FROM CROWDSURFING TO CROWDSOURCING: USER-GENERATED CONCERT VIDEOS, YOUTUBE.COM AND THE PRACTICES OF MUSIC FANDOM
YEE-MAN JANICE LEUNG
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This thesis focuses on examples of fan-produced concert videos. Through an analysis of YouTube, I have gathered a range of performance footages captured and uploaded by fans who have attended the Broken Social Scene concerts at
Toronto's Olympic Island Festival and Chicago's Lollapalooza in the summer of
2006. From this sample, I will evaluate how the immediacy, aesthetics and content of fan-produced concert videos enable music fans to leverage their cultural capital and to attain a sense of self-identification.
iv Acknowledgements
To my supervisor, Professor Barbara Crow, who has endlessly encouraged and supported my intellectual pursuits. I cannot thank you enough for believing in me, and for dispelling every doubt I have in my research in the past two years. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the other members in my supervisory committee, Professor Steve Bailey and Professor Greg Elmer for their generosity and valuable insights.
To my "concert gang" for driving me to shows, and for ritualizing post-gig discussions while cruising down the highway, with caffeinated beverages in hands.
To my Mom, Dad and Sister. I could have never completed this (with my sanity, somewhat intact) without their tireless love and support. Thank you.
v Table of Contents
Abstract iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vi List of Figures viii List of Tables ix Introduction 1 Admit One: Recording Devices are Strictly Expected 1 Research Outline 3 Framing the Research: Why Fan-Produced Concert Videos? 5 Literature Review 13 Structure, Agency and the Construction of the Fan 13 A Brief Analysis of Fan Study 14 Part 1: Social Structure and the Pathological Fan 14 Part 2: Agency and Everyday Fandom 19 Methods 34 The Limits of Focus Group Interviews 34 Fan Concert Videos and YouTube.com 36 The Position of the Aca/Fan 41 Case Study and Data Analysis 42 YouTube, Fandom, and the Banking of Cultural Capital 42 "From Someone Who Wasn't There But Heard All About It...Thank You!": Immediacy in Fan-Documented Concert Videos 47 "This Video Made Me Smile A Lot": Aesthetics in the Fan-Documented Concert Videos 53
vi "All 16 Members of Broken Social Scene Perform 'Anthems For A 16 [sic] Year Old Girl'": Content in the Fan-Documented Concert Videos 69 Conclusions 81 Bibliography 89 Appendix A : YouTube Video Samples from Toronto 97 Appendix B : YouTube Video Samples from Chicago 101 Appendix C : How do Music Fans Deploy Their Mobile Camera Phones and Digital Cameras at Live Music Concerts? 105 Appendix D : Self-Produced Concert Videos 114
vn List of Figures
Figure 1: Screenshot of YouTube's interface 36 Figure 2: Rating Features on YouTube's Interface 40 Figure 3: Stars at The Docks Nightclub, March 1, 2006 105 Figure 4: Arctic Monkeys at The Phoenix Concert Theatre, March 21, 2006 .. 106 Figure 5: Matthew Barber & The Union Dues at the Drake Hotel, April 27, 2006 107 Figure 6: Broken Social Scene at Olympic Island Festival, June 24,2006 107 Figure 7: Wolf Parade at the Phoenix Concert Theatre, August 5, 2006 108 Figure 8: Death Cab for Cutie at Massey Hall, October 31, 2006 109 Figure 9: Shout Out Out Out Out at Lee's Palace, March 3, 2007 109 Figure 10: Bloc Party at Kool Haus, March 26, 2007 110 Figure 11: Voxtrot at Sneaky Dee's, June 8,2007 110 Figure 12: Travis at Kool Haus, July 19,200 Ill Figure 13: Travis at Kool Haus, July 19, 2007 112
vin List of Tables
Table 1: Number of videos uploaded on to YouTube within the first 24 hours of the Olympic Island concert (Toronto) on June 24, 2006 49 Table 2: Number of videos uploaded on to YouTube within the first 24 hours of Lollapalooza (Chicago) on August 6, 2006 50 Table 3: Video T2 in the Toronto sample has received the highest number of star rating 58 Table 4: Video C27 in the Chicago sample has received the highest number of star rating 58 Table 5: User-assigned ratings for fan concert videos (from Toronto's Olympic Island Concert), sorted based on video's playing length (in descending order) ...72 Table 6: User-assigned ratings for fan concert videos (from Chicago's Lollapalooza), sorted based on video's playing length (in descending order) 72 Table 7: Broken Social Scene at Olympic Island, Toronto, June 24, 2006 97 Table 8: Broken Social Scene at Lollapalooza, Chicago, August 6, 2006 101
IX Introduction
Admit One: Recording Devices are Strictly Expected
At a recent Death Cab for Cutie concert in Toronto, lead singer Ben
Gibbard—with all his rock star postures intact—was strutting confidently across the stage as he and his band delivered a high-energy rendition of Crooked Teeth.
Two-thirds into the performance, the singer accidentally tripped over his guitar cable and fell flat on his back. Upon completing the remainder of the song,
Gibbard exclaimed to his adoring fans, many armed with mobile camera phones and digital cameras that he trusted, videos of his blunder were made. He continued by announcing that he was prepared to see footages on YouTube.com prompting his legion of fans to respond with a reassuring cheer.
With YouTube's meteoric rise to ubiquity, the popular web community has accumulated an extensive collection of amateur videos rendering everything from Gibbard's pratfall in Toronto (please see bibliography for links to YouTube videos mentioned in the thesis) to the Arcade Fire's impromptu performance outside Union Square in New York City. Created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, YouTube became an overnight success ten months later when an unsuspected user uploaded the infamous "Lazy Sunday" skit from
1 an episode of Saturday Night Live. With more than 100 million videos viewed per day (Businessweek, 2007), the entertainment industry has wasted no time in trying to capitalize on the hype and buzz surrounding the popular website.
Predictably by October 2006, YouTube was sold to Google for a hefty sum of
$1.65 billion.
At the time of writing, there continues to be minimal discussion—both within academic and popular literatures—regarding the users and their motivations to generate and circulate content on YouTube. In an attempt to rectify this lack, my research will be anchored by the following questions: 1) why are music fans willing to create self-produced concert videos; and 2) what are the rituals and practices related to the production and dissemination of user-generated concert videos.
By situating this topic in relation to existing research on fan productivities, my aim is to unpack the "particular forms of cultural production, aesthetics traditions and practices" (Jenkins, 1992, p. 279) of fan-produced concert videos, and exemplify how music fans render these texts and the subsequent discourses surrounding these texts (supported by the various rating, recommending, and commenting features on YouTube) as strategies to negotiate pleasures and cultural affiliations vis-a-vis their consumptions of popular music.
1 For more information on Lazy Sunday and its presence on YouTube, please refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_Sunday
2 Research Outline
In order to comprehend why music fans are willing to contribute and disseminate content for YouTube, it is useful to first contextualize this research question with a detailed literature review on the topic of fandom. By tracing two of the most common yet polarized perceptions of fans—that is, fan behaviours are either 'dependent on' or 'independent from' official/mainstream culture, I will outline the limitations embedded in the current research in fan culture, and demonstrate why we need to move towards a more nuanced conceptualization of fan behaviour.
In recognizing that fan behaviours are fraught with contradictions, the next chapter will begin with a brief discussion on the methodological approaches underlining the current research. In the following chapter, I will locate YouTube as a site central to fans' participation in popular music and their performance of fan competency. By referencing.John Fiske's notion that fan culture operates as a
"shadow cultural economy" (1992, p. 30), I will demonstrate how YouTube emerges in relation to socio-cultural and technological variables, and in turn, replicates a hierarchal structure where fans have varying degree to exercise their cultural capital.
From this, I will begin mapping these theoretical concerns on to specific examples of fan-produced concert videos. By focusing on YouTube, I have gathered a range of performance footages captured and uploaded by fans who
3 have attended the Broken Social Scene (BSS)2 concerts at Toronto's Olympic
Island Festival and Chicago's Lollapalooza in the summer 2006. Through this juxtaposition, the underlining objective is to evaluate how the immediacy, aesthetics and content of fan-produced concert videos enable music fans to leverage their cultural capital and to attain a sense of self-identification. Lastly, in the concluding section, I will attend to the limitations embedded in my research, and suggest some research directions to further enrich the topic of fan-produced concert videos.
2 According to critics and fans alike, Broken Social Scene (BSS) can be best described as an "indie" music collective. According to Wendy Fonarow's five definitions of "indie" (p. 26), BSS's "indie-ness" can be attributed to its affiliation with the Toronto-based, independent record label, Arts and Crafts (which was also co-founded by BSS lead singer, Kevin Drew in 2002). It should be noted that, while I will be referring to Broken Social Scene as a band from here on in, however, BSS does not operate as a band in the traditional sense—that is, instead of having a fixed number of members, each with his/her own role within the band (for example, the singer, the drummer, the bassist), Broken Social Scene thrives on (and perhaps, is best known for) having a rotational lineup of musicians, many of whom shuffle in and out of the band due to other commitments with various musical side projects. It is precisely this reason, a central attraction to catch the band live is that each performance can be interpreted as being unique, since the touring lineup is always unannounced and is always changing. In addition to this alternative band structure, Broken Social Scene has a reputation for improvising and extending many of their songs in a live concert setting. According to an article from The Guardian, the band is identified as "a kind of indie jam band [...] that can stretch [a concert performance up] to three hours" (2006). While I do not want to imply that the following research findings are only applicable to videos produced and circulated by Broken Social Scene fans. However, the unique characteristics embody by this musical collective (such as changing lineups and musical improvisations) should not be underestimated for propelling some of the fan productive behaviours I will further discuss in this thesis.
4 Framing the Research: Why Fan-Produced Concert Videos?
Although fan-produced concert videos are not the primary examples of fan productivity on YouTube, however, as someone who likes music, likes to attend shows, and likes to read other fan accounts online, I find myself traversing to
YouTube more and more often in the past year, all in hopes to 1) retrieve some of my favourite concert memories; and 2) experience certain concert highlights I would otherwise have no access to due to geographical and temporal limitations.
To navigate YouTube, in other words, has become a prominent rhythm underscoring my overall fan experience. The impact the popular website has towards music fan culture became explicitly clear to me in September 2006 when
I was reading over a message digest from the Yahoo! Fan Group for the Austin,
Texas band, Spoon. With fans presenting their thoughts and comments on the band's performance at Seattle's Bumbershoot Music Festival, the discussion unfolded typically, until one of the community members recalled the incident where comedian David Cross joined the band on stage and unleashed an
"interpretative dance" to accompany the musical performance. As other fans chimed in and expressed their desires to witness such an occasion, the following message also caught my attention:
Can we get some YouTube of this? (McKay, September 5,2006, 3:41pm PST)
5 In this context, YouTube is not merely the name of a popular video- sharing website, butalso a noun, or more specifically, a description of an embedded fan practice. This comment is also of interest to the current discussion, because it clearly reflects how fan culture is organized in a mobile and network era. In recognizing that virtual fan communities often consist of members in diverse geographical locations, when fans take on the responsibility to record and upload concert videos, these rituals do not only enable individuals to democratize a supposedly ephemeral moment in time and space and rearticulate how a concert can be re-experienced.
Also, in acknowledging that virtual fan communities traditionally rely on reading and writing as two central processes of communication, most of the earlier researches on the fandom do centre on literacy and its impact on fan productivities (Baym, 2000; Bird, 2003; Prandstaller, 2003). By referencing the above example, when music fans demand to see "some YouTube of this," this request does not only imply a shift in fan expectations regarding how information should be presented. More importantly, it also unravels new spaces within a virtual environment where fan meanings and desires can be located. With this framework in mind, by positioning YouTube as a space where individual's negotiations with popular culture can be collected, organized, and retrieved, one of the research objectives underlining this analysis is to better understand how
6 peer-driven websites like YouTube have an increasing role in informing the practices and pleasures of music fandom.
As fan-produced concert videos become a normalized practice in music fandom, it should come as no surprise that businesses are also tapping into peer production as a viable and lucrative marketing strategy. In recognizing that "57 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds online (12 million individuals) are [already] creating content of some sort and posting it to the web" (Lenhart and Madden,
2005; Howe, 2006), companies ranging from Procter & Gamble (via the "open
•a innovative" company InnoCentive ) to Trinkhanf (a brand of natural hemp milk drink from Austria) have all relegated to the "global brain" to solve everything from packaging to design problems (Howe; Trendwatching, 2006). To tie this discussion back to the topic of fan-produced concert videos, Wired Magazine recently named Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!—the fan driven Beastie Boys' concert film—as a successful example of "crowdsourcing"4 which harnesses, rather than rejects "the intelligence and creativity of distributed labor" (Anderson,
2006b; Howe, 2006).
