Consolidating the Music Scenes Perspective in Academic Research
Musicians and music journalists have long used the concept of 'scene' to describe the interconnected groups of performers, promoters, and fans that form around particular genres of music. In everyday usage, scene typically refers to a specific local setting — often a city or district — where a musical style either originated or was adopted and adapted locally. Chicago blues, New Orleans jazz, and Nashville country music are classic examples, alongside countless lesser-known instances of local musical innovation.
Since the early 1990s, scene has also gained traction as an academic analytical model. This development stems partly from criticism of earlier theoretical frameworks used in music research, particularly subcultural theory, and partly from influential work on 'art worlds' and cultural industries. As an academic research model, the concept of scene can be usefully divided into three categories: local, trans-local, and virtual. This article examines the various ways scene has been conceptualised in academic research as a means of understanding music as a resource in contemporary everyday life.
Music and the everyday
The application of the scenes perspective in academic work on music is closely linked with attempts over the past quarter-century to map the socio-cultural significance of music within everyday life. Before adopting the scenes perspective, researchers typically used several other theoretical models.
Community
A forerunner of scene as a way of explaining music's significance in everyday contexts was 'community'. Community has been applied to music in two main ways. First, it accounts for how locally produced music becomes a means for individuals to situate themselves within a particular city, town, or region. People look to specific musics as symbolic anchors in regions, as signs of community, belonging, and a shared past. Music functions as a particularly potent representational resource through which communities can identify themselves and present that identity to others. From this perspective, a shared connection with a locally created musical style becomes a metaphor for community — a way for people to articulate their sense of togetherness through a particular fusion of music, identity, and place.
The second application of community to musical life focuses on its role as a romantic construct. In this sense, individuals who lack the commonality of shared local experience can treat music itself as a 'way of life' and a basis for community. The hippie movement of the late 1960s, for instance, tried to forge a sense of community through its commitment to political rock music as a source of social change. Community became something created by the music, describing the musical experience — an ideology central to rock. A similar sensibility appears in the use of music as a bonding device among followers of indie music, where an emotional feeling of community and connectedness between musicians and their audiences lies at the heart of the genre.
Subculture
Another term widely used by music researchers before the scenes perspective was 'subculture'. Originally introduced by the Chicago School to provide sociological explanations of crime and deviance, subculture was adopted and adapted in the early 1970s by cultural theorists at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). The CCCS used subculture to explain the significance of post-war British youth cultural groups such as teddy boys, mods, and punks. Although the CCCS applied subculture more directly to youth style than to music, later work has used subculture to understand the collective appropriation and use of music itself. In a study of heavy metal, for example, researchers have argued that the collective consumption of heavy metal music at live concerts affirms the metal subculture, its shared values, and its sense of community. The songs performed by a band embody the subculture's values, and the songs selected for concerts are not chosen randomly from the band's repertoire — concert favourites are those that give voice to subcultural themes by idealizing them.
The concept of subculture has faced widespread criticism, not least because it implies a relatively fixed relationship between specific aspects of post-war style and music and the class background of those who appropriate it. In the case of heavy metal, for example, there is a broad assumption that the fanbase is almost exclusively working class. Such an argument is closely linked with the original work of the Birmingham CCCS, who claimed that subcultures represented pockets of resistance on the part of British working-class youth to the structural circumstances of their existence.
This position has been contested on several fronts. Some have argued that there is little basis for the belief that all subcultural memberships share the same class origin, particularly in later subcultures such as punk, where there is clear evidence that many punks came from middle-class backgrounds. Similarly, it has been pointed out that subculture, both in its academic application and the groups it describes, is an ethnically 'white' construct.
The relative inflexibility of subculture as an analytical tool has led to a series of attempts to offer alternative models for understanding music's everyday significance in recent years. It is within this context of rethinking, both theoretically and empirically, the relationship between music and everyday life that 'scene' as an academic concept must be situated.
Origins of the scenes perspective
The cornerstone for the scenes perspective is an essay published in the journal Cultural Studies. Although the term scene had previously been used loosely by academic researchers of music, this essay constituted the first attempt to present the concept of scene as a theoretically grounded model of analysis. Scenes are described as actualizing a particular state of relations between various populations and social groups as these coalesce around specific coalitions of musical style. Scenes may be both local and trans-local phenomena — a cultural space that can orientate as much around stylistic and/or musicalized association as face-to-face contact in a venue, club, or other urban setting.
