Music Collectivities and MySpace: Towards Digital Collectives

Music collectivities have been changed by the use of digital technologies in terms of more flexibility among participants. This claim is so widely shared, that understanding if and how it makes sense is a difficult but engaging task. Unfortunately, the concepts used to frame music collectivities until now result unsatisfying for their different degrees of fixity. As a theoretical solution, we move to the concept of "digital collective" as considered in reference to the case of music collectivities on the social network site MySpace. We argue that this concept is a starting point for an analysis that focuses on the processes of collective construction, without a priori assumptions on the collectivities. In the example considered, the flexibility of the concept is shown as powerful both in understanding the technological involvement and in relating it to non-technological processes. So, thinking in terms of digital collectives introduces a degree of flexibility, as well as a way to understand stabilized situations, that opens up space for more empirical research.