Communication Research

Baila and calypso, music styles traditionally used as vehicles for social commentary, are changing in response to new recording and distribution capabilities in developing countries. Traditional lyrics, which typically conveyed a message about local issues, are being replaced by nonsense lyrics or more general content to satisfy a larger, more diverse audience. Lyrics also are losing significance as instrumentation grows more complex, in response to such influences from North America as jazz and soul. These changes suggest that traditional music styles may lose their concrete communicative properties as they are adapted to the recording industry.

This study investigates how people feel about and behave toward different types of music, based on a major U.S. national survey (N = 17,254). Attendance at musical events is quite common, and there is widespread enjoyment of music in that the average person reports listening to several different types of music. A measure of distance between preferences and behaviors toward types of music and multidimensional scaling indicates that music is evaluated socially in terms of its formality and ecological appeal. Behavioral data and attitudinal data yield essentially the same dimensional structure of the types of music for the aggregate audience.

Developments in radio technology have resulted in an inexpensive, portable, and individual-centered means of mass communication that allows young people the freedom to choose how to use this medium. There is evidence of a great preference for Western-style rock music among young people in East Germany, despite the fact that these environments are so socially, politically, and culturally different, suggesting that there may be certain general laws underlying media-transmitted cultural communication.

This article summarizes the current literature on audio and children, and argues that records, radio, and tapes play an important and unique role in the personal and social lives of many young children. Some key issues and approaches that seem most promising in the study of the place of listening in children's lives are examined.

Canada's economic dependence on America extends to the music industry. American recordings and radio broadcasts are strongly preferred by Canadian youth despite government policies.

This article reports results of a panel study of 509 Swedish youth, with data collected in 1976, 1978, and 1980, on uses and gratifications of popular music. There is a relationship between amount of peer orientation and type of music preferred. An exploratory factor analysis identified three types of music preference: (1) punk, new wave, and rock; (2) mainstream pop; and (3) classical, jazz, and folk music. Motivations for listening were more physical and emotional than cerebral (that is, listening to lyrics).

Music plays a variety of roles as an agent of social utility and source of entertainment. For young people in particular, music helps unify social collectives, introduces new topics, teaches society's norms and rules, and creates new symbols. Because active use of a medium increases its effect as an agent of socialization, music has an impact at physical, emotional, and cognitive levels. The modern rock movement is especially important when considering the activities of adolescents in the U.S. and Europe.

The Indian music industry, though small by comparison to Western nations, is vast in reach and penetration. India is one of the few developing nations to both import and export media products. A survey shows that the most popular music medium among Indian college students is radio followed by cassette tapes. Most prefer Indian popular music derived from Indian film industry to western music. Upper-class youths, however, mostly prefer western music.

This article examines culture flow between nations, specifically the attention those in Jamaica pay to exogenous cultural influence in the form of popular music. A survey of 300 Jamaican youths in early 1983 found that higher socioeconomic status was accompanied by greater preference for foreign over local music.

The development of Brazil's rich musical traditions is examined in respect to structural factors that have affected that development. The cultural industry in Brazil has not yet reached the “mass culture” point. The cultural industry produces a society whose homogeneity is perceptible through a mass culture; if this means that all previous traits characteristic of different cultural contributions are amlgamated and unidentifiable, then the mass culture point is not yet realized in Brazil, because huge income differences create a society that is highly stratified in consumption.

This article explores the structure of pop music in Hungary, focusing on social factors under which the music has developed. A distinction is made between the mere existence of a musical idiom and that of the culture built around it. An understanding of this distinction helps explain points of pressure on the pop music industry in Hungary and offers a possible answer to the question of how an inherently anti-authoritarian type of art may develop under the control of authoritarian cultural politics.

Popular music is perhaps the most international mode of communication, yet social research on this phenomenon remains strongly national in orientation. Recent research begins to point to issues at the levels of the individual and the subculture (especially youth), and to functions for social groups such as identification, integration, and expression. Market forces, driven by the demands of youth culture, create a tension between international flow of popular music and the concern over preservation of indigenous national musics. The sound, more than the words of music, provides subcultural ties and boundaries, and might be studied by both social scientists and humanists in ways that complement content-oriented research on politics.