthropologists like Steven Feld and Alfred Gell, she argues, are properly tuned in to
the expressive, temporal qualities and distinct ontologies of art forms because they show
in detail the mediating role that arts materiality plays in social relations. In distinction to
Bourdieus neat but ultimately rigid sociology of taste, such work reconnects with what is
specically physical and meaningful about our encounters with cultural objects, for Born.
This opens up music to a new post-Bourdieusian analytics where taste and consump-
tion are more than social weapons.
All this means that a position once deemed radical and progressive in the sociology of
music is itself under question as alternative positions are excavated and explored. Whilst
internationally, some scholarly outlets (such as the journal Poetics) are still broadly sympa-
thetic to Bourdieusian approaches, the current state of play in Anglo-American sociology
of music is eclectic. A newly emerging emphasis on performativity, for instance, draws
on theoretical developments in American cultural sociology, where actors are conceived
as conveying meaning through communicative acts, such as competitions (McCormick
2009). A post-humanist turn to models of circulation on the other hand, is evident in
the way some scholars are exploring how music and media travel through mobile com-
munication systems, effectively collapsing the distinction between production and con-
sumption and dispersing digital objects like music into what Straw calls the generative
matrix (Straw 2010, 215).
In some respects, these developments in the eld of scholarship mark the inevitable
process of social ageing that Bourdieu himself identied as crucial to the development
of cultural, educational (and we might add, technological) elds (Bourdieu 1993). In fact,
to the extent that the Bourdieusian approach itself became a kind of orthodoxy, it was
always unlikely that the debate between those sympathetic to his ideas and those more
critical of his concepts would ever be resolved on the basis of evidence alone. As disputes
around the cultural omnivore thesis have shown, the same evidence can be interpreted in
markedly different ways to support broadly pro or anti-Bourdieu positions. Whilst
staunch defenders of Bourdieu have tended to give little ground in debates about musical
taste, detractors are just as wont to hurriedly consign Bourdieu to a classical past that is
unable to capture recent transformations in education, technology and stratication.
Those who have attempted something like a middle ground position have had to tread
delicately between these poles in the spirit of a critical but sympathetic reappraisal of
190 Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption
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Bourdieus ideas (Prior, 2008; Atkinson 2011). But even here, its often unclear if
researchers are merely producing Bourdieu style texts rather than critically appropriat-
ing the legacy that he left us (Lahire 2011). Meanwhile, the concerns of the sociology of
music are themselves developing at a rapid pace to catch up with developments in copy-
right law, digital technologies, globalisation and wholesale changes to the music industry
(Regev 2011). And, in this context, it is not entirely clear how central Bourdieus ideas
will be to future generations of scholars.
Conclusion
What we do know, however, is that tastes in music are a remarkably instructive barome-
ter of wider sociological processes. Music has special signicance in how we construct
and negotiate our social identities. If not always straightforwardly a classier of social class
per se, music nevertheless marks out important differences in how we stake a claim for
ourselves as belonging to particular social groups and taste cultures, even in high-tech,
information-rich, globalized societies. While his ideas might not appear as watertight as
they once were, it is still Bourdieu who, more than any other single sociologist, has pro-
vided us with the most elegant and fertile conceptual scheme to make sense of how
music mediates, intersects with and expresses power relations power relations and strati-
ed social trajectories that are, moreover, often glossed in accounts considered post-
Bourdieusian. And for that, sociologists of music will be forever in his debt.
Short Biography
Nick Prior is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He has interests
in the sociology of museums and visual culture, the sociology of cities and media popular
culture as well as the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and critical conceptual
accounts of the hypermodern. He is currently writing a book, Popular Music, Technology
and Society (Sage) and is currently co-editing a collection with Kate Orton-Johnson called
Digital Sociology (Palgrave Macmillan). He is on the Advisory Board of the journal Cultural
Sociology, is academic consultant for the media company TernTV and a member of the
ESRC Peer Review College.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Dr. Nick Prior, CMB, George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK, E-mail: n.prior@
ed.ac.uk
1
Bourdieus concept of the eld has been particularly fruitful, here, because it orients researchers to the dynamic
space of social relations within which music production takes place. In the case of the eld of music, the eld is
split into two sub-elds, for Bourdieu. On the one hand, the large-scale or heteronomous sub-eld of produc-
tion and, on the other, the delimited or restricted sub-eld. While the delimited sub-eld is dened by its
autonomy from commercial mass markets and its appeal to small, specialized audiences, the large-scale sub-eld is
dened by its proximity to the broader eld of power and economic determinants (Bourdieu, 1993). In music, we
can recognize the distinction between genres and styles that are positioned as experimental, innovative or indepen-
dent versus more commercial styles of music.
2
According to Reynolds (2011), the vast musical archive available on sites and services like YouTube and Spotify
has redrawn pops relation to its past, resulting in an obsession with older styles, artifacts and fashions which he
terms retromania.
3
To be fair, however, in a context where the search for music is often mediated by software-generated recom-
mendations and the sharing of playlists, one can imagine that Bourdieus model might still show how tastes tend
to cluster around stratied networks in the digital age. The emergence of inuential music sites like pitchfork.com,
Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption 191
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for instance, illustrate how a will to distinction is prevalent amongst highbrow popular music lovers often (albeit
pejoratively) termed hipsters.
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