As this description suggests, scene constitutes a far broader and more dynamic series of social relationships than those considered in the context of subculture. According to this view, scene memberships are not necessarily restricted according to class, gender, or ethnicity, but may cut across all of these. Similarly, scene encompasses a much more diverse range of sensibilities and practices than subculture or other popular alternative terminologies such as post-subculture or neo-tribe, which refer largely to sensibilities of music consumption and the possibilities for identity construction that emerge from this.
Scene, on the other hand, offers the possibility of examining musical life in its myriad forms — both production- and consumption-oriented — and the various, often locally specific, ways in which these cross-cut each other. The current diversification of academic research on scenes makes it useful to present the scenes perspective as a trichotomy comprising local, trans-local, and virtual readings of 'scene'. The fact that academic work on scenes is developing in such a multifaceted way constitutes both an acknowledgement of, and a systematic attempt to address, the highly specific merging of music production and consumption practices with everyday sensibilities within and across a range of local, trans-local, and virtually mediated contexts.
Local scenes
A pivotal study in terms of both introducing and exploring the concept of a local music scene is the groundbreaking work on rock culture in Liverpool. Before this study, little attention had been devoted to small-scale, local music-making practices, since the popular music literature at that time focused primarily on the music industry and its packaging of rock and pop performers for global consumption. The Liverpool study presents a rich, ethnographically informed account of the micro-social worlds of two local groups, illustrating how the merging of locally specific social sensibilities with the artistic ambitions of these groups created a particular outlook among individual group members. A range of collective values held by the group members — such as the fear and distrust of women as a potential threat to a band's unity, and the emphasis placed on music-making as a 'real job' — are shown to be firmly rooted in Liverpool's local socio-economic environment.
In a city where many young people thought they might as well pick up a guitar as take exams, since chances of finding full-time occupation from either were similar, being in a band was an accepted way of life that could justify one's existence. As one band member put it, 'It's an alternative to walking around the town all day,' while another asked, 'What else is there to do?'
These findings are reinforced by a study of the local music scene in Austin, Texas. This study similarly illustrates the continuities between local networks of social relationships and the building and maintenance of the local music scene. However, it advances the perspective by demonstrating how, even within a specific local space, a music scene may take on a plurality of simultaneously overlapping and contradictory dimensions. This is illustrated by comparing the local significance of punk and cowboy song. Despite their very different socio-historical connections to Austin, each of these genres has achieved equal standing as authentic local musics because of the common forms of vernacular knowledge underpinning their performance and reception. Cowboy song has become a musicalized performance of Texan identity, with the image of the authentic cowboy as autonomous, strong, and independent continuing to inform the cultural practice of the Texan male. Such issues of Texan masculinity also feature in music by local punk rock groups, though here the emphasis is on self-mockery and satirical reflection. Local stress on masculinity and male superiority becomes a subject of laughter and ridicule for punk groups and their audiences.
A further series of insights into the significance of popular music production and performance in specific local spaces comes from a study focusing on four countries: Italy, the Czech Republic, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This research examines how locally produced rock, pop, and rap music deals with various local issues such as racism, unemployment, and political extremism as these are experienced in particular localities. One significant contribution of this work to the scenes perspective is its illustration of how globally established popular musical styles can be readily plucked from their global context and reworked in ways that make them more culturally significant to musicians and fans in particular local contexts. This transformation includes reinscribing musical styles with local meanings through the introduction of local musical influences or lyrics sung in a local language or accent.
The localisation of musical styles in this way is further examined in a book on popular music and youth culture. Presenting four ethnographic case studies focusing on dance music, bhangra, rap, and rock, this work examines how contemporary youth musics have been variously appropriated and locally transformed in UK and German cities. This is exemplified in the case study focusing on hip hop culture in Frankfurt, Germany, where young people from Moroccan and Turkish families have adapted African-American rap's concern with racism and inequality to suit a German context, adding German language lyrics to reflect the everyday experience of such social problems at a local level. Two thematic issues appear regularly in German language rap songs: the fear and anger instilled in ethnic minority groups by racism, and the insecurity experienced by many young members of such groups over issues of nationality. The first theme has in recent years become one of national concern in Germany, since the reunification of October 1990 brought a steady rise in neo-Fascist attacks against Gastarbeiter and refugees.
