This time we discussed what music senses of identity in regards to what kinds of music you listen to, and the contrast between musical choice and market supply.  The main factors of individual choice in the music store, availability/location of those songs in the market, and cultural segregation all impact people’s musical identities, as was posited.  I guess the main theme would be, “what you listen to has less to do with who you are than what you have available to you.”  For example, in Witt’s book on How Music Got Free, there is an example he puts forth where a small community named Cumberland, Maryland dominated the market for Music Explosion records, after a radio station played “Little Bit O’ Soul” non stop on the radio (Witt43).

This process of “availability to identity” makes a certain sense to me, because of course people are going to continue to delve in a genre that they always have available to them.  Growing up, my parents were fans of classic rock and other popular sounds from the 80s such as Duran Duran, Van Halen, Sugarhill Gang, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, because that is what they both had available to them in their youth, and what they remembered loving.  This influenced my musical tastes, because even now I’ll throw on “Rapper’s D-light” every now and then.

Another example can be seen later in Witt’s book, when describing Bennie Lydell Glover’s musical tastes.  Glover lived in slowly-urbanizing King’s Mountain North Carolina, and only really had country, American folk, and the blossoming rap scene available to him (Witt 69). These genres were apparent in Glover’s lifestyle and identity as a person and a music lover, and might have similarly been a mix of cheesy pop and hip hop had he lived in Hollywood for example.