Auto-communicative reconstruction of meaningfulness in musical randomness: reclaiming musical order on Facebook

Abstract

This article investigates how music-specific communities on Facebook self-organize in and respond to the digital music ecosystem dominated by streaming platforms such as Spotify and their algorithmic restructuring of music. By building on earlier work on digital platforms as archives, we differentiate between the “old” and “new” orders of music cultures. We also utilize Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotics and his concepts of semiosphere and auto-communication to make sense of communicative self-ordering and memory work by music-related communities on Facebook in Estonia. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with local music experts, we demonstrate how communities focused on record collecting, specific music genres or music quizzing work auto-communicatively, build shared memories, identities, and self-organize in order to resist the “new musical order” that has resulted from the datafication and platformization of music markets.