Work on the local music scene in Montreal demonstrates something of the depth and diversity of activities that comprise a scene in any given place. In addition to musicians and audiences, a rich and complex network of entrepreneurs and enthusiasts — promoters, designers, producers, DJs, sound engineers, critics, and the like — plays a crucial role in keeping the scene alive, even as predominant styles change from decade to decade.
A similar scenario is described in a study of the local dance club scene in Toledo. Although this relatively small scene turned largely on the entrepreneurial skills of one promoter, the ability of this individual to draw on the resources and influence of other persons in the local community and to gain their confidence in the economic value of his pursuits was crucial to the scene's survival.
As a number of researchers have demonstrated, local music scenes can also benefit cities and communities in other ways, notably through the creation of tourism. Research has examined the impact of Beatles tours and other Beatles-themed tourist attractions on the local economy in Liverpool. Similarly, objects and memorabilia associated with Elvis Presley provide the basis for a thriving tourist industry in Memphis; in a parallel way, country music and jazz draw thousands of tourists to Nashville and New Orleans each year. Work on the Chicago blues scene illustrates another aspect of this relationship between music and place from the perspective of the tourist gaze. The many blues clubs and bars in Chicago help assert and maintain the city's image as the blues capital of the world. This air of authenticity persists, even though, according to blues purists, many such venues have been created purely to satisfy tourists' desire for what they define as an 'authentic' blues experience.
Trans-local scenes
In many ways, the concept of trans-local scenes responds to criticisms of studies focusing on local music scenes. A number of theorists claim that the conceptualisation of the local as a socially and culturally bounded space can no longer hold currency in an age of global media. This argument is made in relation to ethnographies of music scenes, which are said to treat the media as outside authentic culture. Such studies depict internally generated culture, disclose local creativity, and give positive valuation to the 'culture of the people' — but at the cost of removing the media from their pictures of the cultural process.
In truth, it is highly doubtful that those who have studied local music scenes have been ignorant of the interplay between local and global music-making processes in the way this criticism implies. Nevertheless, such criticisms of the local have resulted in a series of attempts by music researchers to readdress the relationship between the global and the local using a range of terms designed to recast the parameters of the collective appropriations and localized innovations that take place within a stream of globally available media products and information.
The term trans-regionalism, for example, has been coined as a means of recognising that local appropriations and innovations of musical styles may occur simultaneously across a range of globally diffuse sites. Trans-regional musics have a very high energy that spills across regional boundaries, perhaps even becoming global. This category of music is increasing rapidly due to the mediascape, which at any moment can push a music forward so that a large number of audiences can choose to domesticate it.
Focusing more specifically on youth-oriented musics and attendant styles, the term trans-local has been used to describe the way in which young people appropriate and adapt musical forms across different urban locations, creating networks of shared taste and identity that transcend local boundaries while remaining anchored in specific local contexts. These trans-local connections are facilitated by various media — from fan magazines and record labels to online forums and social media platforms. In essence, the trans-local scene represents an expansion of the scene concept beyond the confines of a single city or region, recognising the complex interplay between the local significance of music and its circulation across broader geographic and cultural spaces.
Harris observes that local scenes have been especially important in pioneering new styles that later achieve popularity across the global scene. During the 1980s, the San Francisco Bay Area scene proved crucial to the development of Thrash, featuring bands like Exodus and Metallica. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Death Metal gained popularity through strong local scenes in Stockholm, with bands like Dismember and Entombed, and in Tampa, Florida, with bands such as Obituary and Deicide. Then in the mid-1990s, Black Metal was popularised through the Norwegian scene, involving bands like Burzum and Emperor (2000: 16).
