Music Media Uses and Influences

Abstract

This chapter discusses how music media are used and become influential in various everyday contexts. Contrary to the majority of studies into youth subcultures, it details the extent to which domestic, family experiences are reported by respondents to have influenced their music consumer choices. Having outlined these media uses and influences, the implications of a paradoxical trend for growing public uses of music media that wield their strongest influence in the privacy of young people's domestic lives are assessed. The growing public presence of non-terrestrial music television channels and the Internet across young people's everyday educational, work and leisure contexts seems to be stimulated by a desire to consume mediated technologies that might be excluded from domestic settings at the will of parents. The discussion then turns to the extent to which media consumer literacy is able to be productive and even innovative in the formation of music tastes and practices, regardless of ostensibly omnipotent global media influences. The final section of the chapter considers the importance of everyday life narratives to youth music practitioners' immediate but also embedded identities and presentations of themselves and significant (familial) others.