This book is about music audiences. As an audience researcher, I draw on the legacy of theoretical and empirical developments of decades of researchers before me, who, in various ways and with various aims, investigated the link between people and society through and around media texts, context and institutions. I refer in particular to television and film audience research, which in the last few decades has developed analytical tools to address the critical questions of media reception and society. As an audience researcher writing about music, I also consider the legacy of music scholarship, with particular attention to studies that considered audiences.

The balance between the two is surprisingly tricky, as is the relationship between the academic concepts of ‘music’ and ‘audience’. This is surprising, partly because in everyday language both terms seem to fit together naturally, almost as a collocation – and ‘audience’ stems from ‘audio’, after all. But mostly because studies of music and audience studies often have common interests and aims, while rarely sharing analytical and methodological skillsets. In this book I argue that audience studies (a field once contested, now established, yet not without challenges) have much to offer to studies of music, and studying music (alongside television, film and new media – scholarly interests that music has been overshadowed by) can provide new insights for audience research.

Music audiences are both a promise and a challenge for media and cultural studies. They are a promise, as practices of and surrounding music are distinctly two-fold: music as a cultural practice is deeply connected to the private self, to the subjective, but is also at the same time a foundation of public, social experiences (Hesmondhalgh, 2013, pp. 1–2).