Music Fans Research Articles

Phonography Culture

Phonography Culture

Ritual

Ritual

Beyond Slacktivism: The Cases of K-pop Fans and Tiktok Teens

With recent technology and social media, new forms of political activism have become widespread. Young people in particular, have been willing to embrace these new forms of activism. This paper examines new trends in digital activism through qualitative observations of Twitter and Tiktok, and three case studies of young people’s digital activism. In the first case study, Korean pop music (K-pop) fans thwarted police’s attempts to identify protesters by crashing police apps. In the second, they rendered white supremacist hashtags useless, by drowning out the hashtags with their own tweets. Finally, K-pop fans, along with Tiktok users, played a prank which humiliated the Trump reelection campaign. The study expands upon the life cycle effect and generational effects theories of political behavior, and develops a continuum with which to conceptualize and understand the nature of activism. It concludes that digital activism is characteristic of Gen Z, and has real-world impacts. This article pushes back on the notion that digital activism is mere “slacktivism” (low effort token support of a social movement). Instead, it argues that activism evolves along with technology and time, and that digital activism’s real-world impacts can be just as effective as conventional political activism.

Keep the Fire Burning: Exploring the Hierarchies of Music Fandom and the Motivations of Superfans

The Internet has changed how music fans come together and how the music industry connects to and communicates with fans. To understand the incentives for becoming a fan and why fans take part in an artist brand, this article considers the diversity in a particular fan community, including its hierarchy and roles. Fans have different levels of engagement, knowledge, and status, both inside and outside a fan community. To extend the existing research on fan hierarchies into the digital promotional culture, this study focuses on the case of the Swedish music artist Robyn and her Facebook fan community Konichiwa Bitches. To gain insights into a complex online research arena, we use a qualitative and digital ethnographic approach in both online and offline contexts. The article provides an understanding and conceptualization of fan hierarchies, focusing on the top of the hierarchy, superfans and executive fans, and on their incentives for engagement. These high-level fans function as a key connecting point between the brand management and the fans, thus taking fandom a step further and enhancing the brand.

Johnny Cash International: How and Why Fans Love the Man in Black

Johnny Cash International: How and Why Fans Love the Man in Black

Review: Cool Town: How Athens Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Review: Cool Town: How Athens Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Creating a brand community at the bottom of the pyramid: the case of a Cameroonian music platform

ABSTRACT The phenomenon of brand communities has been well documented by researchers during the last two decades; however, little attention has been paid to the phase during which brand communities first emerge. Facilitating this emergence is particularly crucial for businesses operating in countries or regions in which large segments of the consumer population live at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). But how can a brand community be generated in a BoP context? And how can organisations mobilise people living at the BoP to participate in creating and maintaining a brand community? To respond to these questions, we study the case of a Cameroonian music platform created in 2015 that was quickly able to mobilise Cameroonian music fans to spread its reputation by word of mouth and to produce content. Our case study shows that to create a brand community, startups should follow three precise steps.

The Labor of Curating: Fandom, Museums, and the Value of Fan Heritage

The Labor of Curating: Fandom, Museums, and the Value of Fan Heritage

Hang with Me—Exploring Fandom, Brandom, and the Experiences and Motivations for Value Co-Creation in a Music Fan Community

Abstract Active and co-creative audiences are sought, used, tracked and taken for granted in the quest for strong music brands. Fan communities are co-opted to build value for brands and used to foster communication in transmedia marketing campaigns. However, when focusing on audiences and fans’ digital media activities, digital traces and numbers, important questions of motivations, expectations, experiences, morals and power structures are often overlooked. Drawing on a digital ethnographic study and an interdisciplinary perspective, we investigate a fan community of the Swedish artist Robyn, both online and offline. The article contributes to the concepts of fandom and brandom and the notion of value. It also adds to the knowledge about the perspective of fans and fans’ motivations for taking part and co-creating value in a highly commercialised and strategised music market.

Recording studios as museums? Record producers’ perspectives on German rock studios and accounts of their heritage practice

AbstractRecording studios are shrouded in mystery. Some have become sites of pilgrimage; other studios have been converted into heritage museums. These practices are driven by city authorities, commercial heritage institutions or music fans. This interview study gives a voice to an understudied group: record producers and studio owners as the people in charge of popular music creation. Three German rock and metal producers expressed their opinion on the usefulness of studio museums and explained their own heritage practices. Their insights demystify the ‘magical aura’ associated with recording studios, picturing these spaces as places of pressure and anxiety. Hardly convinced of the technologically deterministic ‘magical contamination’ of technical equipment, the producers see little sense in studios as museums. For them, the released record is what counts. To stay in touch with the community and to keep the memory of their work alive, they prefer to use social media.

