18. Media Development and Convergence in the Music Industry

Communication and Media Science historically distinguishes between four dominant groups of media with regard to the respective technology. The oldest group is the Primary or Role Media dealing with fundamental media roles (“minstrels”, “prophet”, “priest”, etc.) and institutions such as the “theatre”. Here, public communication takes place without the use of technology. Print or Secondary Media such as “books”, “newspapers” or “magazines” require technology for the production of public communication and culture; electronic or tertiary media such as “cinema”, “records”, “radio” or “television” require additional technology for their reproduction. The new digital networks or Quaternary Media require additional transmission technology and software. The medium is not the “Internet”, which is comparable to radio waves, but specific equipment, upon which services within a framework of communication-generalised expectations exist such as YouTube, Facebook, etc. They do not however differ through their being “social”. All media is social.

I have examined the various concepts used to differentiate these sub-processes of culture and communication and later value creations as well as the logic driving it in detail elsewhere in length (Winter 2006a, b, 2008).

The interviews took place within a research project conducted by the IJK of the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media for the Berlin Music Commission, in which a model of dynamics of the Berlin music economy was to be developed, in which concrete value creation potential and perspectives were to be identified and developed—compare Chap.​ 3.

The differentiation between “oral live music culture”, “performance music culture” and “recorded music culture” as phases of the current transformation of music culture follows Faulstich (2000).

The unfolding of this cultural difference follows the development of a technology into a media in relation to complex processes (Winter & Dürrenberg 2011), that are not easy to comprehend. It is a process of mediation between the developments of a cultural form of a medium within and between the processes of production, allocation, perception and use of, in this example, music. The process will become, as shown in historical reconstruction, more elaborate with the development of every new medium that makes these processes more independent.

The now common use of the terms “push culture” and “pull culture” or “on-demand culture” stem from James Lull (Lull 2002; 2007 discussed in Winter 2011a; Winter 2011a, b).

“The most basic change has been a shift in the role of the consumer—from isolated to connected, from unaware to informed, from passive to active.” (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004:2).