Artists as Entrepreneurs, Fans as Workers

Abstract

This paper uses the increasing integration of social media into music making and marketing to reflect on the work artists and their fans perform. While new technologies are celebrated for making cultural production more accessible, there is also more pressure on artists, as cultural entrepreneurs, to produce and distribute their own work. At the same time, fans are facing greater invocations to participate through overt calls to become co-creators or through more passive participation like behavior tracking. Fans cannot really consume without working. Using an analysis of British musician Imogen Heap—including press articles and data scrapes from Heap's social media accounts—this paper focuses on the changing occupational and creative roles for artists and fans and the attendant implications for the circulation of cultural goods.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Derek Johnson as well as audiences at the IASPM conference and at the UW Madison Media and Cultural Studies colloquium for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to the reviewers and editors of Popular Music and Society for their time and comments. This research was funded in part by a grant from the Quebec provincial government (Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société).

Notes

^[1] She even created a “twitdress” for her appearance at the 2010 Grammy Awards that tweeted messages and pictures from fans so they could “accompany [her] on the red carpet” (Dybwad).

^[2] As a quick example, Heap has been invited to give TED lectures about her recording process; her technological abilities and co-creative stance are always mentioned in her print and television interviews.

^[3] In September of 2010, Amie Street closed down and began directing all its customers to Amazon.com's new music service. Although files were still available at Amazon, the demand-based pricing structure was no longer supported.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeremy Wade Morris

Jeremy Wade Morris holds a PhD from McGill University and is an Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Communication Arts department. His research interests include the state of the popular music industry, the digitization of cultural goods and commodities, podcasting and other music and sound technologies. His work has appeared in New Media and Society, First Monday, and in collected editions on music and technology.