Inspired by a 30 second, grainy cell-phone concert video recorded and uploaded to the Beastie Boys' website, Adam Yauch (a.k.a. MCA), a founding
3 http://www.innocentive.com/
4 Coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 issue of Wired Magazine, crowdsourcing is a buzzword describing businesses who turn to the "latent talents of the crowd" to complete various tasks such as content production or corporate research and development. 7 member of the hip-hop trio decided to pursue a concert film project with the help of concertgoers. In the fall of 2004, the band, via its website, recruited 50 fans attending the sold-out Madison Square Garden performance in New York, and by equipping each individual with a Hi-8 handheld digital video camera, the fans- cum-cinematographers were instructed to document the show in its entirety with one single take. The resulting work is a dizzying juxtaposition of amateur concert footages along with ecstatic fan reactions as captured by audience members at their respective vantage points. In an interview with MTV, Yauch ruminates "[i]t just seems like so many concert videos and films I see are done in this one style, with the flying boom that kind of swings out over the crowd.. .There was something about the hand-held thing and the rough edge of the way the stuff looked, and I thought it might be interesting to document the show like that, by giving lo-res[olution] cameras to the audience" (Cosgrove, 2005).
At this point, it is useful to first step back and locate user-generated content in relation to the oft-discussed phenomenon: Web 2.0. According to Tim
O'Reilly (2005), Web 2.0 is an umbrella term used to describe the broad "set of principles and practices" in which underscores the social and collaborative features of second generation, web-based services like YouTube, Flickr and
Wikipedia. Despite being one of the most referenced terminologies since its inception, the meaning of Web 2.0 (or lack thereof, as some critics may argue) remains a highly contested subject. For the purpose of my research, I am going to
8 simply focus on the participatory and interactive nature of Web 2.0 and situate this neologism as a corporate attempt to work alongside rather than working against the flow of human capital. Adopting Eric E. Schmidt's (Chief Executive
Officer of Google Incorporated) slogan, "Don't fight the Internet," O'Reilly revisited the topic in December 2006, and suggested that:
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. This is what I've elsewhere called "harnessing collective intelligence" (O'Reilly, 2006).
As O'Reilly clearly noted in the above passage, Web 2.0 is first and foremost, a "business" principle. With that said, when initiatives like the aforementioned Beastie Boys' concert film (although the final project is not web- orientated, however, its origin can be traced back to the practice of fans sharing
DIY videos within virtual communities like websites and bulletin board systems) employs the generative productivities of fans, these projects do not only provide a space where fans can exercise their concerns and desires, but more importantly, they also fulfill industry interests (Theberge, 2005, p. 487). While The Beastie
Boys have always exercised flexibility when it comes to fan inputs (for example, band members have in the past, released various a-cappella tracks on their
9 website5 to encourage a fan-remix project), there is no denying that Awesome is inextricably a commercial entity—ready for distribution and mass consumption.
This perspective raises interesting questions amidst all the "fan inclusive" accolades the Beastie Boys' project has earned since the film debuted at the 2006
Sundance Film Festival. While I do not wish to suggest the subjective experiences presented in Awesome as insincere, however, the overtly positive attentions towards the film do obscure a central concern regarding the commodification of user-generated content.
It was merely eight years ago when the entertainment industry boisterously punished the public for swapping and repurposing digital content— all in the name of copyright protection. To reference Lars Ulrich of Metallica, who of course is best known for spearheading the RIAA vs. Napster lawsuit, he has persistently accused p2p services like Napster for stealing and not fully compensating his creative endeavours. With his logic in mind, it is important to ask: how are the members of the public being remunerated when they are hailed to "co-create" with the cultural industry today? How are these "consumer-made"
(Trendwatching) initiatives protecting (if at all) the rights of the public's creative work? More importantly, with recent research suggesting that the popularity of
5 http://www.beastieboys.com/remixer/
10 Web 2.0 is inflated (Reuters, 2007), is peer production really an option open for everyone?
I do want to stress that I am by no means against businesses from fostering a more open and transparent relationship with their consumers. However, to fully achieve this balance, it is imperative to move the discussion beyond technological hyperboles, buzzwords and neologisms ("crowdsourcing" from Howe, 2006;
"prosumerism" from Tapscott and Williams, 2007; "ProAm"—an amalgamation for professional and amateur work from Anderson, 2006; "Brand Democracy" from Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners' campaign for Converse Sneakers, see
Jeffers, 2005) that seemingly saturate every facets of contemporary marketing rhetoric.
To approach this topic from another perspective, Jenkins contended that fans were perpetually misunderstood twenty years ago, because mass media distorted selective fragments of fan culture; presented them as objective facts; and subsequently "mythologized" fannish identity as excessive and deviant (1992, p.
11). As the cacophony of hype surrounding user/fan-generated content continues to escalate within marketing commentaries, I would argue that all the buzz and chatter are not really advancing our understanding of the topic, but rather, they are merely "mythologizing" fandom as media democracy, in turn, allowing brand names to neatly align themselves with "mythic values like progress" (Mosco,
2004, p. 27-32).
11 As Baym advises, in order to fully consider the limits and potentials of increasingly mediated (and commodified) fan communities, it is important to turn to the fans themselves and acknowledge how they are developing and maintaining norms, rituals and practices within these spaces (p. 218). In adopting this research mandate, my intention is twofold—first, to provide a nuanced framework to better understand fan motivations; and second, to mobilize this knowledge and to begin assessing how mainstream attention towards fandom can compliment or complicate the fan/industry, producer/consumer relationship.
12 Literature Review
Structure, Agency and the Construction of the Fan
In Sharon Hays' essay, "Structure and Agency and the Sticky Problem of
Culture," she contends that a central problem with sociological literature is that,
"social structure," despite being an oft-used terminology, is entrenched with ambiguous and misleading definitions. She extends this discussion by suggesting that:
"social structure," like many sociological concepts is often defined by contrast: its meaning then becomes dependent on the concept which is set against. One of the more prevalent forms of contrast is that between "structure and agency." In this formulation the interconnections between structure and agency are lost. Further, this contrast is often mapped onto another set of dichotomies common in social theorizing and interpreted to mean, for instance, that structure is systematic and patterned, while agency is contingent and random; that structure is constraint; while agency is freedom; that structure is static, while agency is active; that structure is collective, while agency is individual. (1994, p. 57)
Although Hays' essay does not attend to fan culture, however, her concern towards structure and agency evokes an elegant framework to reassess some of the most stubborn misconceptions attached to the topic. By outlining key concepts surrounding fans—both within an academic and popular perspective—I will argue that many of these observations unintentionally obscure the nuances of fan communities and their practices, because these discussions are constrained within a "defined by contrast" formula.
13 A Brief Analysis of Fan Study
Part 1: Social Structure and the Pathological Fan
As Jenkins notes in Textual Poachers, the theoretical discussion of fandom originates from "longstanding debates about the popular consumption...and audience response to popular entertainment" (1992, p. 1). By locating this remark as a starting point, I am going to 1) illustrate the impacts audience study have towards fan study; and 2) highlight how this context has circumscribed fan study into a "defined by contrast" paradigm as described above.
In acknowledging this weakness, I am going to adopt Hays' mandate to
"disentangle" the concepts of structure and agency, and through this clarification, rearticulate a more complex modality in understanding how fan culture operates.
In keeping a more balanced viewpoint, my objective is to exemplify fandom as a complex social phenomenon that cannot be understood within binaristic notions such as active/passive, individual/collective, empowered/exploited, or working against/working towards commodification.
The relationship between "audience" and "fan" can be described as both distinct and interrelated. While the former is often regarded "as a category rather than a way of being.. .something we slip in and out of (Casey, 1992, p. 17), the latter is characterized by an individual's commitment (time, emotional and
14 financial) towards specific "media texts, icons, stars, or sports teams" (Kane, n.d.;
MacDonald, 1998, p. 135).6 Despite these differences, audience study continues to play a significant role in shaping our understanding of fans and their practices.
For example, the conceptualization of fans as "passive, mindless dupes" is strikingly similar to one of the most influential models of audience study—the
"hypodermic" theory of media effects. As a result of the rising Fascist regime in
Germany during the 1930s, theorists like Theordor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
(or collectively known as the Frankfurt School of Social Research) have argued that as traditional social ties and structures corrode (for example, the decline of community), audiences have fewer defenses against external influences and consequently become more susceptible to mass media pressures and manipulations (Casey, p. 18; Jenson, 1992, p. 14-15; Morley, 1997).
To tie this back to the topic of fan study, the passivity underscoring the
Frankfurt School's "pessimistic mass society thesis" is clearly exemplified by some of the earliest academic discourses on fans. In the essay "Fandom as
Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization," Joli Jenson (1992) argues that
"the fan" has been historically discussed in relation to celebrity and fame. She further interrogates this association by suggesting that, "the, fan is understood to be, at least implicitly, a result of celebrity—the fan is defined as a response to the star system. This means that passivity is ascribed to the fan—he or she is seen as
6 For my research, I am going to limit my discussion to music fans only. 15 being brought into (enthralled) existence by the modern celebrity system, via mass media" (p. 10).
By depicting the fan as a passive consumer of popular culture, this representation provides a fitting platform to unpack some of the "ideological commitments" pitting structure and agency as opposing binaries. In recognizing that contemporary Western thoughts privilege both "individual freedom and social order," this tension is imperative to the current example as the need for
"social order" is ultimately what facilitates the "passive fan" rendering to emerge.
Put simply, by typifying fans in pathological terms, this assessment, much like the atomized "mass man" argument put forth by the Frankfurt School, is motivated by a perceived deterioration of social values vis-a-vis industrialization and urbanization (Jenson, p. 14). In order to alleviate the trepidations of modernity, by filtering fandom within a "structural" lens, this approach enables social critics to situate external constraints like resources and economic institutions (mass media, or more specifically, the cultural industries) as key factors in engendering human passivity (Hays, p. 58), and subsequently, re-inscribes a foundation to "look for order, find patterns, make generalizations, establish laws, and thereby [re]discover the structured character of the social universe" (Hays, p. 59).
Before addressing the limitations linked to this deterministic, structural model, I wish to revisit a point established earlier—that is, while audience study and fan study do share many similarities, they are by no means interchangeable. A
16 good example in illustrating this argument is to once again refer to Jensons' essay on fandom and pathology. By observing how fans are perceived in both academic and popular literatures, Jenson contends that fans are often classified into one of two categories: the "obsessed individual" or the "hysterical crowd" (p. 9). She continues by suggesting that when fans are depicted as the "marginalized others," these expositions are not arbitrarily defined, but rather, they are strategically positioned in order to firmly remind the public that society privileges "the rational over the emotional, the educated over the uneducated, the subdued over the passionate, the elite over the popular, the mainstream over the margin, the status quo over the alternative" (p. 24-25).
The "us versus them" distinction clearly marks the difference between audience members and fans. While audience is perceived as a category we "slip in and out of, fandom is identified as a commitment, a "way of life". The assumption I wish to underscore is that being a fan inherently implies a lack of distance towards the television show, the movie, the rock band, that have triggered one's dedication in the very first place. In Television Studies: Key
Concepts, Casey neatly summarizes this conjecture by stating that the fan
"appears to have been 'taken over' by the text in a way that 'we' have not... [djespite the fact that we may enjoy the same texts" (p.90).
Distance is a key concern in fan study. While the concept is often presented in tandem to the proximity fans share with their media interests, on the
17 flip side to this, distance also evokes a platform to challenge the structural analysis of fandom. A central criticism regarding "the fan as passive" or "the fan as the others" appraisals is that these sketches are construed upon a "severely truncated basis of inquiry" where conclusions about fans are drawn without any meaningful engagements with the fans themselves (Casey, p. 90; Jenson, p.25-26;
Jenkins, 1992, p. 6). The vast distance between scholars and fans, in other words, does not aim to theorize fan culture in an empirical capacity. Instead, by implementing an elitist "us vs. them" position,7 this clear demarcation serves to patronize fans, and further perpetuate the myth that fans are idiosyncratic dupes.
