Part of the Party? Fan & Participatory Music Culture

A Part of the Party!? Fan-culture on the web 2.0 as             a way towards a participatory music culture

The World Wide Web is a place of freedom: of free speech, free choice and of free creative expression. The latter     is becoming increasingly observable ever since the Web 2.0 is available to the Internet-users. The second generation of the web has given people the freedom to put their own content online with only few restrictions. According to media theorist Henry Jenkins (2006) this user-generated content has led to a phenomenon called convergence culture. Three concepts are the buzz words of convergence culture: media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence. With the first Jenkins refers to a media landscape that is mixing old and new media, as for instance showing and watching TV series online. The second and third are about the interaction of the consumers with the producer and with each other. They do this without knowing the effect and where “grassroots and corporate media intersect” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 2). All of this is also expressed in fan culture, which is merging all sorts of media and content and is very grassroots, participatory and collective. Relating convergence culture to music culture in the Web 2.0, one could claim that they will shift the passiveness of the music consumer to a more active and participatory involvement. It could function as a space for expressing the fans’ needs rather than being influenced by the music marketers. In the following I will examine in how far convergence can be a way towards a more participatory music business and culture and how marketers can learn from the music culture online.                        

Of all fan-products I found, looking for fan culture on the Web 2.0, the most interesting subjects were located on the video platform YouTube. Other communities and networks as MySpace, Facebook[1] and LastFM[2] give room to promote one’s favourite artist[3], but the creativity is often limited due to the preset character of the platforms. The works I discovered on YouTube spoke of rather unlimited creativity. Those were:

Fan-alternatives to original music clips. For instance, a SecondLife version to the song Jein by the German Hip Hop act Fettes Brot; 

So-called ‘mash ups’ merging videos and songs of famous musicians, as the mix of Oasis’s Wonderwall and Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams; 

The merging of cuts from movies with popular songs. For example, a Star Wars version of Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars

 The creation of completely new music videos, as the very artsy remix of Madcon’s Beggin, not only remixing the video but also the entire song . 

These are only a few examples of how fans have used media convergence to promote their celebrities. This type of convergence, mixing various musical genres and creating videos to it, is also called ‘remix culture’. Lawrence Lessig (2004), the inventor of the term, calls for a culture in which different types of media-mate
rial should be mixed in order to open up the production of culture to everyone and making it more participatory. Convergence allows for this remix culture as it implies a cultural shift, which makes people look for new sources of information and connect the content of media that usually do not seem to fit, as the abovementioned examples show. According to Jenkins (2006), fans are generally the early adopters of new media technologies. They are also “the most active segment of the media audience” (p. 131) and hence do not appreciate the dictation of the music industry. Moreover, Jenkins states that “the web provides them with a powerful new channel for amateur cultural production” (p. 131). Thus, it seems natural that they have  already invaded the Web 2.0 and exploit its opportunities to generate         Simon Moretti feat. J.M. Armleder - Remix 2003       their own content. The online grassroots efforts of fandom become an             Source: Galerie chez Valentin 2003

answer to the dominance of the mass media. They are hoped to create a participatory music culture that finally gives a voice to the consumers in the music business.

Some bands have already used this potential for their own purposes. The American alternative-rock band Incubus, for instance, started the I Dig Incubus competition in late 2006. The task was for their fans to create a video clip to their song Dig and then post it on YouTube. The winner entry was to become the official clip to the song. The result was quite a substantial amount of entries that were not only very creative but also served as an expression of the fans’ commitment to the band. The competition is a symbol for how convergence culture can also be used by bands (and quite probably their management and marketers) to promote themselves and their products. However, whereas there is no doubt that a musical fan culture exists on the Web 2.0, it must be asked whether it really provides the consumers with participation in the shaping of a music culture according to their needs. The term ‘participatory’ would require that the consumers become involved in the process of production and marketing of products connected to music that has so far been the domain of the music industry . According to Jenkins, the cultural fan-works can only achieve marketability if they can obtain collective meaning. The Internet has provided a platform to the fan culture that can distribute those cultural artefacts and help them to be adopted by the rest of the fan community.

The leaders of the music industry will eventually be forced to pay attention to their customers’ desires. As Jenkins explains, TV producers have already started to listen to their series’ fans to adopt their programmes according to their needs. Furthermore, the dialogue with the consumers through the Web 2.0 is even called the Future of Marketing by the Economist Intelligence Unit (2006) – a leading economics research unit. The researchers found out that marketers will have to incorporate online efforts of web-users as well as the merging of offline and online media into their strategies. Through this they will be able to achieve a more holistic branding that is participatory and that suits the medium. Their advice is to get into a dialogue with the consumers through the user-generated content on the Internet. Moreover, following Holt’s (2004) theory on cultural branding, marketers should be able to understand the social tensions of an era and adjust their product according to them. For the music industry that means that it must be assessed what the place of music as a product and brand is within the current music culture. An instance for such a tension is the consumers’ reluctance to pay for music and the overall negative attitude towards the major labels. The marketers would need to find out how the knowledge about this tension could help the music market out of its dip.

 Winner video of the I Dig Incubus competition

Furthermore, Holt also attaches importance to the consumers’ role as authors of cultural content and brands. For him especially those have an influence, which are immersed in what he calls “populist content”. According to Jenkins (2006), those who are involved in the creation of fan-culture usually are immersed in such content. Thus, marketers should accept that fans are necessary to shape the music culture and business in order for them to profit. If this view on fan-culture is really adopted by the music-marketers in the future, then the participation and integration of the grassroots-level of the music culture will be possible in the music business. It is possible that this way the ongoing process of alienation of the music consumers by the music industry will come to an end or will at least be slowed down. Ideally the consumers would feel that they are part of a culture that is very important to them.

Notes


[1] A social network, mainly to connect friends.

[2] An online radio, presenting related artists to the listener, when entering the name of one’s favourite artist.

[3] See The “Do it yourself” guide to stardom on the promoting effects of MySpace.