The Industrialization of Musical Culture as a Pattern of Contemporary Society

Abstract

This article demonstrates the chief hidden guidelines for the industrialization of Russian
musical culture. The main purpose of this study is to identify the components of the patterns of
the contemporary musical industry as a segment of mass consumption. Musical culture becomes a
product of social consumption, adapting to the law of supply and demand. The author defines the
characteristic features of the target segment of consumers of the musical culture in the European
Union. The main trends in the development of the cultural industry in the forecast period will be
the ongoing digitalization and personalization of cultural products and services, an active growth
of user consumption of content from mobile devices, as well as, of course, a consolidation,
vertical integration and the formation of large digital ecosystems. The author identifies the two
main patterns of the current state of the system of musical culture – its “worth value” and its
“price value”: the “worth value” being a non-economical concept which interprets culture as a
system of semantic meanings, and the “price value” – as entirely an economic concept, which
views culture as a system of paid services, a cultural industry aimed at making monetary profit
by replicating copies. Depending on the initial goal, the basic components of these two patterns
and the main elements of the final structure of the cultural system for a specific consumer in a
specific time period are selected.

Keywords: culture industry, latent patterns, mass consumption.