Within a methodological context, the gap between researchers and subjects is a topic that has been thoroughly discussed. Although it is beyond the scope of my thesis to review in details the impacts ethnography has towards fan study; however, in recognizing its research mandate to eradicate an "all-seeing perspective" in favour for a "multiplicity of perspective" (Fonarow, 2006, p. 3), this paradigm shift is a direct attempt to re-contextualize the fan from a pathological into a normalized, everyday context. The move away from a detached, clinical perspective is also crucial in introducing agency to the discussion of fandom. Much like the concept of "structure," in the following
7 According to Jenson, socio-economic class is one factor in motivating the "us vs. them" logic. She further differentiates the two positions by stating that, "'they' (viewers, consumers and fans) are seen as victims of forces that somehow cannot and will not influence 'us'. The commenter on fandom is protected by reason or education, or critical insights: thanks to these special traits, 'we' don't succumb to whatever it is we believe applies to 'them'" (p. 25). 18 section, I am going to tease out the key beliefs underlining the terminology and examine how these ideas have both contributed and compounded our understanding of fans and their productive and generative practices.
Part 2: Agency and Everyday Fandom
According to Hays, social theorists often identify "agency" in contrast to
"structure" by distinguishing the former concept as creative, contingent, and synonymous with choice (p. 59). Unlike the "structural" perspective where external and material factors determine the course of social life, Hays notes the
"voluntarists" model values individual freedom, and renders agency as an empowering force privileging humans to "tacitly understand and creatively choose the cultural values guiding their action" (p.60).
It should come as no surprise that the pessimistic treatments of audiences and fans eventually lost traction in the research milieu. As members of the
Frankfurt School fled to the United States amidst Fascism in Europe, American scholars asserted the "mass audience" as a problematic concept since the model itself was both "pessimistic and sociologically unsophisticated" (Casey, p. 18). In response to these shortcomings, researchers by the late 1950s introduced the "uses and gratification" approach, and redirected their research focus from "what media did to people to what people did with the media" (Casey, p. 19). Although this
19 perspective was not without its flaws, however, by extracting audience engagement as a site of investigation, this method was regarded by many as "a step forward in audience theory, since it allows us to see audience as active participants in the creation of meaning and as a heterogeneous population with different needs and motivations" (ibid).
Another theoretical approach that is worth reviewing is the
"encoding/decoding" strategy (theoretically influenced by semiotics and ideology) advanced by the British Cultural Studies tradition. According to Stuart
Hall's seminal paper, he suggests that the encoding and decoding model of communication should be understood as dualistic—where interpretations occur on
"both ends of the sender and receiver axel" (Puustinen, 2001, p. 203). The
Cultural Studies model is of relevance to the current discussion because of two interrelated reasons. On one hand, the encoding and decoding model was a popular method in the 1980s when researchers began examining how audiences interacted with specific media forms like soap operas (Ang, 1985) and romance novels (Radway, 1984). In this capacity, many of these literatures can be situated as an empirical foray into fan study. By giving fans a voice (through the use of ethnographic methodologies like interviews, participant observations), these findings reflect the researchers' deliberate intention to reduce the distance between themselves and their subjects.
20 On the other hand, the encoding/decoding system has provided a platform to assess the complexities embedded in the concept of agency. If the Frankfurt
School is accused of being overtly pessimistic, while the "uses and gratification" model being overtly individualistic, the Cultural Studies approach can be interpreted as an attempt to reconcile the two extremes. In acknowledging that the relationship shared between audience and the media is dialectic, this framework is also comparable to Hays' delineation of agency:
A sociological understanding of agency does not confuse it with individualism, subjectivity, randomness, absolute freedom, or action in general, but recognizes it as embracing social choices that occur within structurally defined limits among structurally provided alternatives. Since social life is fundamentally structured, the choices made by agents usually tend to reproduce those structures. That reproduction process, however, is never stable or absolute and, under particular circumstances, the structured choices that agents make can have a more or less transformative impact on the nature of structures themselves. Human agency and social structure, then, have a simultaneously antagonistic and mutually dependent relationship, (p. 65)
To exemplify this tension, it is useful to turn to John Fiske's analysis of
Madonna and her young female fans. By drawing on various examples ranging from fan interviews to the "Make My Video" contest (where MTV and Madonna have solicited fans to direct a short clip for her 1986 single, True Blue), the researcher positions the controversial pop icon as a site fraught with semiotic tensions. By highlighting the in-between space Madonna occupies, Fiske argues that when fans interpret her persona and her oeuvre, these processes simultaneously address the distribution/struggle of social power (patriarchy,
21 gender roles and expectations, in other words, social structures) and the distribution/struggle of personal meanings (everyday engagement with the media text, or the manifestation of agency on behalf of the audience) (1989, p.97).
If Hall's encoding and decoding model enables researchers like Fiske to shift the empirical lens towards media text and examine how fans derive
"offensive pleasure" by resisting intended media messages; Fiske's Madonna study also points to the "producerly pleasure" (Bailey, 2005, p. 21; Fiske, 1989, p.58) initiated by fans when they create their own cultures. By examining how fans talk about Madonna, mimic her fashion choices, or even create their own versions of a music video, Fiske identifies these levels of participations as 1) enabling fans to work out the inconsistencies embedded in the dominant definitions of femininity/masculinity; and 2) transforming their engagements with popular culture as an active (albeit, small-scaled) attempt to resist established social norms (p. 113).
The conceptual link between fan productivity and resistance is one of the most compelling ideas in fan study. Paradoxically, this association is also one of the most misleading—especially (and perhaps, not surprisingly) if it is filtered within the structure/agency conundrum. In the previous section, I have already mentioned that when fans are rendered as passive and easily manipulated, these depictions stem from what Jenson exerts as "an unacknowledged critique of modernity" (1992, p. 9). From this framework, a central objective underscoring
22 most contemporary researches on fans is to reject these unfounded and biased observations.
For theorists like Henry Jenkins, by examining how fans "poach" media texts, his ethnographic work reveals fan-generated content as a complex pastiche of appropriated and personal aesthetics. Jenkins' analysis also illustrates how fans rely on active participation as a means to articulate and circulate concerns that are not being addressed in mainstream media (1992, p. 23).
Drawing from the works of Michel De Certeau, Jenkins takes up
"poaching" to exemplify the complex and unstable relationships between producers, consumers and media texts. Although, Jenkins' treatment of fandom is often branded as "too celebratory" (Hills and Jenkins, 2001), however, it is useful to point out that throughout Textual Poachers—one of the earliest and most comprehensive analysis of fan culture—he has repeatedly noted that fan interpretations do not equate "resistant" interpretations. He also warns his readers
"against absolute statements [...] that appear too frequently within the polemical rhetoric of cultural studies. Readers are not always resistant; all resistant readings are not necessarily progressive readings; the 'people' do not always recognize their conditions of alienation and subordination" (p. 34).
Jenkins' attention to the nuances organized within fandom cannot be overlooked. To juxtapose his ideas with the structure/agency discussion, it can be argued that when fans "poach" media texts, this agency can be understood as both
23 structurally reproductive and structurally transformative. According to Hays, structurally reproductive agency is exercised when individuals "remain present in the conceptualization, and it points to the processual nature of structures" (p. 63).
In this context, Hays contends that while human beings do implement creative choices when faced with structural limitations, however, these choices often reproduce and reinforce social structures as well (p.63-64).
Within a fan study framework, there are many theoretical concepts that parallel Hays' analysis of structurally reproductive agency. An obvious example that comes to mind is John Fiske's "shadow cultural economy." In "The Cultural
Economy of Fandom," Fiske defines fan culture as a site that occupies both outside and within the institutions of "official" culture. By broadening Pierre
Bourdieu's metaphor in treating "culture as an economy in which people invest and accumulate capital" (1992, p. 30-31), Fiske superimposes this concept on to popular culture and argues that when fans amass "unofficial" cultural capital, this gesture enables them to fill "cultural lack and [to] provide the social prestige and self esteem that go with [official] cultural capital" (p. 33).
Fiske's articulations concerning power and capital become pertinent when considering how fan community is structured and organized. For researchers who have examined the dynamics of fan communities (Jenkins on fan artists, writers, or tape traders, 1992; Baym on the soap opera listserv, 2000; Bird on the Dr.
Quinn Medicine Woman email list, 2003; Prandstaller on the U2 Yahoo! Fan
24 Group, 2003), all of these case studies do unravel a crucial similarity—that is, when fans come together to share/discuss their interests, equal participation is not guaranteed for everyone involved. Rather, fan communities are carefully informed by a hierarchical structure where certain members—due to more active or proficient contributions (in turn earning them more prestige, or pop cultural capital)—have more clout in sustaining the overall rhythm of these communicative spaces.
In recognizing that more productive members tend to have the authority to moderate and mediate virtual discourses amongst other fans, this configuration clearly denotes that structure and agency are not mutually exclusive. What is of particular interest here is that, this pattern of participation also serves to destabilize the myth that the World Wide Web is inherently a democratic space unaffected by gender, class, and race divisions (for an introduction on these topics, please see Kolko, Nakamura and Rodman, 2000 and Nakamura, 2002). As networked and mobile technologies continue to converge, one cannot ignore the fact that these circumstances do privilege participation from individuals who have the appropriate form of economic affluence and technical literacy.
Before turning to the concept of structurally transformative agency, I wish to briefly shift my focus on to the "newbie"—a label ascribes to new fans who often infiltrate established online fan communities and display inappropriate
25 behaviours. The distinction between seasoned members and newbies is strikingly similar to the division drawn between audience members and fans. In the previous section, I have already mentioned that the "us (audiences) vs. them (fans)" delineation is commonly reduced to the perception that fans lack critical distance towards popular, mass mediated commodities. To a certain extent, this argument is also applicable when considering how in-group/out-group dynamics are determined amongst fans.
As someone who frequents online music fora, a common pattern that emerges after a band or musical act receives some form of mainstream attention
(this is more common with indie bands, whose subcultural enclave is defined by a contested relationship with media conglomerates), is that certain fans will unduly complain about the sudden influx of newbies who wish to become a part of the fan community. By criticizing how new members are disrupting the flow of these websites (for example, asking too many questions, posting too many irrelevant comments), this provocation is a direct response to the sudden exposure (and increased accessibility) towards their valued pop cultural capital.
In Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community, Nancy
Baym detects that while most fans do welcome new members and regard their
8 In Baym's analysis of the All My Children newsgroup, seasoned members are referred to as "Old Fogies" (p. 184). In Bird's study of the email group for the now-defunct television show Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman established members identified themselves as "Old Geezers" (p. 60). These self-imposed designations clearly reflect both seniority and a hierarchical system in fan cultures. 26 contributions as vital in sustaining the well being of online communities (p. 184), however, many fans are weary of a certain type of newbies whose media interests are driven by marketing hype initiated by the cultural industries. Put simply, when established fans find faults with the behaviours of new community members, often these assertions—much'like the audience vs. fan argument—are dependent on the assumptions that new fans are uncritical, passive, and unable to withstand the repressive ideology of consumerism.
Jenkins remarks that fans often identify themselves as "consumer advocates," since "[t]he history of media fandom is at least in part the history of a series of organized efforts to influence programming decisions" (Hills and
Jenkins, 2001; Jenkins 1992, p. 28). This "mutual suspicion and open conflict" between fan and producers (Jenkins 1992, p. 32) can be attributed to how ratings, audiences, and the operations of the cultural industries are discussed and understood within popular discourses. Casey further explains:
At the industry level, the way media audiences are conceived is fairly straightforward...commercial broadcasters are generally interested in only two things, the size of the audience and its composition (or more specifically, the amount of disposable income its members possess). This is because audiences are not seen as a category to be understood, but as a commodity to be sold to advertisers, (p. 18)
To challenge the notion of the "commodity audience" (Jenkins, 1992, p.30), fans often write letters or sign petitions in an attempt to save television programs from network cancellations. In doing so, fans deploy these strategies to
27 confront and destabilize established hierarchy between producers and consumers.
What is of particular interest here is that these projects—despite their sincere nature—often fall short in meeting their deliverables. On a surface level, these failures only serve to support the argument that fans are powerless in evoking any meaningful changes. However, by establishing alternative networks to rewrite, reinterpret and re-circulate media texts, these grassroots campaigns do on a subtle level disrupt established constraints regarding content ownership and copyright control.
The troubled relationship between producers and consumers can be further exemplified by the practice of music bootlegging. Lee Marshall contends that when fans (illegally) tape and distribute live recordings, these gestures can be identified as a form of "contested commodification" (2005, p. 149). As I have already mentioned, fans are always suspicious when they see their media interests being commodified, and it is precisely this reason, music fans tenaciously live by the sentiment that bootlegs are to be shared and not to be sold (Neumann and
Simpson 1997, p. 327). In other words, when "bootleggers attempt to evade the commercial music industry's [...] structures of production" (ibid), they do so as a practice of resistance—since the very idea of capturing live music on tape not only violates the legality of commodified culture, but more importantly, by obtaining pleasures vis-a-vis these smuggled recordings, fans are given the
28 opportunity to reclaim the symbolic values they have invested on to popular music (2005, p. 154).
