Augmented Scenes: Digital/Analog Interfaces in the Platformization of Music

This article proposes the notion of ‘augmented scene’ to describe music scenes whose digital and analog practices and aesthetics are mutually constitutive, a dynamic increasingly characteristic of contemporary music cultures. Digital platforms are now central to the production, circulation and promotion of music worldwide, yet offline activities remain fundamental to musical life for producers and fans alike. Research on music platformization, however, has largely examined how musicians orient their practice towards platforms. Scene augmentation, by contrast, is reciprocal: platform logics reshaping the offline life of a scene, and offline activity transforming communities that began online. Bridging scene studies, music infrastructure analysis and platform studies, and drawing on ethnographic research in the Hong Kong independent music scene, the article conceptualizes the role of scene ‘interfaces’ as actors that connect, translate and distribute elements of analog and digital music cultures. These interfaces drive processes of ‘augmentation’, analysed here through three functions: renewal, expansion and preservation. Scene augmentation, the article argues, operates at a micro-sociological level and offers both a response and an alternative to the prevalent globalized ‘optimization’ of music for platform circulation.