This book set out to answer the overarching research question of how people’s practices of music listening are situated in their social and cultural lives. Theoretically, the book has been driven by three aims. First, conceptualising generational audiences’ engagements with music through the idea of ‘practices’, I have been interested in finding out how the concept might be helpful in understanding the social and cultural aspects of engagements with music. Second, starting my research from the audience studies tradition, I wanted to investigate in what ways the analytical tools from the field could be of use in understanding music audiences. Third, and more broadly, I wanted to find out what new insights music could bring to audience studies, and what audiences could bring to studies of music. To address these theoretical challenges, I specified the overarching research question through four sub-questions, concerned with the nature and meaning behind listening practices, the relation between audience engagements and production activities, and the generational and cultural aspects of practices and interpretations.

I engaged with these questions through my conceptual framework, informed by audience studies and the practice approach, which drove the methodological decisions in the research. For data collection, during the fieldwork in Japan, I used a mixed methods approach (including questionnaires, focus group interviews, qualitative individual interviews and participant observation) to corroborate findings and to understand practices in a deep, contextualised way. Then I conducted thematic analysis of the data to identify recurring themes and categories, and to analytically capture the patterns of listening practices.

In this chapter, I recap the empirical findings and discuss their significance with relation to music, generations, audiences and Japan. Then I step back and address the aims and achievements of the study in a more reflexive way.