Audiences and their musics: new approaches

Why do we need a new approach to music audiences? The answer is complex and its various threads surface in all articles of this special issue, but the problem boils down to the underlining challenge of a visual bias in media research. It starts from the language (English – but similar phrases exist in in Polish and Japanese – and, I imagine, in a number of other languages): we look at issues, we shed light on challenges, we see challenges, we observe emerging patterns. But even beyond the linguistic sphere, the history of modern media research accentuates the focus on visual media. In audience studies this imbalance is felt especially strongly, as the word ‘audience’ stems from Latin audentia meaning ‘a hearing’, and later ‘listeners’ – and yet the audiences nowadays are rarely asked about things they hear or listen to. It has not always been so (the broadcast and radio effects studies of the 1930s and 1940s are examples of such approaches) but with the dawn of the television era, and later, the new media, the focus of audience research shifted towards the visual, the new, and, with the internet, the ‘interactive’.