The consumption of music and the expression of VALUES: A social economic explanation for the advent of pop music

By consuming pop music, people want to express who they are, to which group they belong, what their identity is. People's identity, however and contrary to what many believe, is not strictly individual. Instead, people's identity is highly social and draws on the socio-cultural values (what I here propose to call VALUES) in society - VALUES that become 'objectified' or institutionalized and may thus be communicated to others. If such institutionalized socio-cultural values are not conceptualized, and if one is not able to understand how institutions work in signaling people's identity, one is not able to explain a phenomenon such as the advent of pop music. In this paper, I apply and develop ideas taken from institutional and social economics, to understand the consumption of a symbolic good such as pop music.