Promises and Pitfalls: The Two-Faced Nature of Streaming and Social Media Platforms for Beirut-Based Independent Musicians

ABSTRACT

I argue that streaming services like SoundCloud and Spotify are key elements of a two-faced virtual ecosystem – including social media and crowd-funding platforms – that independent musicians worldwide must navigate to achieve economic viability of their music. The two-facedness of these technologies lies in their promotion as democratic and open gateways for musicians at the same time as they actually serve as gatekeepers that throw up hidden walls along lines including national origin and language. I begin by introducing the music scenes of Beirut, Lebanon, where I have done ethnographic research since 2015. I then lay out the importance of online modes of sociality for these musicians and their fans, focusing on social media and streaming services. SoundCloud, in particular, illustrates the two-faced nature of these technologies. Throughout, I offer case studies of how several musicians and other culture workers are navigating the promise and constraints of these technologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• streaming services
• independent music
• global south
• Lebanon
• ethnography

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jane Sugarman and her Music & Mobilities seminar for the support to begin thinking critically about the roles of social media and streaming services in Beirut’s independent music scene. I thank the American University of Beirut’s Media Studies faculty for the opportunity to present this material at their January 2017 Rethinking Media Studies through the Middle East conference. Last, I give gratitude for Grace Osborne’s true friendship, intellectual camaraderie, and sharp editing eye.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the framing of “culture workers” here to include producers, promoters, band managers, DJs, venue managers, festival organizers, non-profit foundation workers, multinational corporation branding and advertising workers, and others involved in the production and dissemination of independent music in Lebanon. This framing owes much to Bourdieu’s formulation of “cultural intermediaries” in Distinction and the subsequent academic literature considering the roles and class positions these figures occupy (see, in particular: Bourdieu, 1984; Beck, 2005; Negus, 2002;; Wright, 2005). All of these figures play a role in the virtual and physical manifestations of independent music in Lebanon, so I choose to group them under this rubric of “cultural workers.”

2. Those of my interlocutors who have been active since the mid 1990s, the “old guard” among the independent musicians today, tend to narrate the scene beginning with themselves and the infrastructure of studios, labels, venues, and bands they built up. However, the history of independent music in Beirut extends at least as far back as the pre-war years. Even at the height of the war, some research associates recournted, there were politically-committed independent bands at the American University of Beirut, a couple venues for rock and for dancing, and a radio station playing this kind of music.

3. All attributed quotations have been approved in context by my research associates who offered them in interviews per my Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocol filed with the New York University IRB as IRB-FY2016-1237. This process has also yielded valuable feedback in the writing of this article that I cite where applicable. I have sought approval for attributed quotations of non-public social media postings, anonymizing them wherever approval was not obtained. I was not able to dialogue with research associates about my use of all publicly-posted materials from which I draw, although these conversations are an integral and ongoing part of my research method.

4. Even as my research associates almost universally appreciate the music of popular and politically-engaged artists like Ziad Rahbani and Marcel Khalifeh whose careers peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, they set themselves apart from this generation of Lebanese music just as they set themselves apart from the broader Lebanese society which these older musicians engaged and critiqued. As I explain below, many of my interlocutors come from a de-politicized sub-elite and middle class background, which informs their desire to stand wholly apart from what they identify as the social ills of a sectarianized Lebanon.

5. These folk practices involve mostly wedding music and the sung poetic form of zajal where men improvise in a competition of verbal wit. Independent musicians I work with occasionally draw on these forms in their work, as in a 2017 ElectroZajal event, sponsored by Red Bull Lebanon, in which six DJs provided electronic backing to zajal tracks. See Chapter Two of [Author’s Name] 2019 for more details. Otherwise, these spheres of folk production and consumption remain separate from the ones I focused on during my fieldwork.

6. See also Carah (2010) for relationships between independent music and brands in Australia and Meier (2017) for a more global consideration of the role of brands in music.

7. See, in particular: Joseph (1983), Traboulsi, 2016), Deeb & Harb, 2013), Salloukh, Barakat, Al-Habbal, Khattab, and Mikaelian (2015), and Baumann, 2017). I follow many of these scholars in using the adjective “sectarianized” rather than “sectarian” because it conveys the processural and intentional nature of the dominant social order in Lebanon: sectarianism is neither natural nor inevitable, but rather has been a conscious political strategy deployed by the ruling elites to legitimize their power.

8. These sentiments around lack of infrastructure do, in fact, resonate across independent music scenes worldwide, including in the global north. Garland (2014) describes similar feelings among musicians in both Chile and Brazil, while Luvaas (2012) discusses indie music and design in Bandung and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Fournet (2019) focuses on these feelings among women producers in the U.S. and Peru.

9. See also Kirschenbaum (2008), Chun (2011), and Sterne (2012), among others for prominent statements of a similar argument about other forms of digital technology.

10. It bears mentioning that this uploading process is often less smooth than it sounds and requires advanced planning. Internet upload speeds are still slow, even in metropolitan Beirut, and many companies impose daytime capacity limits. My interlocutors often will plan to stay up late to take advantage of the nighttime unlimited capacity and higher upload speeds to shepherd new audiovisual content onto various platforms.

11. The topic of language ideology among independent musicians in Lebanon and Egypt is beyond the scope of this paper. It will suffice to say that a far greater propotion of independent musicians in Egypt sing in Arabic than in Lebanon. The simplest explanation for this reality, in keeping with some themes of this paper, is that Egypt has a large enough population of middle-class and sub-elite listeners to support a domestic scene in Egyptian Arabic. See Sprengel (2017) for a detailed study of this scene. More complicated explanations for the prevalence of Arabic in Egyptian independent music and its relative absence in the Lebanese scene stem from the different ways the Egyptian and Lebanese bourgeoisie have navigated European colonialism and its aftermath.

12. One of the only other scholarly publications about SoundCloud I could find – Allington, Dueck, and Jordanous (2015) – focuses on the importance of place in the valuing of electronic music on the social streaming site. From quantitative networking analysis, they find that artists not hailing from London, New York, and Los Angeles face similar levels of geographic inequality in the supposedly ubiquitous virtual space as in cultural economy taking place in physical space.

13. The other scholarly publication involving SoundCloud performs an analysis of English-language comments scraped from the platform in 2013 to investigate the modes of sociality the site enables (Hubbles, McDonald, & Lee, 2017). They conclude that most comments are meant as “broadcasting” of support or disapproval instead of invitations to dialogue. Anecdotally, I can attest that a much higher percentage of comments on these Arabic-language hip hop tracks are in the spirit of dialogue.

14. One of the two Pro users, Chyno, pays for the service to increase exposure for his English-language material, and the other, El Rass, does so because he needs the extra space for all his material.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Nickell

Chris Nickell is a Ph.D. candidate in music at New York University. Chris' dissertation draws on ethnographic fieldwork with participants in independent music scenes of Beirut, Lebanon to better understand how they mobilize performances of diverse musical masculinities to shore up their social status and defer threats of downward mobility. Chris is also a community organizer in Northern Manhattan and currently serves as Deputy Chief of Staff for State Senator Robert Jackson.