Extending Play

Abstract

Abstract Extending Play examines the ubiquity of brand partnerships within the contemporary music industries. Though brand partnerships exist across all media industries, they are a distinct phenomenon for the music business because of their associations with fan club merchandise, concert merchandise, and lifestyle branding. The book also foregrounds women’s participation in shaping these economies through fan labor and image management. While brand partnerships are common among male and female musicians, Extending Play focuses specifically on how female-identified musicians use them tactically to extend their commercial and creative longevity after they have established their recording careers by commodifying their creative acumen with either hegemonically feminine cultural knowledge or traditionally masculinized skills. They do this through branded consumer goods that they make in partnership with companies associated with the beauty, fashion, food, or musical equipment industries. Through textual and discourse analysis of artists’ songs, music videos, interviews, social media usage, promotional campaigns, marketing strategies, and business decisions, Extending Play investigates how female-identified musicians co-create branded feminine-coded products like perfume, clothes, makeup, and cookbooks, as well as masculine-coded products like music equipment as resources to work through their own ideas about gender and femininity as workers in industries that often use sexism and ageism to diminish women’s creative authority and diminish the value of the recording in order to incentivize musicians to internalize the demands of industrial convergence.