Extreme Music Genres and Online Social Media: From Subcultures to Genre Music Scenes

The introductory paper of this Replika article selection looks at the lessons for cultural studies that can be drawn from a parallel analysis of the proceedings in extreme genres and in the music-related aspects of online community media that has increasingly gained ground in recent years. By tracing the common questions of these two main fields, the introduction gives an overview of the new interpretations of the notion of subculture and discusses the main points of the debate around the notion of scene that provides a possible alternative to it. The paper suggests the notion of genre music scene as an alternative to interpret music based-communities functioning in the era of online community applications. Furthermore, the main lines of reasoning put forward in the papers of the authors in this selection (Peter J. Martin, Keith Kahn-Harris, Sean Ebare, Tracy Greener, Robert Hollands and Tamás Tófalvy) are presented.