The purpose of this master’s thesis is to find out how free music can be promoted in a meaningful manner towards young people living in an age of streaming and experience-orientation. This is achieved by investigating what music library work consists of, and how music streaming is perceived in relation to this. The investigation consists of qualitative interviews with library personnel working with music at public libraries in Sweden. The results show that there is a democratic reason to keep physical media such as CDs, although they are currently borrowed by a limited audience. This indicates a vacuum in terms of offering music free of charge to the entire population. While licencing commercial streaming services could prove too costly and might be regarded as somewhat superfluous, the interviewees in general seem positive towards libraries offering their own service. A library-specific service would ideally promote local musicians and could according to the author put public libraries on the map in a national as well as international sense. In conclusion suggestions are made to consider the value in keeping physical media by putting them in experience-oriented contexts, for example in involving adolescents in active listening and music discovery; regenerate Demoteket by working with it in a digital context; and focus on reaching adolescents by offering musical instruments and putting music in a context where the adolescents are rather than viewing the music department as exclusively an adult section. There is also reason for putting music in historical, lingual and geographical contexts, something that current streaming services lack. Both the physical space and the web can play important parts in exposing the music collection, which should be used as a means for experiences rather than as a goal in itself.

In November 2008, the National Library of Sweden decided to change their standard classification system from the Swedish Library Classification System (SAB) to the american Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). One of the main reasons to this transition was the assumption of gaining the possibility to exchange and import catalogue posts by using an outspread international classification system. Throughout the years, it has been disputed whether DDC’s treatment of music has been the most suitable. The system has been criticized for being biased in favor of Western music and not being updated with the growth of new music. The purpose of this study is to examine the opinions among librarians connected to the music area on how this classification transition went, and how it has affected their work. The primary questions concerned with this study are if the interviewees perceive that there is a problem by using DDC for music and if so, how? Additionally, does this change also affect the library users, or is it only the librarians? The method I am using to examine these questions is qualitative interviews based on Steinar Kvale and Svend Brinkmann’s thoughts in their book Den kvalitativa forskningsintervjun. The theories that will be used for this thesis are theories concerning functional requirements of classification systems. The results show that the interviewees’ opinions are that DDC’s notation tends to be long, which affects the usability of the system. The interviewees’ perception is that DDC is also lacking in its treatment regarding musical recordings and the popular music area. One of the main reasons for this shortage is because there is basically no other library outside of Sweden that is classifying such material with DDC, which means that the information exchange with countries abroad has so far been rather exiguous.