Home on the page: a virtual place of music community

Abstract

Introduction

In 1996 a small independent record company, Oh Boy Records, set up a ‘chat page’ on its web site where fans of its major artist, John Prine, could exchange typed messages in close to real time. The page became a place where fans could ‘virtually’ meet to get information or exchange experiences and opinions relating to Prine. Through the chat page a fan community was established, in that the chat page became a meeting place that could not exist within real-world boundaries. John Prine has had some recent commercial and critical success, but Prine fans are still a minority in most geographic communities, and are, to some extent, isolated by the lifestyle of their 35-plus age group. It could be said that the one and only place where Prine fans could regularly gather was online through the chat page provided by the record company. The Oh Boy Record's homepage became a symbolic anchor – a recognition of shared experience and a sign of community. While music communities are usually associated with ‘local’ places, ‘the notion of “communities” or localities as bounded geographic entities increasingly has been seen as problematic to the study of music in urban settings’ (Gay 1995, p. 123). Communities exist through dialogue; through an exchange of past social history and current social interaction. Developments in communication technology have contributed to a ‘deterritorialization of space within a global cultural economy’ (Fenster 1995, p. 85), to a point where ‘local’ is no longer disconnected from ‘global’ and the identity of a specific place is located both in ‘demarcated physical space’ and in ‘clusters of interaction’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, p. 8). In the absence of a communal physical space, the Oh Boy home page became the site of a ‘local’ Prine community.