Page 265 . Volume 9, Issue 2 November 2012 Technological engagement and musical eclecticism: An examination of contemporary listening practices Melissa Avdeeff, University of Alberta, Canada Abstract The ways in which technology mediates the relationship between people and music has increasingly evolved since the advent of playback devices. With the arrival of digital music, and its inherent culture of digitality, new issues have emerged regarding musical engagement at the level of fan and/or consumer. This paper will explore how and what people are engaging with music, as mediated by technology. These two issues will be categorized by: (1) the immense quantity of popular music available digitally is promoting a culture of eclecticism, whereby people are not tied to specific genres when defining their tastes. Personal genre alliance has fallen out of favour, and replaced by fluid definitions of genres and artists, that are user-driven and highly personalized and subjective: for example, folksonomies. (2) One of the primary ways in which people consume music is through portable media devices, such as the iPods. It is shown that there are statistically significant differences in genre preference between those who use MP3 players and those who do not. This paper utilises a dataset comprised from both qualitative and quantitative means. Keywords: Digitality; Genre; iPod; Taste; Engagement; Consumption; Empirical; Subjectivity; Youth. Introduction Without engagement, music essentially becomes meaningless. The ways in which people consume music is an important aspect of why we study it, why we listen to it, and why it is distributed. The evolution of digital technologies has altered the creation and distribution of music, ultimately affecting how people consume it. (Ayers; Coleman; Taylor) Musical engagement is technologically dependent, and the technology we use to engage with music is altering the manner by which we define our engagement, on multiple levels. Much