The trans-local character of a music scene may not depend solely on the global mobility of particular local styles or on scene members communicating across time and distance through new technologies. Recent work on contemporary dance music shows that trans-local scenes are increasingly characterised by global flows of people—DJs, promoters, and fans. Laing (1997) highlights the extensive trans-national networks now in place for producing and marketing dance music, a global flow that also enables extensive touring for DJs and their club events. Similarly, Carrington and Wilson (2002) discuss how easier long-distance travel, combined with the desire to go clubbing in new and exotic locations, has fostered a growing culture of "dance tourism" among young people.
5. Virtual scenes
Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has become increasingly important in everyday life. It has had a significant impact on the time-space compression process (Harvey, 1989) linked to developments in global communication systems, further displacing the boundedness of social interaction within the restrictions of time and space and opening up relatively instantaneous channels of trans-local and trans-temporal communication (Foster, 1997). These developments have notably affected the formation of music scenes. While previously music scenes were local or trans-local phenomena, the Internet created the possibility for "virtual" scenes. Like the virtual communities examined by Rheingold (1994), these form not in the physical spaces of cities and towns but in the virtual spaces of the Internet, so scene members need never meet face-to-face.
Work on virtual music scenes is still in its infancy, yet clear signs already show the difference between scenes centred on the Internet and those based on physical territory like clubs, bars, record shops, and associated spaces. Attachment to locally based scenes often depends on visual displays of involvement, such as attendance at gigs (Fonarow, 1997), personal image (Thornton, 1995), and competence in posturing and dance (Malbon, 1999). Virtual scenes, however, because of their non-face-to-face quality, rely on other displays of competence, notably articulation and musical knowledge and information. Kibby's (2000) study of the Internet-based music scene devoted to folk artist John Prine is a case in point. As Kibby shows, this scene functioned as a space where globally scattered fans of John Prine could communicate and trade knowledge and information. Participants in Internet chat rooms were delighted to find others across the world with whom they could exchange information and opinions. According to Kibby, this "ritual sharing of information" online was a source of "commonality between chatters" (2000: 95).
Another example of a virtual music scene appears in Bennett's work (Bennett, 2004; Bennett and Kahn Harris, 2004) on the "Canterbury Sound." Journalists originally coined this term during the late 1960s to describe London-based groups like Soft Machine and Caravan, whose memberships each included one or more individuals from the defunct Canterbury-based jazz-rock band the Wilde Flowers. Many musicians involved in these groups, such as Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper, have dismissed the notion of a Canterbury Sound as little more than a journalistic tag. Most citizens of Canterbury remain entirely unaware that their city was supposedly the centre of a major music scene from the late 1960s. Nevertheless, the myth of a Canterbury Sound was revived in 1996 when a French fan established Calyx, anointing itself the "official" Canterbury Sound website. As with Kibby's example of online fandom, Calyx became a forum for fans to debate various aspects of the Canterbury Sound and which groups centrally defined it. The website also hosted discussions and debates about Canterbury's role in creating the musical style, giving rise to collective myths about how growing up in Canterbury had imbued musicians with artistic influences and "a certain Englishness" that they supposedly brought to their music.
As Bennett notes, although this Canterbury Sound revival initially remained limited to online fan discussions, it soon generated entrepreneurial interest, particularly in the Canterbury region, where a small-scale "cultural industry" based on the Canterbury Sound began to take shape. This was signalled by the appearance in local record shops of Canterburied Sounds, a four-volume CD set featuring tracks by the Wilde Flowers and Caravan, as well as musical liaisons between members of these groups and other, often unidentified, local musicians. For the most part consisting of rough demo tapes and rehearsal sessions recorded on domestic reel-to-reel tape recorders, the Canterburied Sounds CDs have significantly helped bring the myth of a Canterbury scene alive for fans worldwide. The perceived link between the Canterbury Sound and the city of Canterbury was further strengthened through subsequent local entrepreneurial activities, notably the "Canterbury Sound Festival," an event that took place in the summer of 2000. In addition to "Canterbury groups" Caravan and Gong, the lineup for the three-day event also included a wealth of other late-1960s British rock favourites, including Coliseum, Man, and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.
