A new breed of home studio producer: Agency and cultural space in contemporary home studio music production

The purpose of this article is to examine the creative and collaborative agency of a young, professional home-based studio producer of popular music, who iden- ti es as a tracker/producer. The study seeks to illuminate how music production technologies and practices shape our understanding of the agency of the contemporary aspiring music producer and to provide insight into the music production studio as a socially constructed cultural space. In this article the music producer is seen to do more than just work with an artist on an existing work. Producing here means having a creative input on a song from the very beginning of the compositional process up until the point where the song is sent to the master- ing engineer. By combining cultural study of music technology (Théberge 1997; Taylor 2001; Greene & Porcello 2005), which understands music technologies as cultural practices that produce and mediate musical meanings and experiences, and ethnographical methods, I approach the home-based music production studio as a cultural space (Bates 2012) where social and musical performances and interactions take place and meanings of music and its authorship are constantly in negotiation.