Hays describes structurally transformative agency as "social choices that have 'non-trivial consequences'—that is, those actions that affect the pattern of social structures in some empirically observable way" (p. 64). She continues by emphasizing that, "structurally transformative agency [...] is made possible under particular historical circumstances—when portions of what were once deeper social structures become particularly malleable and provide occasion for significant collective refashioning" (ibid). By describing how fans organize letter- writing campaigns or establish bootleg networks, the probability of success behind these projects is not a concern in this discussion. Rather, in recognizing that fans have always mobilized their collective interests to promote a more engaged form of cultural citizenship, this mentality (and the subsequent behaviours motivated by this mind set) is momentous in propelling some of the most conversed changes between producers and consumers, and the space they subsequently occupy in popular culture.
In a December 2006, TIME Magazine assigns "you"—the collective public—as its annual "Person of the Year." In the article, Lev Grossman reflects,
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new
29 bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME'S Person of the Year for 2006 is you. (2006)
Although Grossman is quick to recognize the "mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary" (ibid), however, the popular discourses surrounding UGC is a topic worth further investigation. On one hand, it is obvious when TIME Magazine frames "the time, energy and passion" underlining peer production as a positive attribute, this rendering is drastically different from a more established, mainstream perception of fandom—an activity that is deviant, extreme, or as William Shatner boldly declares in his infamous "Trekkies" sketch9 on Saturday Night Life, "a colossal waste of time" (Jenkins, 1992, p. 11).
On the flip side to this, it is troubling when popular literature simply conceptualizes peer production as a synonym for media democracy. By outlining the animosity between "newbies" and established members in online fan communities, I wish to reiterate that fan cultures are hierarchical, and that the pleasures derived from fan productivities do correspond to an appropriate performance of social, cultural, and economic capital. With that said, when TIME
9 The sketch revolves around actor William Shatner attending a Star Trek fan convention and after being inundated by endless (and mostly absurd) questions about Captain Kirk—a character he plays on the popular television series—Shatner snaps at his fans, and declares, "[g]et a life! For crying out loud, it's just a TV show." This episode first aired in North America on December 20, 1986. For a transcript of this specific sketch, please visit http://snltranscripts.jt.org/86/86hgetalife.phtml 30 Magazine associates peer production as an expression of "the new digital democracy," this assessment is problematic, because it assumes everyone has the inherent ability to blog, to make mash-ups, or to upload YouTube videos as long as these technological applications are made available.
There is no doubt that the Internet has provided many fans with an accessible and creative outlet to address their media consumption habits.
However, as Bird and Jorgenson detect in their study of media literacy and low- income households (2002), by simply making computers and network technologies available, these initiatives alone cannot guarantee that subjects will accordingly integrate (or better yet, manipulate) technologies to their own advantages. The researchers further explain, "[l]earning how to use the Internet, let alone related multi-media possibilities, requires a level of educational and cultural capital that is largely unobtainable to the poor (and these participants were by no means the poorest of the poor)" (Bird, p. 170).
To approach this concern from another perspective, it is useful to return to the discussion on mythology and emerging technologies. Mosco contends the problem with mythologizing the potentials of cyberspace is that "myths depoliticized speech because they purify social relations by eliminating the tensions and conflicts that animate the political life of a community" (Mosco on
Barthes, p. 31). Drawing together these ideas, it can be said that when TIME
Magazine (or any of the managerial literatures like The Long Tail or Wikinomics)
31 overemphasizes the democratic power of peer production, this "myth" does not only obscure class politics, but more importantly, it normalizes the opportunity to
"talk back to the media" without acknowledging that creative and subversive reworking of media texts is an option determined by one's socioeconomic context
(Bird, p. 170,182).
By outlining how popular presses celebrate peer production as a form of civic engagement, it is important to recognize this shift in attitude is first and foremost a marketing strategy. As Jenkins notes, when media industries tap into existing researches on fan communities, this understanding also enables businesses to better translate consumer desires into purchasing decisions (2006a, p. 62).
Of course, it is a welcoming change for mass media to conceptualize fandom in a productive rather than a pathological framework. However, since
"the ideal of individual autonomy is so ingrained in Western culture," one cannot ignore the fact that "audience power" can easily conceal the social and cultural inequalities in which ascertain who can actively and critically engage with popular culture (Bird, p. 168-171). To filter this discussion within the structure- agency lens, if a central concern regarding the "passive fan" is that it over augments the power of social structures (in that fans cannot help but succumb to media power), the "active fan" is equally problematic in that it over exaggerates the power of personal agency. With this concern outlined, in the following
32 research, I will further examine how socio-economic circumstances affect the production and collection of fan texts.
33 Methods
The Limits of Focus Group Interviews
In order to appraise the motivations and pleasures related to the creation and circulation of fan-produced concert videos, my project will be informed by two methodological approaches: participant observations and textual analysis.
As I have already mentioned, ethnography plays a seismic role in transforming fan study into a site of empirical analysis. A common strategy deployed by many researchers working on this topic is the use of focus group interviews. Since the late 1980s/early 1990s, social scientists have increasingly attempted to confront persistent stereotypes regarding fans and their behaviours.
With this objective in mind, many researchers favor this hands-on approach since it allows them to reveal what people are actually thinking (Fonarow, p. 13). Put simply, by treating fan experiences as a topic worthy of attention, this method is much more sensitive in understanding how fan interests and sentiments manifest within their everyday lives (Jenson, p.25).
With that said, focus group interviews are not without their limitations. As
Baym notes in Tune In, Log On, "[o]ne of the unfortunate consequences of the heavy reliance on focus group interviews is that they allow us access only to the social relations that researchers have put together for research purposes." She
34 continues by stating that since interviewers and interviewees both have schematic ideas about what they should ask and what they should respond within a research setting, these cultural scripts often "reproduce stereotypical beliefs in place of their understandings of their own experience" (p. 21).
Baym raises another criticism I would like to further pursue in my own project. She contends that while interviews do provide important insights into what fans are thinking, however, they should not be "taken as complete or accurate explanation of [fan] practice," because "people are [often] not aware enough of the nuances of their behaviour to explain them" (ibid). Since a central motivation underscoring my analysis is to unravel the contradictory practices embedded in fan culture, I have deliberately excluded focus group interviews because this method cannot fully attend to my research objective (for example, how many fans will voluntarily admit that by attending and documenting certain concerts on video, they are motivated by their needs to show off their cultural capital).
Instead, by adopting Baym's methodology on her Usenet study—that is, to focus on "fan performances" (such as writing messages on a bulletin board system, or in this specific example, creating, uploading, rating and commenting on concert videos found on YouTube) that would have taken place "whether they were studied or not"—I am going to treat these activities as detailed "field notes" tracking fan interactions within a naturally occurring setting (Baym, p. 21). In
35 observing how music fans leverage and manipulate various features on
YouTube's interface—a website that is not exclusive to their media interests—
this method is much more effective in understanding how fans negotiate, both
qualitatively and quantitatively, their fandom to meet their emotional and social
needs within a virtual environment.
Broken Social Scene "Almost Crimes - Guitar Wars"
Figure 1: Screenshot of YouTube's interface, image retrieved on March 13, 2007. i
Fan Concert Videos and YouTube.com
Using John Fiske's "shadow cultural economy" as a theoretical anchor,
my objective is to illustrate how the production and circulation of fan-concert
36 videos enable fans to accumulate (pop) cultural capital in ways that parallel and deviate from official cultural capitalists.
I have administered a total of four YouTube searches in order to locate
Broken Social Scene concert videos from their appearances at Toronto's Olympic
Island on June 24, 2006 and Chicago's Lollapalooza on August 6, 2006 (The first set of searches for BSS concert videos in Toronto and Chicago took place in June
2006. To update the sample, I conducted another YouTube search in July 2007).
By keying in "Broken Social Scene Olympic Island" and "Broken Social Scene
Lollapalooza" into the YouTube search bar, the final Toronto sample consists of
21 videos recorded from the Olympic Island concert, while the Chicago sample comprises of 32 videos captured from the band's 45 minutes set at Lollapalooza.
The 53 YouTube video clips are then assessed based on the following three categories: immediacy, aesthetics and content.
Immediacy
For both of the data charts in Appendix A and Appendix B, I will begin by tracing when each concert video was uploaded on to YouTube. Drawing from existing research that stresses the timely dissemination of information within virtual fan communities (Baym; Prandstaller), my hypothesis is that YouTube will receive a higher number of video uploads immediately after the Toronto and
Chicago concerts as music fans wish to remain relevant within the fan
37 communities they participate. In addition, I will clearly delineate the username of each YouTube members who have contributed content to both the Toronto and
Chicago pool of concert videos. Online identities within virtual fandom are important as they enable fans to 1) claim ownership to their contributions; and 2) gain reputation amongst other fans.
Aesthetics
Building on Baym's findings that desirable social norms are selectively affirmed by other members within a fan community (p. 174), as well as Yochai
Benkler's argument that peer ratings ensure quality and relevance in user- generated content (2006, p. 75), by noting how many times each video has been viewed, commented, favourited, linked and rated (and the value of the star rating),
I am going to treat these variables as "votes of confidence" (Benkler, p.76) cast by
YouTube community members in determining which video has good visual aesthetics. The assumption is that videos that are accredited with high ratings will possess certain characteristics other fan videos are actively trying to replicate.
Also, in recognizing "language practices are microcosms of the communities in which they are used" (Baym, p. 22), in this section of the analysis,
I will examine the various textual discourses that take place on YouTube and how these strategies enable fans to maintain and sustain aesthetic norms that are valued within the fan community.
38 Content
By marking the length, as well as the title of each performance videos, I am going to deploy these data as measurements of rare and authentic content. To address the former category, I will classify and count how many videos recorded in both the Toronto and Chicago samples fall into the following groupings:
"snippet" (under 1 minute); "short" (between 1 to 2:59 minutes); and "full-length"
(3 minutes plus). In recognizing that digital devices on the market today have limited storage capacity and that videos captured on digital cameras have large file sizes, these variables do work together to exemplify full-length concert videos as a form of rare content in the YouTube community. If this is the case, the hypothesis here is that videos under the "full-length" category should have the highest pop cultural currency as expressed by the various rating features on
YouTube.
39 QQ 'M 3,*
Lojztofste 9 save tofavontes O Share Video % Flag as ££>'&£"•.' oo Aji to'iroups <>": Post video"" Inappropriate 68 ratings ua • ^ ' v~ £ Views: 18,215 Comments: 34 Favorited: 154 times
Hofjors: 0 Links: £
Figure 2: Rating Features on YouTube's Interface
With regards to "authentic content," it is useful to first situate Lee
Marshall's observations on the appeal of live concerts. He articulates that "the combination of human performance and unmediated communication means that something different might happen.. .the live performance is understood as unique, in contrast to the mass produced record" (Marshall, 2005, p. 120). By tracking which song/performance is most recorded by fans in Toronto and Chicago, I am going to position the production and circulation of these texts as a strategy where fans can negotiate the contested relationship they share with the music industry.
40 The Position of the Aca/Fan
Since Textual Poachers, Jenkins has promoted the value in being an
"Aca/Fan" (which is also the provisional title of his research blog10)—someone who assumes the self-reflexive role of academic and fan—to clearly decipher the complexities of fan culture. Furthermore, Jenkins has argued that "writing as a fan about fan culture" can also facilitate "certain understandings [...] impossible through other positioning" (1992, p. 6). In taking up these assertions, from March
2006 to July 2007,1 have accumulated a collection of still images depicting fan uses of mobile devices (digital cameras and camera phones) at concert settings
(Appendix C). To supplement these observations, I have also recorded concert videos with my handheld digital camera, and uploaded them to my YouTube account (Appendix D). This experiment was undertaken as a deliberate attempt to immerse myself in the context and setting of my research interests.
http ://www.henryjenkins .org/ 41 Case Study and Data Analysis
YouTube, Fandom, and the Banking of Cultural Capital
In order to comprehend the significance YouTube has on the terrain of music fan culture, it is important to first situate the website not as a single entity, but rather as a fragment interacting with other modes of fan communication such as e-newsletters, music blogs, social network websites and bulletin board systems.
