Aesthetics and taste formation in musical spaces of consumption: A multi-sited ethnographic study

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Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the interrelationships between place and tastethrough a multi-sited ethnography of music consumption. Place and taste areimportant theoretical constructs that have been studied extensively across thehumanities and social sciences. Yet, there is a scarcity of research that attempts tobring together these constructs in the fields of marketing and consumer research andbeyond. In particular, prior consumer culture theory (CCT) research has not takeninto account the spatial processes through which consumers enact, perform andfurther develop their tastes in the marketplace. More significantly, little empiricalresearch illustrates how different consumption spaces tend to orchestrate and shapeconsumers’ tastes. As such, this study focuses on the context of music consumptionand aims to explore spatial taste formation processes via consumers’ aestheticexperiences in popular (festival) and classical (concert hall) music places within thefields of indie and classical music consumption respectively. The emergent findingsare structured upon four chapters (papers) and develop specific research objectiveswhich revolve around the overarching aim of the study, namely the exploration ofthe interrelationships between place and taste. This study brings together bothstructural and experiential dimensions of taste and highlights the ontologicalsignificance of phenomenological understandings of space and place for marketingand consumer research.

Keyword(s)

Bourdieu; arts marketing; consumer culture theory; consumption aesthetics; consumption experience; experiential consumption; identity investments; interpretive consumer research; music consumption; musical taste; place; social fields; taste

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