Imaginative appropriations of music in the new communicative scenarios

Abstract

Sharing music is a traditional mechanism of cultural sociability, the observation of wich is useful in order to understand the negotiation procedures of sense and identity. In the new digital scene, the act of sharing and offering music shows-along with the obvious purpose of establishing relationships with others as well as making them participate in something pleasant-a desire to spread one's own personal taste and a will to communicate our one's identity. Thus, now and then, communicating by means of music and sharing it-as well as giving an opinion on it-are ways of both self-representation and expression of one's identity, offering others some sort of 'musical personality': another way of being in the world, typical of our era and related to a way of using the products of cultural industry with a personal purpose. This use, however, is not restricted to just expressing identity aspects: we use mass culture products in several ways with different purposes in our everyday life. According to some of these other uses, we will expand the field of the main subject of this article: other ways of sharing music that represent both permitted and non-permitted appropriations of music. We will accomplish this by considering some of the reasons that help getting a better understanding of the cultural task carried out by music (and other cultural products).