Understanding Music in the Digital Media Era

Digital systems change attitude to music as the sound dimension of cultural life, which can be transformed into a commodity. Despite the fact, that people increasingly interact with each other via digital media, attributes of music underlying the ability for communicational interaction, are often ignored. Even though even before music digital reproduction methods emerged, music was subject to assimilation in the exchange economic acts, now digital world has permanently altered ways of interaction with music as now it is based on datification of virtual actions and digital shades of random preferences. Music is simultaneously interactive and presentational and in the participatory mode, including its collective, non specific interactive creation in real time, it possesses significant individual and social implications. Music as part of real life is not really presented in the virtual reality and its potential social costsare still to be comprehended and evaluated. Everyday communicational interactions among people face to face are filled with musical models between interlocutors as they share features with music itself, but these constituents are absent in digital systems, designed to perform communicative functions. The article introduced the idea that digital technologies encompasses only a limited and specific cultural understanding of music, whichat least distorts or even suppresses its abilities, which distinguishes it as flexible and quite functional environment for social interaction.