Consuming popular songs online: Phoenix Legend's audiences and Douban Music

摘要

This article explores the creative consumption of popular music and explains how audiences involve their place-based emotions within their representations of popular music in an everyday setting, drawing on a qualitative study on people's interpretations of Phoenix Legend (a popular music duo in mainland China) and its music. We collected the texts created by Phoenix Legend's audiences from Douban Music (http://music.douban.com/), a Chinese online music forum. Our analysis focuses on how fans, non-fans and anti-fans interpret and re-write the meanings of Phoenix Legend and its songs emotionally and how these interpretations shape and are shaped by these audiences' senses of self and place. The key finding of this article argues that through the consumer-to-consumer network provided by social media (Douban Music), the rural-urban division, ethnic cultures and the role of Chinese nationalism in the global marketplace are generated by audiences' creative writings and their interactions with other consumers. Moreover, we suggest that anti-fans' and non-fans' emotional engagement within music consumption and their interactions should be paid more attentions to.