Suburban Cowboy

This essay analyzes the political and cultural significance of confrontations between country music fans and punk rockers in the suburban community of Costa Mesa, California, in the early 1980s. During this time, Orange County was defined by paradox. On one hand, the region proved historically influential to leading conservative politics and the rise of Ronald Reagan, and bore a legacy of a country music and cowboy culture that well complemented such conservatism. And yet, the area also served as the breeding ground where right-wing politics and suburbanism’s sonic resistance, hardcore punk rock, took root. More than a simple culture clash, the conflict between country music fans and punk rockers represented a moment when two uniquely suburban and Southern California sounds collided at a significant point of transition in American politics and culture, and at heart revealed a conflict over the merits of suburban life. This struggle over space was one in which country music fans emerged victorious, as their efforts to violently quash the local punk scene worked in conjunction with city leaders who forcibly closed the region’s leading punk venue, the Cuckoo’s Nest, in 1981 and revealed a solidarity between country music fans, local police, and local politicians.

HIPSTERS VERSUS POSERS: FANNISH SPLIT IN THE INDIE MUSIC WORLD

ABSTRACT Purpose: Web 2.0 technologies have enhanced relational dynamics in fan communities. Indie music fans significantly identify themselves with the genre and participate in these communities within a music industry reinvention scenario. Based on the Foucauldian perspective, by sharing knowledge about media products, fans manifest truths capable of expressing subjectivities - parrhesia, a way of mutually affecting different truths. Thus, the aim of the present study is to analyze how parrhesia is operated in interactions among indie music fans. Originality/value: The present research expands an important theoretical-investigative path in the consumer culture theory (CCT) field by adopting Michel Foucault’s later theoretical cycle, which addresses the construction of subjectivities. Design/methodology/approach: Netnography of interactions among indie music fans was carried out in one of the largest online discussion forums on the topic. Findings: Heated discussions observed in the investigated community often create a split that shows a dispute focused on defining what being an indie music fan means. Based on disruptive parrhesia anchored in moral backgrounds associated with erudition and collectivism versus hedonism and individuality, self-declared true fans and those who seek fun establish alter-subjectivities as hipsters and posers.

Fan Affirmation: Alethurgy on an Indie Music Fandom

ABSTRACT Context: highly identified with the genre, indie fans are engaged and productive, especially in virtual communities where they circulate opinions and share experiences. Objective: since relations mediated by consumption provide conditions for constituting subjectivities, we rely on Foucault’s theory with the aim of analyzing how the interactions of indie music fans evidence an alethurgical process of subjectivation. Methodology: to do this, we performed a netnography on a large global forum for indie music discussion. Results: results show a cultural configuration in which the communal sense legitimize conducts, based on emotional testimonies and manifestations of expertise, which establish the very condition of fanity associated with the capacity of its members to outline the fan object, develop a fan authority and then to position themselves in relation to the market logic in which the genre is inserted. Conclusion: thus, we conclude that indie music fans perform an alethurgy of affirmation. The study innovates by adopting the concept of alethurgy as a means of analyzing the subjectivation of fans, which is evidenced as a theoretical gap in the field of CCT.

Fan Affirmation: Alethurgy on an Indie Music Fandom

ABSTRACT Context: highly identified with the genre, indie fans are engaged and productive, especially in virtual communities where they circulate opinions and share experiences. Objective: since relations mediated by consumption provide conditions for constituting subjectivities, we rely on Foucault’s theory with the aim of analyzing how the interactions of indie music fans evidence an alethurgical process of subjectivation. Methodology: to do this, we performed a netnography on a large global forum for indie music discussion. Results: results show a cultural configuration in which the communal sense legitimize conducts, based on emotional testimonies and manifestations of expertise, which establish the very condition of fanity associated with the capacity of its members to outline the fan object, develop a fan authority and then to position themselves in relation to the market logic in which the genre is inserted. Conclusion: thus, we conclude that indie music fans perform an alethurgy of affirmation. The study innovates by adopting the concept of alethurgy as a means of analyzing the subjectivation of fans, which is evidenced as a theoretical gap in the field of CCT.

