Life is Strange brought me here (again):
The Soundtrack of Life is Strange: Double Exposure and the Formation of Digital Musical Communities on YouTube
Keywords:
Videogames; YouTube; Digital Musical Communities; Collective Listening.Abstract
This article investigates the formation of online digital musical communities through the analysis of comments on YouTube videos featuring songs from the Life is Strange: Double Exposure soundtrack. The aim is to understand how narrative-driven games, by mobilizing affectively marked musical curations, function as cultural mediators that organize shared modes of listening and belonging. Through a combined quantitative and qualitative approach, comments were collected from seven music videos whose songs are part of the game’s repertoire, focusing on those that reference the lived ludic experience. The data indicate that, within digital platforms, musical listening acquires collective contours, being traversed by memories, aesthetic identifications, and personal narratives. YouTube thus emerges as a space for the symbolic reinscription of the soundtrack, where users not only relive the game experience but also share it publicly and performatively.
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