In "Mapping Popular Culture," Grossberg notes, "a [cultural] formations is a historical articulation, an accumulation or organization of practices" that must be understood in relation to its "context, the dispersed but structured field of practices in which the specific articulation was accomplished" (1992, p. 70). With this in mind, it is useful to conceptualize YouTube as a "cultural form" that appropriates its technical capabilities from established web-based communication tools, and from a socio-cultural perspectives, the site emerges as an ongoing response to the shifting relationships between users and producers, authorship and authority—topics that are perennially contested within an increasingly peer2peer driven online environment (Diakopoulos, 2005).
The contextual parameter with which YouTube operates is also useful when considering why fans are contributing to a website that is not bound by a specific, shared media interest. Bove contends, "the most mature technology for
42 group media creation is sharing works with text and still images" (2001). With that said, the emergence of YouTube and its capacity to store, share, and integrate moving images into fan-produced text becomes appealing as it not only allows fans to express their fandom beyond a static (textual/pictorial) representation, but more importantly, through this multimedia juxtaposition, their productivity and creativity enables them to attain status within a fan community.
The need for self-identification amongst fans is clearly articulated in
Prandstaller's investigation of the Adam Clayton Yahoo! Group. She observes that when members engage in "fan talk" such as sharing stories about meeting the
U2 bassist, individuals also rely on these accounts to "establish their own personalities, gain recognition and reputation among other fans, and determine a sort of hierarchy based on the amount of participation [... ] and their access to the star" (2003, p. 20-21). In this way, the 'in-group' dynamic renders what John
Fiske identifies as a "shadow cultural economy" (1992, p.30).
According to Fiske, fan culture can be conceptualized as an economical system where fans perpetually strive to "invest and accumulate capital" (p. 30-
31). To filter this discussion back to the subject of YouTube, it can be said that when fans deploy multimedia resources (such as self-produced videos) to transform their enunciative productivity into textual productivity,11 YouTube
11 According to Fiske, there are three types of productivity in fandom: semiotic, enunciative and textual. Semiotic productivity is usually internal; it exists at the moment when fans begin to 43 enables fandom to manifest in the following ways, 1) it permits fans to exercise their "pop cultural capital" with which they use to distinguish themselves from others within the fan community; 2) it facilitates pop cultural capital to circulate from a localized to a broader (and virtual) economy; and 3) it showcases pop cultural capital in the form of specialized knowledge and technical/artistic skills.
Much as Fiske argues that, "[k]nowledge, like money, is always a source of power" (1992, p. 43). When pop cultural capital is distributed via YouTube, this means of dissemination does not only inscribe a power structure within the fan community, it also implies a new set of standards in defining the role of a
"competent fan" (Prandstaller, 2003, p. 19).
Although Fiske has provided a much-needed theoretical trajectory in understanding the relationship between YouTube and fandom, the current framework is insufficient in explaining a central characteristic of the website— that is its capability to share videos beyond its original context. With a flexible interface that includes a "share video" link and cut-and-paste html codes/URLs, the design of YouTube actually encourages users to re-contextualize its collection of content by repositioning them outside of its initial placement. If the accumulation of pop cultural capital, much like legitimate cultural capital is
construct meanings with resources in popular culture. From this, enunciative productivity is when fans outwardly speak about and share these meanings with other like-minded individuals. An example of enunciative productivity is fan talk. Lastly, textual productivity is when fans take on the responsibility to produce and circulate their own texts. For more information, please see Fiske, 1992, p. 37-39. 44 something that is intrinsically tied to one's self-esteem and formation of one's cultural identity, it is important to ask: why would music fans want anyone to simply visit YouTube and with a few simple clicks, cash in on their (pop) cultural assets?
To attend to this query, it is imperative to first evaluate how hotlinks are structured and established on YouTube. For example, if a music blogger wishes to compliment her post with a brief concert video she has located on YouTube, by embedding this media file on to her blog entry, she is simultaneously addressing the video in both its new (via her blog entry) and original (the media player is a link back to the YouTube page) context. To tie this back to the economic metaphor that has underscored the analysis so far, YouTube can be conceptualized as a bank where cultural capital can be deposited and borrowed.
When fans implant a peer-produced video on to a website, blog, or message board, they are inherently borrowing cultural capital to amplify their online presence. The intention here is to gain immediate pleasure by mobilizing borrowed cultural capital to elevate one's status within the "competent fan" hierarchy.
Of course, the transaction of cultural capital between lender and borrower is not without remuneration. In this case, the process of "paying back" is signified by the explicit display of statistics beneath every video on YouTube's interface.
By clearly illustrating the number of times each video has been rated, viewed,
45 commented, favourited, and hyperlinked, these quantifications can also be translated as the value of one's cultural currency—in turn, bestowing fans with the heightened status they seek through their active participation.
At this point, I do need to stress that for music fans who upload concert videos on to YouTube, their affiliation towards this community is much more dispersed in comparison to other users whose notoriety depends on the site. In other words, when fans are seeking status through their concert video contributions, they are looking for reputation in the community associated with their music tastes, and not necessarily YouTube. In Lange's study on antagonistic
YouTube comments, she identifies five types of YouTube users: 1) former participants; 2) casual users; 3) active participants; 4) YouTubers; and 5)
YouTube celebrities (2007, p. 4).
For music fans who upload the occasional concert footages, I contend these individuals are most akin to Lange's description of the "active participants"—that is, while these members may have an awareness of the "issues and people that are important to YouTube," however, their video contributions do not necessarily reflect or centre around these concerns (2007, p. 4). With this reason, active participants tend to have much lower rate of channel subscriptions in comparison to YouTube celebrity. With this reason, I have selected to locate statistics related to each video entry, rather than statistics related to each user's
46 profile (or in YouTube terms, the channel, which also tracks how many profile view and subscribers the users have) in demonstrating one's pop cultural status.
Baym argues that for soap opera buffs, the ability to keep up-to-date with the latest story arcs and character developments is a desirable form of cultural capital (p. 159). For music fans, being "in the know" is equally important and in the next section of the essay, I will turn to a series of fan-produced concert videos to illustrate how fans are actively producing content that are of value to their interest community.
"From Someone Who Wasn't There But Heard All About It...Thank You!":
Immediacy in Fan-Documented Concert Videos
It is of interest to note that within the past few years, both academics and industry leaders have cited "near professional quality" of user-generated content as a key factor in sustaining the health of online communities (Bove, p. 14).
Although this argument is logically deduced, especially since software and hardware are becoming more and more accessible—both technologically and economically. However, with the case of YouTube, this prediction is not quite on the mark. By referring to the 53 video clips included in my research sample, it is obvious that the majority of these moving images are pixilated and devoid of both visual and audio details. To be fair, the dissemination of good quality, streaming
47 videos within a virtual environment requires substantial bandwidth. Moreover, since YouTube decodes all uploaded content into a flash format, this conversion process places another hurdle in the distribution of "near professional quality" videos online.
With that said, I am not suggesting that "good quality" videos do not have a place on YouTube. However, in its current iteration, a major draw of YouTube lies firmly on its amateur rather than professional appeal. According to a recent market report by Oppenheimer, it observes that while most consumers "prefer high quality content (with crisp pictures, sound, etc.), but that they are also, perhaps surprisingly, willing to compromise on the quality of content just for its immediacy" (2007, p.22).
The present discussion on the quality of fan videos strongly resembles
Roland Barthes' appraisal of the amateur striptease. Fan concert videos are inherently more "seductive" than commercial productions, because they too lack the corporate gloss and "magic" that detaches the spectacle from an ordinary viewing gaze. Without any control in lighting, or the "flying boom that kind of swings out over the crowd" that Yauch discusses in his MTV interview, fan videos are also saturated with "technical awkwardness" such as out of sync audios and abrupt camera movements. While professionally shot concert
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkAatWnDA8w
48 videos are most likely to discard these footages through the process of editing, for fan videos however, these production flaws are explicitly displayed, in turn making these texts more authentic and powerful, because their structures closely resemble audience reception within a crowded, concert environment.
From the analysis so far, it is obvious that low fidelity does not deter people from watching fan-produced concert videos. With that said, perhaps a more helpful trajectory in understanding why music fans have taken up YouTube is to acknowledge the website's immediacy (rather than "near-professional quality") in enabling other fans to (re)experience a concert event. By referring to the two sets of samples, YouTube receives the highest number of video uploads on the day following the two respective events. Moreover, within the first 24 hours of the concert, both the Toronto and Chicago samples have the highest number of contributions by unique YouTube members.
Table 1: Number of videos uploaded on to YouTube within the first 24 hours of the Olympic Island concert (Toronto) on June 24, 2006. ID Date Username Tl 25-Jun daveekuhronic T2 25-Jun RonniDP T3 25-Jun sirangcthcapplc T4 25-Jun slMllSICthCtippIc T5 25-Jun brunn T6 25-Jun Laurendorphin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcruGCpvWak 49 Table 2: Number of videos uploaded on to YouTube within the first 24 hours of Lollapalooza (Chicago) on August 6, 2006. ID Date Username CI 7-Aug djottcrcreok C2 7-Aug hmh21384 C3 7-Aug Smackdogl3 C4 7-Aug simplesinger - C5 7-Aug simplcMiigci C6 7-Aug stureogum C7 7-Aug mellow bonsai
Hence, to understand the purpose these video footages serve to the fan community, it is important to first step back and examine the venues with which
YouTube videos are disseminated. For this example, I will quickly turn my attention to the band's official message board, Broken Telephone.
Ever since summer 2004, Broken Social Scene has played/organized a daylong concert at Olympic Island in Toronto, Canada. Since the band has never officially declared this as an annual event, months prior to summer, fans tend to congregate on the forum to address rumours, questions, and general chatters regarding this pending occasion. On March 4th, 2006, a member started a thread entitled Toronto Island Show?14 and within four months (the last reply to this tread is dated July 26 , 2006), fans turned this into a 12-page discussion devoted entirely to the Olympic Island concert. The rhythm that underscores this thread is worth noting, because it clearly delineates how fans deploy the web forum to
The thread can be found at the following URL: http://www.brokentelephone.ca/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=2486&start=l
50 leverage their reception with popular culture, or in this case, the band Broken
Social Scene. As fans share everything from ticket sales information, memories of previous Olympic Island concerts, reviews of the 2006 event (including links to
YouTube videos on post #27913 ), to a live audio bootleg, this thread explicitly illustrates how fans shift from enunciative productivity to textual productivity, and in turn, shape their cultural capital via an ongoing, virtual dialogue.
What is of particular interest to the current discussion, however, is how quickly fan reviews are generated on the message board. A member with the handle "theplot" literally posted his thoughts on the Olympic Island concert three hours after the event (post #27587).16 As I have already mentioned, the ability to share useful information with other fans is a valuable form of cultural capital.
Although fans on Broken Telephone do not have a designated "updater" to keep other members in the loop with the latest band developments, however, for those who choose to provide other fans with concert reviews in a timely fashion do share similarities with the soap opera fans Baym describes in her study—that is, they "gain greater social recognition than most posters, no just because of their
The community member named "quadb" located and shared a collection of YouTube videos with other fans. URL: http://www.brokentelephone.ca/forum/forums/thread- view.asp?tid=2486&start=351
16 "theplot" posted the first concert review for the Olympic Island concert on June 25, 2006 at 1:44am. URL: http://www.brokentelephone.ca/forum/forums/thread- view.asp?tid=2486&start=246 51 enhanced visibility but also because these informative commodities matter in this community" (2000, p. 162).
To connect this discussion with a topic mentioned earlier, it can be argued that when fans upload their videos immediately after a concert, their actions are guided by both structurally reproductive and structurally transformative agency.
The time-sensitive production and circulation of fan videos is structurally reproductive of a common practice undertaken by many print-journalists—
"overnighting." Since the majority of rock concerts take place in the evening, in order to meet production deadlines, music reporters often have a short turn-around period to complete and submit their reviews. In a way, the swift transfer of content from personal digital devices on to many-to-many platforms like
YouTube enables fans to disseminate timely and newsworthy information, and subsequently, assume authoritative positions within their communities.
Of course, timeliness and newsworthiness in traditional print media are crucial elements to sustain circulations and sales. For music fans however, their incentives to review concerts via text, images and videos are more emotional than economical. What is of particular interest here is these forms of fan participation are not entirely self-serving. Guided by the ideology that fan communities are about celebrating rather than commodifying fan experiences, the ways in which fans engage with one another do unravel the inner-workings of structurally transformative agency.