Sounding El Paquete: The Local and Transnational Routes of an Afro-Cuban Repartero

Cuban authorities have accused reggaetoneros of creating "vulgar" and "distasteful" music since the musical style's introduction to the island two decades ago. As a result, the artists' work is mainly excluded from both state television and radio broadcasts. Despite these restrictions, reparto, a reggaeton subgenre that originated in outlying Havana neighborhoods, ranks today as one of the most popular musical styles in Cuba. Its broad reach is due to the style's prominent inclusion on el paquete semanal. El paquete semanal is an informally distributed digital media platform that provides participants with a means to find and create music, and to connect with a transnational network of music fans outside of the purview of the Cuban state. Using archival material from personal interviews and other forms of digital data collection, I address the addition and removal of the music of popular reparto artist Chocolate MC from the paquete as a direct consequence of the shifting decisions of a network of matrices, paqueteros, and subscribers. I argue that Chocolate MC's mediated path through the paquete sounds a shifting border between acceptable and unacceptable modes of racial representation amid a moment of heightened change in Cuba.

«В Ливерпуле, на площади, в длинных пиджаках»: творчество группы The Beatles в городском фольклоре

The article examines texts of several genres of urban folklore the content of which is related to the Beatles. These texts are remakes of lyrics (“Michelle”, “Back in the U.S.S.R”), jokes, and various kinds of fictional narratives, like funny stories about writing particular songs and about some events from the life of the band members. Some jokes about the Beatles involve popular characters of Soviet jokes (anekdot) — Vasilii Ivanovich (Chapaev) and his batman Pet’ka. The song “Can’t Buy Me Love” was also rendered in a folkloric manner (“In the Square in Liverpool…”). Variations of this song were widespread among rock music fans in the USSR in the 1970s. Today, modern communication modes, like the Internet and social networks, are instrumental in the revival of these folklore (post-folklore) texts.

English in Russian musical reviews

AbstractThis paper seeks to contribute to the current discussion of world Englishes by showing how English is used in popular music reviews in Russia, a context that has not been addressed in previous research. Drawing on sets of textual and ethnographic data, we argue that English and Anglicisms contribute to the expressiveness and precision of musical reviews, enhance promotion of musical products and become part of the unique identity that ties Russian music fans together. We show how English evokes connections to global contexts in the local community and how Russian speakers use English resources creatively, adapting them to local needs and modifying English musical terms through Russian word‐formation mechanisms, to make them more local.

Steal My Girl

ABSTRACT This article explores the way that a scholar of girls’ studies and popular music deals with the emergence of her own daughter’s identity as a popular music fan, with particular emphasis on the discourses of sexuality, empowerment, and safety that dominate contemporary feminist discourse. The author contrasts her own experience as a young fan and daughter of a feminist in 1976.

Motivations for music information seeking as serious leisure in a virtual community: exploring a Eurovision fan club

PurposeThis study aims to examine the motivations of a group of music fans of the Eurovision Song Contest to seek information about the competition and to participate in a virtual community of fans.Design/methodology/approachThe study draws from the uses and gratifications framework to understand the needs that a particular mass medium fulfills for its users. Fifteen Eurovision fans were interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. Interviewees were asked to talk about how they seek information about the competition, to relate their engagement and participation with the virtual community and to reflect on the role that the community of fans and the Eurovision have in their lives.FindingsContent analysis revealed four themes that reflect the motivations that shape many aspects of participants lives, relating to seeking information about the Eurovision Song Contest, fulfilling the need for serious leisure, making social connections, finding a sense of belonging and forming an identity.Social implicationsThe study examines the motivations of a group of people who share a common interest that shaped the ways the seek information, related to others, view themselves and construct their identity and make social connections, all to satisfy their love and admiration for the competition, and this regardless of the societal stigma that the competition might carry.Originality/valueThis study extends the literature on serious leisure information seeking by exploring the role that information and social media play in different aspects serious leisure activities.

Ayat al-Qur’an dan Lirik Lagu Sufistik (Studi Intertekstual atas Album Bintang Lima Dewa 19)

The purpose of this manuscript is to browse the Qur'anic verses, which are positioned as a hipogram in the lyrics of “Bintang Lima”, Dewa 19’s album and the intertextuality pattern that occurs between the Qur'anic verses as a hipogram and the lyrics of “Bintang Lima” album as a transformation. The intertextual approach is used to evaluate which pattern is more used by the author of the transformation in ordering the lyrics of the song on the album. Of the twelve sentences in song lyrics on the “Bintang Lima” album, there are six sentences used exerp pattern, three sentences used modification pattern, one sentence used expansion pattern and two sentences used conversion pattern. The exerp patterns are more commonly used, as they are the simplest intertextual patterns and at the same time, giving way to the music fans of “Dewa 19” to understand sufistic messages in an easy way, so the accusations of carrying a Jewish mission (using Illuminati symbols). or theosofi and freemason understandings about this music group can be reconsidered.