It’s New, it’s revolutionary, and it’s modern. Vietnamese indie music in the age of digital streaming platforms

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Vietnam, ‘indie music’ is an internet-based phenomenon that began in late 2015, spearheaded by a generation of young GenZ artists on the music sharing platform SoundCloud. As a contribution to the current special issue, this article examines the relationship between Vietnamese indie music and streaming platforms. It shows how the genre was formed through the technological affordances of platforms such as SoundCloud and YouTube, and how it changed with the entry of Spotify. The findings show that Vietnamese indie music is co-produced on digital platforms through three means: users’ interaction, algorithmic recommendation system, and platform curation. These factors come together to deliver to listeners a sense of a new cultural formation that is different from how popular music has been traditionally produced and delivered in the past. When Spotify launched in the country in 2018, Vietnamese indie musicians saw it as a means to publish, to protect their copyrights, and to get publicity, something that domestic institutions or infrastructures did not provide. From this perspective Vietnamese indie music can be seen to represent the musicians’ entrepreneurial desires, rather than the oppositional politics that have historically been associated with indie music elsewhere.