52 As Lee Marshall notes, fans strive to attend live concerts, since the technologically unmediated space allow them to critically engage with music they would otherwise only have access to through the consumption of market goods (I will further address this topic later on in the paper; 2005, p. 150). Realistically, however, the opportunity to attend a concert is not an option made available for every fan due to legal (age limit), financial (tickets cost) and geographical (tours often only visit cities that are deemed viable markets) limitations. With that said, when fans deploy YouTube to distribute and share self-produced content, their motivations stem from a sincere attempt to democratize the concert from the above constraints. Put simply, by transgressing the parameter with which a pop cultural commodity can be experienced, fan-produced concert videos do provide a space where others fans can derive pleasures in new and unexpected context.
"This Video Made Me Smile A Lot": Aesthetics in the Fan-Documented
Concert Videos
It is important to note that fan videos have always existed since VCRs have become an affordable household appliance. Jenkins conceptualizes these self-produced videos as a site where fans can rework mass-produced commodities in order to challenge "the generic conventions" of mass media (1992, p. 231). He also elucidates fan videos as "aesthetic objects" that centre on the "selection,
53 inflection, juxtaposition, and recirculation of ready-made images and discourses"
(1992, p. 224). A fundamental problem in classifying fan-produced concert videos alongside Jenkins' articulation is that their aesthetics never appear active.
Despite the proliferation of video editing applications like Windows
Movie Maker and iMovie where fans can easily alter source files by shifting their temporality, by adding colours or filters, music fans rarely take up these options when producing their videos. In the sample of BSS's performances selected for this project, only one text17 has received some form of "treatment"—that is, the inclusion of a title page and rolling credits at the beginning and end of the footage. Although this pairing of text and moving images can be construed as a form of "juxtaposition," however, to identify this minor addition as a form of
"poaching" stretches the argument too far.
While fans indisputably prefer performance videos with minimal manipulations as they appear more "authentic" in representing the energy within a concert environment. To members outside of the fan community, this "lack" only serves to reinforce common stereotypes about fans—that is they are "cultural dupes, social misfits, and mindless consumers" who travel great lengths to assign inappropriate importance to their selected media interests (Jenkins, 1992, p. 23;
Kane). This assessment is problematic as it overlooks the more subtle and nuanced motivations of fandom, and simply assumes fans are deploying
17 http://youtube.com/watch?v=Qo-qEvh0ew4 54 commercial technologies, as they want to mechanically reproduce a live concert event in order to feed their obsession.
As I have already mentioned, one of the tenets for fans to share concert videos online is to democratize an event that is confined in a specific time and space. In this way, it is useful to conceptualize these music fans as pop culture
"archivists" whose mandate is to capture and share "the impermanence and temporality of [a concert] performance" (Neumann & Simpson, 1997, pp. 330).
Much like any archivist who employs a methodology to build and maintain a collection of data, I would argue that individuals who tape and upload content to
YouTube also abide to a set of rules in attaining a certain visual aesthetic.
In order to understand how good/bad aesthetics are determined and internalized, it is useful to refer to two distinct yet interlocking functions concerning online communities: Benkler's "relevance and accreditation" (2006, p.
75-76) and Baym's "selective affirmation" (p. 174). In The Wealth of Networks,
Yochai Benkler, by focusing on the "recommendation" feature and the PageRank algorithm on Amazon.com and Google respectively, suggests that when individuals rate the books they buy, or hyperlink websites they like, these gestures can be construed as a virtual "vote of confidence." By extracting and averaging the actions of many individuals subsequently, these mechanisms are useful in leveraging "peer production to enable users to find things they want quickly and efficiently" (2006, p. 75-76).
55 The discourses surrounding YouTube—both qualitative (text-based comments for example) and quantitative (number of ratings, view counts)—serve important functions in the organization of user-generated content. For example, if you are to administer a video search on the website, results generated are automatically ranked based on the category of "relevance." Relevance in this instance, is not solely determined by the search terms you key in, but also by the tags and descriptions (qualitative variables) assigned by the users, as well as the number of times a video has been viewed, commented, favourited, and rated by other community members (quantitative variables).
The star rating assigned to each YouTube entry is one of the few statistical information (along with view counts) clearly displayed on the result interface.
Within the YouTube community, members can assign a one-to-five star rating
(the ratings are as followed: one star = poor; two stars=nothing special; three stars=worth watching; four stars=pretty cool; and five stars= awesome!) to each video entry, in turn, quickly communicating to other users which videos are worth checking out. In an attempt to ensure all ratings are representative of the community, YouTube members must log in to rate videos. Moreover, members cannot reward their own videos/contributions with any star rating.
In Baym's analysis of the rec.arts.tv.soaps (r.a.t.s.) Usenet members, she notes that values of importance within a virtual fan community are "continually reinforced through selective affirmation of the many identities put forward in the
56 group" (2000, p. 174). Specifically, she regards praises (such as compliments and encouragements) as one of the most important methods to reinforce and promote desirable behaviours within virtual fan spaces (p. 171). Mapping these observations on to YouTube, when fans rate various concert videos, this peer- based judgment system (Benkler, 2006, p. 76) enables users to "praise" one another, and to "selectively affirm" which types of videos are of value to a fan community, and which type of videos have sought-after pop cultural capital.
Drawing together these ideas, it can be inferred that videos with many
"votes of confidence" should also have a higher view count than videos with low or no "votes of confidence." This conjecture is reinforced in both the Toronto and
Chicago samples. In both examples, the two videos with the highest number of unique ratings (Video T2 has 68 unique votes, while video C27 has 49 votes) each have over 10, 000 view counts. Aesthetically speaking, both videos have acceptable audio and visual quality, include full-song performance, as well, both videos receive higher number of comments, "save as favourite" designations, and
"click back" from other websites.
YouTube's link feature showcases the top 5 URLs linking to each specific video. It also measures how many clicks (back to the YouTube page) originated from each of the 5 URLs listed. 57 Table 3: Video T2 in the Toronto sample has received the highest number of star rating. ID Date Username Length/Title of Views, Comments, #/Value of Performance Favourites, Links ratings (Clicks) T2 25-Jun RonniDP 4:011 Anthems 10692,22,112,5(87) 68/4*
Table 4: Video C27 in the Chicago sample has received the highest number of star rating. ID Date Username Length/Title of Views, Comments, #/Value of Performance Favourites, Links ratings (Clicks) C27 30-Sep Simonlynn 5:111 Anthems 18311,23, 122, 49/4*
Not surprisingly, for videos that have received low/no rating (or more accurately, these videos have been "selectively rejected"), they are saturated with unfavorable aesthetics. In both the Toronto and Chicago samples, it appears that music fans discard videos that are extremely short in length (length is a topic I will further discuss in the next section), have low audio and video quality.
Although I have mentioned in the previous section that good quality is not a primary driving force in facilitating the success of YouTube, however, it is obvious that when a selection of videos amass on the website, fans tend to prefer documentations in which they can make out the performance both visually and audibly. Another interesting observation is that in the Chicago sample, a collection of videos uploaded by "philiprmccarthy" (video IDs: T17-20) has very
58 little "hits" by other fans. While his productions do have very low overall quality, his videos are unique in that he inserts his voice and introduces the band.
In turn, by referring to the 53 videos in both the Toronto and Chicago sample, objective documentation can be summarized as having the following characteristics: 1) steady camera work; 2) a quick pan across the stage to give the audience an overall reading of the specific performance; and 3) a survey of the crowd or surrounding environment in providing spatial context of the current concert site.
In outlining these characteristics, it can be argued that fans determine and maintain good visual aesthetics in fan videos through a two-step methodology.
First, fans collectively decide which videos are of value to a community by selectively affirming these texts with the various rating features available on
YouTube's interface. In doing so, fans are also defining this body of works as the arbiter of good aesthetics. From this, fans self-consciously refer to these texts, and commit themselves in creating videos with similar visual aesthetics.
The self-conscious decision to keep the camera as still as possible while recording is one of the most persistent characteristics in fan-produced concert videos. In video entry C7 from the Chicago Sample, the user "mellowbonsai" contextualizes his/her contribution by stating the following:
Broken Social Scene performs Stars and Sons live at Lollapalooza at the Q101 stage. Sorry if the camera shakes a little, people nudged and
59 moved alot, sometimes they hit my hands and arms while holding the camera. (Emphasis my own)
In understanding how fan communities sustain desirable social norms,
Baym observes that when fans engage in discussions that may lead to disagreements, they tend to pad these discussions with "qualifiers" (such as "I may be wrong", or "I am sorry but") to "lessen the negative impact" (p. 124; see
Lange, 2007 for a discussion on antagonistic comments found on YouTube). In the example above, it can be inferred that when "mellowbonsai" prefaces his video with an apology regarding camera shakes, his apologetic attitude clearly reflects a firm awareness of community norms and his inability to match these expectations. Put simply, by justifying the conditions in which the concert video is produced, this technique enables the user to minimize the offence by posting footages that do not adhere to the values of a fan community.
Interestingly, self-imposed neutrality is not a characteristic exclusive to the production of fan-concert videos. Instead, existing literatures have revealed that certain forms of peer production are governed by a shared commitment to record and archive information objectively. For example, Benkler describes
Wikipedia contributors as following a "self-conscious social-norms-based dedication to objective writing" (p. 72). He argues that since supporters wish to keep the peer2peer encyclopedia as a robust and relatively reliable source of information, individuals are constantly exercising their self-discipline to ensure
60 their contributions meet the standards collectively valued within the Wikipedia community.
With the practice of bootlegging similarly, fans often dislodge themselves from the immediate concert experience in order to achieve a good quality recording (Simpson and Neumann, 1997, p. 325). Of course, the ability to share
"grade A" bootlegs with other fans serves to heighten one's status within the competent fan hierarchy. However, fan behaviours are simultaneously shaped by internal (personal interests) and external (community interests) variables. With that said, when fans choose to record videos with their handheld and mobile devices, their actions have also taken into consideration the interests of the fan community—that is, by reproducing how a concert can be experienced, fans are also looking into the future, and considering their productions as a site where deferred meanings and pleasures can be attained (ibid).
I do wish to make explicit a major contradiction underscoring the aesthetics of fan-produced concert videos. In the previous section, I have mentioned that a major appeal of fan texts is that they are "rough around the edges," and that they lack professional polish. Interestingly, when I presented an abbreviated version of my research at a conference organized by the University of
Rochester, the initial response I got from Professor Marsha Kinder is how remarkably similar fan and professional concert videos are based on the three visual characteristics I have already outlined.
61 To farther emphasize this point, by referring to video C27, as
"Simonlynn" pans the camera away from the stage and on to the crowd at 3:12 into the video, this movement can be interpreted as a fan attempt to replicate what
Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys describes as "the flying boom that kind of swings out over the crowd" (Cosgrove, 2005). This crowd panning technique can be found in a total of seven video entries within both the Toronto and Chicago samples (videos T5, T17, C5, C7, C27, C28, C29), and these occurrences serve to insinuate that aesthetics in fan productions are not oppositional, but rather relational to official culture.
In order to better comprehend the interplay between fan culture and official culture, it is useful to juxtapose the discussion with the topic of public histories. As Neumann and Simpson note, since members of the public rarely have an opportunity to take part in the preservation of cultural memories, in order to retrieve and access these experiences, individuals must rely on available structures and practices like "museums, libraries, textbooks, films or television programs" (p. 329). What is particularly interesting with these institutions is that, despite their attempts to become more socially and culturally inclusive, their curatorial agenda always authorize and legitimize certain practices while dismissing others (p. 329).
It should come as no surprise that since fan culture has traditionally existed at the periphery of mainstream popular culture, fan productivities are a
62 form of cultural memories that are mostly neglected in cultural institutions
(Kane). Drawing from this assessment, Neumann and Simpson contend that when bootleggers take on the responsibility to transform their private histories into public ones (that is, to record and subsequently share their concert experience), they are doing so because they see the live musical performance as an event worth archiving, even if professional institutions fail to appreciate their historical values
(p.331).
Similar to audio bootleggers, when music fans deploy their digital cameras to document the concert event, they are not merely mimicking professionally shot concert videos, but rather, they are appropriating methods of preservation in order to legitimize fan practices within institutional standards. Despite the fact that a concert setting is highly contingent on the expression of emotions (fans are expected to demonstrate their excitement by taking part in rituals like cheering and clapping. For more on this topic, see Fonarow's study, 2006, on the various zones of participation at an "indie" gig), the overall preference for fan videos to be neutral and objective ironically reflects an attempt for fans to fit in with expected social values which traditionally criticize fandom as an excessive, deviant response to modernity.