Virtual scenes can also facilitate ongoing communication and collectivity among fans of artists who have stopped touring or tour only infrequently. For such fans, the Internet offers an alternative way to articulate their fandom in a public sphere. Vroomen (2004) makes this point effectively in her study of fans of Kate Bush, an artist who retired from live performance in 1979 and whose last studio album was released in 1993. As Vroomen notes, Kate Bush fansites such as the Hounds of Love provide one of the few available means for the Kate Bush fanbase to maintain itself at a collective level, with chat rooms and other web-based facilities allowing fans to communicate and share views and opinions on Kate Bush and her music. Significantly, however, Vroomen suggests that such communication is also, and perhaps crucially, facilitated through other means, notably Kate Bush conventions and "Katemas," gatherings of fans held each year on the singer's birthday.
Finally, Lee and Peterson (2004) consider some of the differences and similarities between virtual and physical local scenes using the example of "Postcard Two" (P2), a listserve devoted to alternative country music. As Lee and Peterson observe, while interaction in physical local scenes occurs at the face-to-face level, allowing for the exchange of both verbal and non-verbal communication, interaction in virtual scenes is based entirely around the exchange of written words, and occasionally images to support particular points. Consequently, Lee and Peterson argue that gaining access to a virtual scene is often easier than to a local scene. Local scenes are clearly bounded by physical location, and they are often small and quite select. Virtual scenes, on the other hand, are open to all who know how to use a networked computer and can write in the language used by the scene. At the same time, Lee and Peterson note that to become fully integrated into a virtual scene, many of the same rules apply as with a local scene. Ultimately, a person must show commitment, both through regular contributions to online discussions and through the display of musical and associated knowledges relevant to such discussion.
Lee and Peterson suggest that a notable difference between virtual and physical scenes lies in their demographic composition. While most local scenes are characterised by a narrow age range, body type, sexual orientation, recreational drug use, and world view, the demographic composition of virtual scenes is generally much broader. They found that P2 members ranged in age from their teens to their 70s and were about evenly split between those who are single and those who are married or partnered. As Lee and Peterson observe, such a varied demographic spread may well be due to the possibilities that virtual scenes offer for individuals to remain anonymous or use a pseudonym. This kind of masking clearly does not apply in local, physical scenes where membership also depends on the physical appearance and personal attributes of individuals. Even so, Lee and Peterson noted that most of the active members of the P2 listserve use their real names, and their address line often includes their place of employment. In a sense, those who become members of virtual music scenes often observe the same rules of membership and sociality as those involved in physical, local scenes.
6. Conclusion
This paper has examined the developing scenes perspective and its value as a means of understanding and theorising the various forms of significance that musical activity, both production- and consumption-oriented, takes in specific everyday contexts. Using the trichotomy of "local," "trans-local," and "virtual" scenes introduced by Peterson and Bennett (2004), the paper has examined a range of existing studies on music scenes and the insights they reveal into the highly specific ways that music, creativity, identity, leisure, economic activity, and productivity intersect in a variety of physical and mediated contexts.
In addition to scholarly monographs, a growing body of edited collections has helped fine-tune the “music scenes” framework. Such works, associated with scholars including Will Straw, expanded how we theorize musical collectivity beyond older models like subculture. The notion that scenes are not merely local phenomena but are woven into broader networks of affiliation is underscored by the work of Thornton. Through the lens of club cultures and the idea of “subcultural capital,” her research showed how taste, knowledge, and participation circulate both face‑to‑face and via media. Andy Bennett, whose ongoing investigations situate music and memory within everyday life, has served as Chair of the UK and Ireland branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. He has argued convincingly that scenes are shot through with localized forms of practice and belonging. Meanwhile, authors like Stahl suggest that even a city such as Montreal can itself be articulated as a scaled‑down model of a larger cultural territory — evoking the phrase, “it’s like Canada reduced.” This points toward how geography and identity entangle within any scene. Vroomen’s work on Kate Bush’s fan community reveals further nuance: older female fans sustain attachment well beyond a cohort’s collective youth, stretching older linkages between music, memory, and continuing identification. And Weinstein saw metalheads as participants in a durable, transnational scene that derived strength as much from disavowal by mainstream culture as from the sonic content of the music itself. Across each contribution, an emergent consensus takes shape: consolidation does not mean closure. Rather, adapting Straw’s phrasing, scenic logic requires preserving an account of how musical communities remain “systems of articulation” alert to constant change.