Live music and the dilemmas of the Korean consumer experience : consumption, markets, and identities

This thesis examines the cultural consumption of live music events in contemporary South Korea. It explains the structure and emergence of the contemporary popular music industry, and offers a historical background to the development of South Korea’s society and culture. Live concerts, now a crucial part of music industry in Korea, are the central object of analysis, through which the current conditions of cultural consumption in South Korea are assessed. The thesis argues that music consumption experience in South Korea provides an opportunity through which a set of dilemmas and tensions in contemporary Korean identity can be explored. It proposes a theoretical concept, ‘Confucian Postmodernism’, with which to understand the contradiction and coexistence of Western postmodern and traditional values within the practices of cultural consumption. While academic research on music, culture and consumption is growing, there remains little research on the impact of the consumption of cultural products on East Asian social culture. This thesis offers a review of traditional and contemporary scholarly approaches to the study of music experience and consumption, identifying a deficit of research attention in the area of cultural consumption in South Korea. Through twenty semi-structured in-depth interviews, this study looks at both the Korean music market and consumer experiences, focusing on a specific experience of cultural consumption through the theories of ‘postmodern cultural consumption’ and Bourdieu’s ‘cultural capital’. Two major contemporary characteristics of Korean social identity are identified: (i) the tension between the activity of individual selfpresentation and necessary social conformity, and (ii) the struggle to gain symbolic differentiation within the Korean popular music field, the constitution of which betrays both traditional Confucian and postmodern influences. Assessing the role of music in terms of consumer experience dissolves previous theoretical distinctions between musical form content and aesthetic experience, while affording the opportunity to consider the broader socio-cultural shifts in South Korea