Unemotional, detached, 'cool' behaviour is seen as more worthy and admirable than emotional, passionate, 'hot' behaviour. 'Good' parades are orderly and sequential and serious (not rowdy, chaotic or lighthearted); 'good' audiences are passive and quiet and respectful (not active, vocal or critical); 'good' newspapers are neutral, objective and
63 gray (not passionate, subjective and colourful). Congruently, then, 'good' affinities are expressed in subdued, undisruptive manner, while 'bad' affinities (fandom) are expressed in dramatic and disruptive ways. (Jenson, p. 20-21)
To return to the idea of reconnecting with our histories through the gateway of cultural institutions, it is important to note that memories within these contexts are usually presented in a way to be "gazed upon" (Neumann and
Simpson, p. 329). When fans rely on websites like YouTube to manage their cultural histories, this form of the "virtual archive" clearly subverts the institutional norms by promoting dialogue and participation. Interestingly in both the Toronto and Chicago samples, videos with good, objective aesthetics do generate significantly higher number of comments by other YouTube members.
By shifting the analytical focus on to the commenting function, the following examples will highlight how textural productivities allow fans to defer their own pleasures (which is also exemplified by the sub-title of this section)19 and meanings to the recorded concert experience.
For example, in the Almost Crimes-Guitar Wars footage (video ID: T7) from Toronto, as fans praised "RonniDP" for contributing this video (in turn, validating his cultural capital), a user by the name of "recordjnky" hijacked the discussion with the following comment:
19 "This video made me smile a lot" was a comment made by a user named rockalbatross in response to the Almost Crimes-Guitar Wars video uploaded by RonniDP (Video ID: T7). http://youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments&v=Qo- qEvh0ew4&fromurl=/watch%3Fv%3DQo-qEvh0ew4 64 fucking AWFUL noise ~ blonde hair dude was sloppy and boring and the dude with the red guitar had no clue where to go — he kept playing the same lick over and over and didn't have a clue how to solo over that chord. How sad ~ pack up the guitars boys - your playin' ain't never gonna make you any money...
Immediately, "freakscene88" retorted:
the guy above me a a [sic] fuckin [sic] retard this video is aamazing [sic] with amazing people
Later, another user "Swervegarden" responded:
i think j won...that blonde hair dude (which its [sic] actually grey) is j mascis, and i think its [sic] safe to say that hes [sic] made more money playing guitar for a living than you have, (not to mention successfully influenced more people) unless your [sic] in a well known band as well? and if so lets [sic] hear you [sic] guitar playing? im [sic] interested to hear what your [sic] so confident about...
In order for the community members to reclaim this exchange from the
"flamer," it is clear that the Broken Social Scene fans immediately resort to their
(pop) cultural capital to first, re-establish the order within the social hierarchy, and second, to destabilize the dissenting opinions that are being put forth by
"recordjnky." By labeling "recordjnky" as a "fuckin retard," "freakscene88" is explicitly distinguishing the former member as someone who lacks the correct cultural capital (and intellectual capacity) to participate in this discussion. On a more subtle level, when "Swervegarden" corrects "recordjnky" for misidentifying the colour of J Mascis' hair, this seemingly juvenile behaviour is also deployed in order to illustrate that "recordjnky" does indeed lack the indie rock expertise to
65 appreciate the music of Broken Social Scene (as J Mascis is not just any "blonde hair dude," rather he is a member of Dinosaur Jr—an indie/alternative rock band with a loyal following).
Since Broken Social Scene is regarded by most as an "indie" rock band, its alignment to this genre should not be overlooked. As Fonarow summarizes, the
"indie ethos" celebrates "the sprint of independence, being free from control dependence, or interference" (p. 51). With music specifically, independence is about "actively eschewing a centralized corporate hierarchy where decisions are made by distant executive bodies" (ibid). The critical attitude underlining indie music fandom is also apparent in the Chicago sample of videos vis-a-vis the commenting function. For example, in various video entries (CI, C3, C5, C7,
CI5, C22, C29), fans have decidedly taken up the comment section on YouTube to address their annoyance with Lollapalooza organizers for not allowing BSS to return on stage for one more song despite an overwhelming demand after the band's 45 minute set.20 Since the more mainstream (and signed to a major label) act, the Red Hot Chili Peppers (RHCP) is scheduled to begin their headlining performance after Broken Social Scene, fans have utilized the comment space to differentiate BSS from the RHCP, and subsequently, substantiate why the former indie band is more deserving of an encore. Take for example:
20 The reaction is (not surprisingly) recorded and disseminated on YouTube, for video documentation, please visit: http://youtube.com/watch?v==mOMzXHOgVXU
66 From video CI, "lik3n" notes:
The RHCP set sucked in comparison to BSS. I was expecting to hear/see a much better show than the one I watched. Their encore, if you want to call it that, was terrible.
In contrast, "Icer98" in video C7 contends that Broken Social Scene is:
One of the few remaining good bands
From video C22, user "monkeyfilpper" evokes the "sell-out" argument by
stating:
one thing i can tell you is that while RCHP has sold out and put out pop chart toppers time and time agian [sic], BSS will never become pop icons because they will stay true to their music and won't sell out for sales, and the chili peppers are a stadium band anyway because [AJnthony [Kiedis— lead singer of the RHCP] can't sing for beans in a nice intimate venue...stadiums will cover his crap voice up.
Lastly, "hornsofarabbit" provides a somewhat Bourdieuan analogy in
video C3:
yeah the chili's was like., man im [sic] searching for a metaphor here, it was like being served hamburger helper after you've had fillet mignon.
In Hibbett's article "What is indie rock," he notes, while "money is antithetical to indie rock" yet most "indie enthusiasts [...] are white, middle class, and college educated" (2005, p. 70). Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to empirically determine whether or not YouTube members also correspond to this class division, on a cursory level however, it is obvious that participation on
67 this website privileges individuals with economic (to purchase concert tickets, camera phones, digital cameras, computers) and technical aptitudes (to record videos, transfer, compress, upload content).21 With that said, the tension in exercising the "appropriate" form of cultural capital as demonstrated by the disagreement above does confirm Fiske's argument that the pop cultural system, much like the legitimate cultural system "promotes and privileges certain cultural tastes and competences" that are intrinsically tied to elitist education and socioeconomic context (Fiske, 1992, p. 31).
By tracing how good and bad aesthetics are distinguished within a fan community, it is important to recognize that this process is not as transparent and democratic as it appears. That said, in acknowledging that fans with common interests do collectively determine a codified set of good vs. bad video aesthetics, this collaborative effort does imply a critical distance with which fans deploy in making sense of their relationship with popular music. In this way, fans are never
"merely" taping an event. Instead, they are actively negotiating between personal, social and cultural narratives, in turn rendering their fan-produced footages as "an
From my experiences sharing content on YouTube, it is beneficial to first compress the video (I compressed all my files via iMovie) into smaller, more manageable file sizes. Throughout the research period, I have tried and failed to upload a full-length concert video at 97.1 MB without first compressing the file. In my four attempts to upload said video, the processing period was up 20 minutes per trial. Shortly after, YouTube also stopped working. This observation clearly revealed that it is not that easy and some form of technical literacy is needed in order to participate in virtual fan communities effectively. 68 ongoing process of interpretation rather than a frozen body of fact" (Neumann &
Simpson, 1997, pp. 331).
"All 16 Members of Broken Social Scene Perform 'Anthems For A 16 [sic]
Year Old Girl'": Content in the Fan-Documented Concert Videos
Jenkins notes, "[rereading is central to the fan's aesthetic pleasure" (1992, p. 69). Similar to the television buffs who gain new insights about a specific text through the process of repeated viewings, the accessibility of concert footage on
YouTube also provides music fans with a platform to persistently reassess the relationship they share with certain musicians and their work. As I have argued, having the appropriate form of cultural capital is integral to building and sustaining one's group and personal identity. In the next section, I will focus on the topic of contents, and exemplify why certain subject matters in these fan concert videos enable individuals to exercise greater cultural currency within a fan community.
Before turning to specific videos for example, it is useful to first recognize that collecting is an imperative routine underlining most fan cultures. For example, when Canadian singer/songwriter Feist was prompted with the question whether or not she was comfortable with fans recording and sharing her concert performances on YouTube, she associated the experience of being recorded by
69 fans as being collected by fans. "It's a bit like when you see the cell phone being held up. In the past I naively thought it was someone going, 'Jenny, check it out, it's that song you played me once!' But now I realize they're making a video.. .I'm OK to be collected" (Nardwuar, 2006).
The conceptualization of "music as artefact" neatly extends the institution/museum metaphor highlighted above. Marshall refers to this mentality as a means to understand how fandom becomes shorthand for one's identity. He contends that "[f]he objects involved in being a fan - records, yes, but also ticket stubs, scrap books, posters and the like - are the external embodiment of the musical meaning that is part of an individual's personality" (p. 153; emphasis my own). To tie this idea back with the idea of "shadow cultural economy," Fiske contends that "the differences between a fan collections and art collections are socio-economic. Fan collections tend to be of cheap, mass-produced objects, and stress quantity and all-inclusiveness over quality or exclusivity" (1992, p. 45).
