Play it cool - Understanding Consumer Identity Performances through Musical Taste

Abstract: Sharing music and displaying one’s musical preferences have become an inseparable part of the content circulating on social media, dating apps, and the online world as a whole. Accordingly, music-streaming services are providing users with more and more functions to share musical content on other platforms and even introduced summaries of their annual music consumption. How consumers are using these functions to share their musical taste online and how this is helping them present themselves in the digital world is at the center of the present research. In the process of investigating these consumer practices, this study adopts a Consumer Culture Theory perspective to examine the concepts of consumer identities and taste and follows the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Erving Goffman for the analysis of the collected data. From an empirical point of view, this research is based on 23 in-depth semi-structured interviews with young European consumers who use Spotify, the biggest music-streaming service worldwide. The findings highlight three ways in which consumers share their musical taste in the online world as a means to (1) express and validate their personal identities, (2) perform collective or expert identities and thus define their social position, and (3) selectively present socially desirable identities to avoid stigmatization and symbolic violence. The insights of the present study further contribute to consumer cultural conversations in relation to (1) the role of the market, (2) consumers’ self-presentation in the digital world, and (3) social belonging. These contributions might be of interest for brands that seek to discover why and how consumers use music sharing functions and for future consumer culture researchers who might want to investigate even further the connection between musical taste and consumer identities. Finally, this research presents how and why these contributions might also be important from a societal perspective.