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Paper short abstract

This study analyzes 1990s Japanese DTM magazines to argue that early online music scenes developed as extensions of magazine-based participatory cultures of music production, sharing, and evaluation, rather than as disruptions caused solely by new technologies.

Paper long abstract

This study examines Japanese music programming publications, specifically desktop music (DTM) magazines of the 1990s to elucidate the elements of participatory culture embedded in magazine-based submission practices and to analyze the process through which these cultural practices migrated to early online music scenes. Specifically, it focuses on the expansion of music production, sharing, and evaluation practices rooted in print media into networked music scenes through the adoption of communication technologies, such as computer networking services and the Internet.

This study aims, first, to demonstrate that DTM magazines functioned as infrastructural bases for a participatory culture by mediating sharing and mutual evaluation among users. Second, to theoretically situate the continuity between magazine-based submission cultures and early online musical practices. Through this approach, this study seeks to reconceptualize the emergence of online music culture in 1990s Japan as an extension of preexisting cultural practices rather than as a rupture owing solely to new technologies.

This study employs a qualitative analysis of major DTM magazines published during the 1990s, as well as contemporaneous music magazines and related mooks. Specifically, it examines reader submission sections, MIDI data contribution projects, and articles introducing network technologies to analyze how magazines functioned as media institutionally supporting a participatory culture. Additionally, early websites, mailing lists, and net labels were considered to comparatively examine the points of connection between magazines and online culture.

This study concludes that the culture of submission, sharing, and evaluation fostered by DTM magazines in the 1990s already fulfilled key principles of participatory culture, and that these structures were subsequently inherited by music scenes following the spread of the Internet. Guided by the logic of application, DTM magazines offered perspectives that actively integrated communication technologies into musical practice, thereby providing the cultural and practical foundations that enabled user-driven creative communities to transition into online spaces. Consequently, cultural practices in early online music scenes can be understood as reorganized and expanded extensions of print-based submission cultures, rather than entirely new formations.