Content area
Abstract
In recent years there has been a remarkable proliferation of personal online radio platforms (POR) like Pandora Radio, iTunes Radio and Songza. These programs work by creating a ubiquitous and interactive stream of music that is intended to respond to and shape a listener's desires. Through analyses of the social forces underlying POR, this thesis will contribute to the scholarship that explores how emergent cybernetic technologies engage and transform the traditional political economies underlying musical commodification. Unlike CDs and vinyl, PORs offers a marriage of interactivity and ubiquity that enables the emergence of subjectively evolving listening experiences. These experiences are never static, but rather they are constantly attuning listener's musicological relationships in ways that reconfigure the sociological, economic, political and aesthetic spheres that govern modern musical life. As such, POR systems are more than just technology for transmitting music, but rather they embody the evolving ways that society defines musical engagement.
