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This study explores how young Maltese women give meaning to the music they listen to and how this music is incorporated in everyday discourses and identities within the differing local contexts of their lives. This area of research has not attracted the attention of researchers and this study starts to fill this gap. The research was carried out in Malta, a post-colonial island with a population of approximately 400,000 people. Through purposive sampling and snowballing, 20 in-depth interviews were carried out with young Maltese women aged 16-34, from different social backgrounds. By looking at young Maltese women’s identities through their engagements with music, this study shows how girls experience the tensions between the opposing forces of Maltese traditional music and more modern globalised musical forms. Music was found to be a means of conspicuous leisure as well as a means of maintaining social difference and distinction. Musical taste and the social practices associated with that particular music was found to be a primary indicator of social class for Maltese girls. The significance of this study lies in the exploration of a topic that has not yet been properly researched. It combines the Maltese context and the gendered nature of identity formation in Malta’s music scene. The framework of categorisation of respondents is also significant since rather than categorising respondents according to the music they listen to, it categorises respondents through the ways in which they engage with their music. By developing Willis’s (1978) analytical framework, participants were placed into four categories of Fully Committed, Committed, Active Drifters and Passive Drifters. For each category, the most prominent characteristics of participants’ music identities are analysed. These include their understandings of social and cultural capital, structure and agency, negotiations of social boundaries and identity formation. The idea of distinct music subcultures is questioned as, in their everyday lives, young women in Malta rarely conform with distinct cultural groups but form parts of multiple groups within the contexts of their lives. Moreover, processes of hybridization seem to have erased what might have been understood as a subculture’s distinguishing characteristics. These have often become adopted and eventually absorbed by mainstream culture making distinct subcultures problematic. The findings of the research imply tensions between traditional and modern lifestyles that are, in turn, associated with different strata of social class.

(in English) This Master's Thesis focuses on the analysis of the issue of production and maintenance of authenticity as subculture capital. Analyzing the case of a decline of interest of participation in the Czech Freetekno subculture, this Thesis shows how analytically grasp the issue of authenticity and subcultural capital. The research is methodologically built on a combination of in-depth interviews and participant field observation. Primary data are then complemented with an analysis of secondary data in the form of media articles, flyers, and social networks. The main argument of this Master's Thesis is that apart from a distinctive dimension, authenticity also has a substantive dimension. Authenticity does not represent only a distinctive element that internally and externally differentiates the field of a subculture. It is also an element that gives a subculture its inner content, meaning, and sense for both current and new members. Authenticity is not only a resource used in the competition of status but is also a source of the content of a subculture and the pleasure of participating in it. Through an explanation of the decline of interest of participation in the Czech Freetekno scene, this Master's Thesis concludes that in the field of subculture studies the formalist perspective of...

This thesis is primarily focused on collecting insights regarding rock music fan that can be applied to marketing communication. Its main aim is to describe how the rock fans are different from the major population in terms of descriptive characteristics, values, opinions and lifestyle. The points of parity and the points of difference are investigated on the level of rock sub-genres. The message, symbolism and main ideas present in rock music are examined, including historical and social context leading to the formation and development of the genre. We also tried to assign a specific archetype to rock and its sub-genres. We assume that rock fans are in some ways different from the rest of the population and that we are able to observe the differences on the level of sub-genres. However, we also expect that there are some points of parity symptomatic for all the rock genres. We suppose that artists and music marketers approach marketing communication mostly from the point of their own intuition and that they frequently use symbolism, historical references and archetypes in their way of communication. The research is comprised of three parts. First part is the analysis of secondary data from MML-TGI database by Median Research Company for year 2013. Used methodology: General analysis and cross analysis. The objective of the analysis was to determine differences between genres and subgenres in terms of descriptive characteristics, value system and verdicts about lifestyle. The next part of the research was the content analysis of notable rock album front covers for the purpose of deeper exploration of rock symbols. The last part of the research is comprised of interviews with music industry professionals who shared their opinion regarding genre characteristics, fans and marketing communication in real life.