Platforms

The stage, merchandise table, and social media (MySpace, Facebook and Twitter) are compared to show how social media platforms have changed the terms of interaction between artists and audiences. Each platform offers affordances for different kinds of relationships, which are understood in different ways by different artists. It shows that where the platforms of the stage and merchandise table bounded encounters in terms of who could be there, what they could do, and for how long, social media unbind participation, activity, time, and distance, pushing people toward everyday interaction.

Staying Human

This conclusion turns away from musicians, asking what we can learn from them to understand relational labor across fields. Arguing that our humanity is at stake, it identifies a set of goals for conditions that would allow relational laborers to flourish. It closes with three sets of recommendations for musicians and others seeking to communicate with audiences, with audiences, and with those who develop the platforms that connect them.

Participatory Boundaries

How do musicians deal with audiences who are organized into gift cultures online? This chapter explores the tensions they experience between wanting and needing to control audiences and recognizing music’s value as a participatory experience. It identifies three strategies of control (territorializing through fan clubs and contests, invoking intellectual property law, and datafying with big data) and two strategies of participation (accepting autonomy and letting them help through fan labor practices like fan funding and promotion). It identifies the challenges with both control and participation, arguing that in a market context, musicians cannot give themselves over fully to participation.

The Intimate Work of Connection

This introduction lays out the main argument of the book, that musicians are pressured into creating personal relationships with audiences through social media in order to stay economically viable. It argues that this has relevance for people in many fields of work. After discussing the importance of relational work in the gig economy, it offers a brief discussion of music and the musicians on which the book focuses. It explains the concept of “relational labor” and closes with an argument for understanding these relationships through the lens of dialectics

Relational Boundaries

When musicians and their audiences can be in touch all day every day, and platforms do little to set boundaries for those interactions or relationships, musicians must do the work of setting relational limits themselves. This chapter explores the pressure to be “authentic,” showing how authenticity in music has shifted from meeting genre conventions to the more intimate demand of being yourself. The result can be the loss of mystique, which some musicians appreciate and others fear, as well as increased encounters with needy fans who feel more intimate than they are. It closes with an analysis of the strategies for bounding relationships and conversations that musicians use to do the work of maintaining a sense of privacy.

Audiences

Beginning with the story of the advent of online crowdfunding, this chapter shows how audiences organized into participatory fandoms during the twentieth century. It defines fandom and shows its tensions between anticapitalism and consumerism. It traces the evolution of online fandom, beginning with BBSs and mailing lists through to the World Wide Web. The progression is illustrated in part through the author’s experiences as a young fan before the internet and as an older able to take advantage of online resources. It closes with the argument that by the time artists came to the internet with hopes of marketing their music, fans had already set the terms of engagement with the gift cultures they had established online.

Music as Communication

This chapter asks what is rewarding about interactions with audiences, answering that it is its ability to help musicians understand the meaning of their work, to help them and their audiences understand feeling and to foster social ties. It focuses in particular on the narratives audiences tell musicians. It also discusses how musicians find value in the relationships they form with other musicians and music fans. It closes with a comparison of social/gift economies and market economies, explaining that the value comes from the former, even though the work is situated in the latter.

Music as Commodity

This chapter begins by laying out the confusing artists face as they try to make sense of the new media landscape. It begins with a history of music as a profession, focusing on how it moved from being seen as a participatory practice to a commodified one, separating musicians from audiences as it did, and changing how they related to their audiences. It discusses the rise and fall of major record labels and the shift to the digital. It argues that as the music industry has become decentralized, musicians have had to do more of the work for themselves. It closes with an analysis of the kinds of entrepreneurial and relational skills musicians need in this new environment.