| Summary: | For the tenth issue of the journal Transposition. Musique et sciences sociales on the theme of “flops” and coordinated by Sarah Benhaïm and Lambert Dousson, we wished to discuss this topic with three young researchers in social sciences whose doctoral research focused on the different levels of circulation of musical goods – production, intermediation, reception – and how they interrelate. We decided to interview them together, in order to obtain a variety of perspectives on the complex object that is the musical “flop” and to have the benefit of seeing these different views side by side. The following exchanges are the result of an interview conducted on Friday, January 29, 2021 via a shared online document. The interviewees were invited to connect to it simultaneously for a period of several hours in order to answer questions that had been previously entered by the interviewers. Beyond its obvious convenience in times of pandemic and restricted access to public meeting places, this experimental interview process was chosen and tested for the possibilities it seemed to offer in terms of discursive production and scientific exchange. Halfway between a live, oral group interview via videoconference (where the responses are recorded and then transcribed) and a collective interview carried out entirely via email (where the different responses are written and then compiled offline), the aim here was to encourage a form of spontaneity and interactivity between the participants while allowing a certain degree of self-reflection and formalization of the answers. Being connected to a shared document, where it was possible to read everything that was written in real time, encouraged each participant to react or adjust to the others’ comments, leaving the freedom to clarify, amend or correct their own answers over the relatively long duration of this virtual meeting. The resulting text was then proofread and edited by the two interviewers before being validated by the three interviewees. The footnotes were written by the interviewees. Presentation of the three intervieweesKeivan Djavadzadeh is a lecturer in information and communication sciences at the University of Paris 8. He is the author of Hot, Cool & Vicious. Genre, race et sexualité dans le rap états-unien, published in February 2021 by Éditions Amsterdam. His research, conducted within his university’s Centre d’études sur les médias, les technologies et l'internationalisation (CEMTI: Centre for Studies on Media, Technologies and Internationalization), focuses on the politics of representation in and around the hip-hop industry in the United States. From a perspective inherited from cultural studies, he questions both the relations of domination at work in the industry and the possible forms of subjectivation for those engaged within it or on its margins. Through a socio-historical approach, he aims to make more intelligible not only the discourses and performances of rap artists but also the contemporary debates about them. More recently, he has turned his attention to the uses of digital networks (Twitter, Instagram and TikTok) by female rappers and in the transformations of celebrity in a digital regime. Tomas Legon holds a PhD in sociology from EHESS. His doctoral thesis entitled « La recherche du plaisir culturel. La construction des avis a priori en musique et cinéma chez les lycéens » (‘Seeking cultural pleasure. The construction of a priori opinions about music and film among high school students’) examined the ways in which teens interpret clues given by presentations of films (previews) and music that they have not yet experienced in considering whether to see or hear them. Through the prism of this sociology of possible lifestyles, he is now studying the way in which individuals integrate the available scientific knowledge on current and future ecological upheavals into their vision of the future. Myrtille Picaud wrote her sociology thesis, defended in 2017, on musical spaces in Paris and Berlin. Her analysis extends to all musical genres and music venues (music bars, concert halls, clubs, squats, etc.), focusing on the work of programmers and on urban transformations related to the location of music venues. Articulating the sociology of professions, urban sociology and sociology of culture, she examines, from a new vantage point, inequalities among artists and in the structure of cities today. This research led to the book Mettre la ville en musique (Paris-Berlin), published in May 2021 by the Presses Universitaires de Vincennes. After studying the rise of security issues in cultural events, she is now pursuing her research on the appropriation of public spaces and digital security policies.
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