In his essay, Fiske does acknowledge that economically privileged fans tend to collect more unique and authentic objects (an example that springs to mind is the Christie's Pop Memorabilia auction where John Lennon's clothing or
Buddy Holly's autograph are offered up for bid) in order to epitomize their fandom against casual fans. With regards to user-generated concert videos, the gravitation towards what is rare and uncommon is also a pattern that has emerged within both the Toronto and Chicago sample of videos. In order to clearly
70 understand this observation, it is useful to first recognize that 1) digital videos have large file sizes (the six full-length videos I have captured and uploaded on to
YouTube each hovers around 95 MB; simply put, the longer the video, the larger the file); and 2) digital devices like cameras and camera phones have limited storage capacity.22
With these conflicting yet interrelated stipulations outlined, the running time of each video entry can be deployed as a basic measurement of content's rarity. In an economic framework, scarcity is directly linked to value (in this case, value can be represented by the number of star ratings assigned by other YouTube members). Working under this assumption, I have sorted each of the 53 videos into one of the following categories:
• Snippet (video is under 1 minute in length)
• Short (video is between 1 minute to 2:59 minutes in length)
• Full-length (video is at least 3 minutes in length)
22 This greatly depends on the brand/model of digital camera or camera phone, since different devices employ different types of memory card. CompactFlash card is one of the oldest types of memory cards, and its storage capacity can go up to 4GB, while a Memory Stick card can range between 32MB to 256MB. Of course, the higher the storage capacity of these memory cards, the more expensive they become. 71 Table 5: User-assigned ratings for fan concert videos (from Toronto's Olympic Island Concert), sorted based on video's playing length (in descending order). Video T3, T4 and T10 have been removed from YouTube since September 2006. ID Date Length/Title of Performance Number/Value of ratings T8 26-Jun mM$Mmi?:dmms-:-:-< •• w7tom.te*mmmm T7 26-Jun Tl 25-Jun T9 26-Jun IX&ttiMMHHtiti&BKHKi T2 25-Jun Til 27-Jun T14 30-Jun 1:33 / 7/4 (Shorefine)-clip I o/o r% In T4a 26-Jun 1:32/ Almost Crimes 11/ Ci T4 25 Jun 1:06 / It's All Gonna Break xu u T6 25-Jun 1:04 / 7/4 (Shoreline) 1/5* T5 25-Jun 0:54 / Ibi Dreams of Pavement 1/5* T19 03-Jul 0:46/Anthems i 3/5* T15 30-Jun 0:44 / 7/4 (Shoreline) - clip 2 <> U 33 25 Jun 0:39 / Snperconnectetl o-a T16 30-Jun 0:36 / Anthems UO T18 30-Jun 0:26 / KC Accidental 1/5* T12 27-Jun 0:24 / Cause = Time 0/0 T17 30-Jun 0:24 / Almost Crimes 2/5* T21 21-Jul 0:21 / 7/4 (Shoreline) 0/0 T13 28-Jun 0:13 / Stars & Sons 1/5* T20 19-Jul 0:15/ Superconnected o/o
Table 6: User-assigned ratings for fan concert videos (from Chicago's Lollapalooza), sorted based on video's playing length (in descending order). Video C6 and C16 have been removed since September 2006. ID Date Length / Name of video Number/Value of ratings C27 30-Sep 5:11 / Anthems':* 49/4* -fclZ-^-" C21 14-Aug 4:49 / fhi Dreaoiiwf Pav'timenf. C3 07-Aug ^^:7/4{Shorimr(^M?) • • ' 23** \I$S$ !•*'•• •" C4 07-Aug 4:30/'Anthems.-*^-::. .'.V^ . M C28 30-Sep 4:18/ JhirrEveWBik'A&~.'.- • C7 07-Aug 3:5.9 !Stdri&.Stm^^!- iafo*-. •;#&•; C23 18-Aug 2 OS Inihems 2 5'= C14 10-Aug 2:07 IN IWtuns 72 C15 10-Aug l-'d " 4 iShiiivliih'i h 4" C5 07-Aug 1 • 5 > //>/ fWuim nt /'in email C29 02-Oct 1:2(l //'/1 Warns of 1'tncmcnl l"4* C31 14-Feb 1:1" " ( tH/.ir '/wiif 0 0 v> I'D 11 Aug 1:14/7/4 fflfore/wic/ n/o. €6 07 Aug 1:12/7/7 fflftore/iwc) n/ci C32 19-Mar 1:05 / Jimmy and the Photocell 1/5* C30 20-Jan- 1:04 / /W Dreams of Pavement 0/0 C8 08-Aug 0:58 / Anthems 1/5* C18 13-Aug 0:49 / 7/7 (Shoreline; 0/0 C26 02-Sep 0:45 / "-V (shoreline) 1/4* C9 08-Aug 0:33 / /-in? Ave tf Aw 1/5* C13 08-Aug 0:31 / Anthems clip 2 2/5* C17 13-Aug 0:31 /Unidentifiable 0/0 C19 13-Aug 0:28 / Superconnected 0/0 C2 07-Aug 0:26 / Anthems 0/0 Cll 08-Aug 0:25 / Anthems 0/0 C12 08-Aug 0:25 / Anthems clip 1 1/3* C20 13-Aug 0:22 / Stars & Sons 0/0 C24 18-Aug 0:19 /:•-'-/ (Shoreline) \ 0/0 CIO 08-Aug 0:15 / //>/ Dreams of Pavement '• 0/0 In both Table 5 and 6, it is apparent that the majority of videos uploaded on to YouTube straddled between the "snippet" and "short" category. In both instances, there are six videos falling under the "full-length" video group. And not surprisingly, these "rare" documentations have received the highest number of "votes of confidence," in turn heightening their (pop) cultural currency. While it is obvious that the reasons guiding pop cultural collection are similar to those underlining official cultural collection, I do wish to make explicit a central limitation in delineating quantity/quality, and inclusiveness/exclusivity as opposing binaries. This is especially pertinent in the digital age when fans can utilize mobile technologies to not only restore the "exclusiveness" of a 73 commercial single, but also to facilitate the "inclusiveness" of a rare concert moment. In other words, by mediating one's fandom through a technological interface, fans are perpetually shifting the boundaries to consume, produce and distribute popular culture in a complex and contradictory space. In the Toronto set of videos, there are six separate documentations of the band playing the song 7/4(Shoreline), in turn rendering this the most recorded performance in this particular concert. A commercial single lifted from the band's third full length, self-titled album, 7/4 (Shoreline) has garnered both regular radio and TV airplays since early 2006, thus confirming its status as a commercial entity. In order to understand why fans would want to allocate memory (both digital and collective) to record this song, it is important to first contextualize the practice with Marshall's concept of "contested commodification" (2005, p. 149). By tracing the relationship between rock music and Romanticism, Marshall concludes that music fans have always been weary of the commodification of rock music as it trivializes the symbolic values (or cultural capital) they have invested on this specific culture (2005, p. 149-150). Drawing from what Marshall identifies as the "Romantic assumptions concerning authorship, art and commerce"—that is, "authentic artists [are] trapped within an industry that distances and alienates individual music through the process of commodification" (p. 155), when fans partake in the production, circulation and consumption of bootlegs, these behaviours can be interpreted as a form of 74 mainstream, cultural resistance that challenges the recording industry for commodifying "something (music, and implicitly their emotional investment) that is supposedly uncommodifiable" (p. 154). It is important to recognize that bootlegging does not only allow fans to become "consumer advocates" (Jenkins, 1992, p.28), but more, importantly, this practice enables individuals to position their fandom as a form of social distinction (Marshall, p. 153). As Hibbett notes, "cultural capital cease to have value as it becomes increasingly accessible" (p. 64). With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that music fans often lament on mass media for tarnishing their favourite music through overexposure. Of course, the quality of music does not deteriorate when it becomes popular. However, what is at stake here is that music fans can no longer rely on certain cultural capital to define a unique sense of self. Aligning these arguments with the example of user-generated content, when BSS fans document a concert video containing a commercial single, their gesture cannot be inferred as passively consuming what is popular. Instead, by recording a live rendition of 7/4 (Shoreline), their behaviours are motivated by their need to reclaim certain cultural capital that is still of value to them. Similar to the practice of bootlegging, when fans produce concert videos, they too are reacting against the commodification of popular culture. In this case, since Broken Social Scene is an "indie" band, the virtue of "fighting the system" only serves to reinforce the anti-capitalistic ideology in which the subculture is 75 dependent upon (and this idea is clearly illustrated with various examples in the previous section, see p. 62-63). There is no denying that this site is fraught with contradictions, however, when fans are given the space to "reread" concert performances through the channel of YouTube, their engagement with these text do enable them to enjoy a "commodified" song within an exclusive and authentic context. In doing so, fans are not only identifying themselves against fair-weather fans. More importantly, by repositioning themselves within the competent fan hierarchy, they are also reclaiming the cultural capital they have lost. According to Marshall, a key element in defining "authenticity" in popular music is "an ambivalent relation to technological development" (2005, p. 65). Of course, this concept is grounded on two incongruent idioms. On the one hand, when fans attend a concert, they prefer live music to studio-recorded music because the former is unmediated by technology; on the flip side to this, fans demonstrate no problem in using commercial technologies like camera phones and digital cameras to summarize these "authentic" live performances. Referring back to Marshall's discussion of live music, music fans today are firmly aware that something different might happen in a live setting, and it is precisely this reason, fans can sometimes trivialize a "rare" moment by making them overly accessible through the means of digital technologies, and in turn, stripping of their cultural capital. 76 A good example to illustrate this is to refer to the Chicago sample of videos. The most recorded performance by fans in Lollapalooza is the full-band rendition of Anthems for a 17 year-old Girl. Since Broken Social Scene is a collective of artists/musicians—many of whom are engaged with their own bands and side projects, it is very rare for the full band (all 16 members at the time of the performance) to perform together. In theory, when fans want to capture this "rare" performance, their motivations are fueled by the logic that by providing other fans with sacred cultural goods, this contribution can lead to the reimbursement of high cultural currency. The paradox in capturing a "rare" moment via digital technology however is over saturation. And with the BSS performance in Chicago, when a five-minute song is suddenly splinted into nine grainy streaming videos, the cachet of a full-band concert can be very short lived. With that said, I am not suggesting that these documentations are of no use to the fan community. Nevertheless, if fans do want to obtain the cultural capital they desire, they must produce videos that align with the other variables discussed, such as uploading footages, which capture full performances, as well as having good visual aesthetics in order to contextualize their productions as a valuable piece of fan memorabilia. Lastly, I wish to address an unexpected finding in the Chicago sample of videos. For video C27, this full-length/good quality documentation of Anthems for a 17 year-old Girl predictably receives a high number of view counts, comments, 77 and ratings by other YouTube community members. What is of particular interest is that the video is not uploaded on to YouTube until September 30,2006—a full eight weeks after the BSS concert at Lollapalooza. Specifically, C27 is the last of the nine Anthems videos transferred on to YouTube. Based on this condition alone, it can even be suggested that the event captured on this file is no longer atypical, as there are eight other documentations on YouTube already. Fiske insists, "fans often ape official culture in describing their collections in terms of their economic as well as their cultural capital" (p. 44). Although this assessment is for the most part, correct, however, fan-produced concert videos do not yield or accumulate market value over time (after all, fans are not asked to pay a fee to access videos on YouTube). With that said, while the immediacy of fan videos may assist individuals to attain status in their interest communities, the first video uploaded on to YouTube (unlike a first edition comic book, or a limited edition LP) cannot be interpreted as "the popular equivalent of first editions whose scarcity and age become markers of authenticity, originality, and rarity, which gives them a high cultural capital which in its turn, readily convertible into high economic capital" (Fiske, p. 44). To revisit the structure/agency argument, Hays contends "[c]ertain structural configurations of resources and constraints make it more or less possible for people to make larger or smaller 'creative' moves" (p. 70). In Marshall's text, he proposes a similar argument by suggesting, "bootlegging 78 actually provides ideological support for the legitimate industry as well as an apparent critique" (p. 155). The desire to generate fan concert videos—much like other forms of fan participations—are provoked by both fascination and frustration with the existing media culture (Jenkins, 2006a, p. 247). By assessing how fan concert videos are created and circulated, the central contradiction underscoring this practice can be summarized in two directions. On the one hand, fans are (for the most part) uncritical of the technical and aesthetic traditions of professionally shot concert videos. This is not to suggest that fans are incapable of accessing/operating cameras or video editing software, however, since specialized training on video production is not a skill set most fans are equipped with, when individuals refer to media content they are accustomed to, they are simply turning to cultural conventions in hopes to create documentations that would also be legitimized and valued by other fans. On the other hand, fans are weary of the one-to-many business model imposed by the cultural industries. Guided by the ideology that art and commerce are separate entities, when individuals take on initiatives to create and share concert videos, their motivations are driven by a need to assail the top-down hierarchical relationships, as well as to suspend the common assumption that producers are active while consumers are passive. As Jenkins succinctly summarizes: 79 Fans reject the studio's assumption that intellectual property is a "limited good," to be tightly controlled lest it dilute its value. Instead, they embrace an understanding of intellectual property as "shareware," something that accrues values as it moves across different contexts, get retold in various ways, attracts multiple audiences, and opens itself up to a proliferation of alternative meanings. (2006a, p. 256) 80 Conclusions In the above study, I have attempted to situate YouTube as a space where the accumulation of (pop) cultural capital can be tracked, displayed, and subsequently, deployed by fans in order to distinguish their statuses from one another. From this, the research shifts its analytical focus towards 53 fan- produced concert videos. By dissecting their immediacy, aesthetics and contents, the resultant observations highlight the complex and paradoxical nature of fandom, in turn affirming the limitations in rendering fan behaviours as either active or passive, normal or deviant, and empowered or exploited. In recognizing this tension, a better strategy to understand why fans are willing to create and upload concert footages is to conceptualize their motivations as both an expression of the structurally reproductive agency and the structurally transformative agency. Take, for example, when indie music fans mobilize their creativity through the production and circulation of fan concert videos, these texts are structurally transformative in that they are democratizing the concert experience from its economic, geographic and temporal limitations. Also, when fans take on the responsibility to record and archive concert videos, their productivities do foster "an ongoing relationship between the fan and the artist rather on that is punctuated by record industry" (Marshall, p. 122). Put simply, 81 when fans participate in the production process themselves, their behaviours do become political in that they are criticizing the operations of the music industry. There is no denying that the conceptualization of fandom as being subversive is particularly striking, however, it is equally important to note that fan cultures are not always oppositional. Instead, when fans engage in the production of self-produced concert videos, many of their behaviours as described above, do structurally reproduce the habitus of official culture. By referencing Fiske's concept of the "shadow cultural economy," this framework is crucial in recognizing that fandom is persistently monitored by a (pop) cultural system that rewards the appropriate performance of taste and competence. Although fan productions do not usually translate to economic capital, however, for fans who actively contribute to fan communities, they are remunerated with emotional/affective capital (pleasures), which subsequently provides them the means to exert influence and power over their interest communities. The hierarchical structure within fan culture is something that cannot be ignored, especially if competency in fan participation is increasingly determined by one's ability to converge existing and emerging technologies to express their fandom. In both Baym and Bird's research on virtual fan communities, both scholars have acknowledged that the Internet, despite its growing accessibility, continues to privileges participation from those within higher socio-economic 82 groups (Baym, p. 203; Bird, p. 173). Interestingly, within the past few years, text- based fan communities like the Usenet group Baym studied, or the e-mail list Bird evaluated, are slowly vanishing in place for more popular formats like bulletin board system, or more recently, blogs and social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook. As current design trends demand the web to move away from a "publish and browse" modality and into a "collaborative canvas" where users can share, create and socialize (Tapscott and Williams, 2006, p. 37), this modification clearly signals a new set of skills in order to fully participate in the "new" web milieu. "[T]he pleasures of enjoying "everyday life" is very much dependent on having the resources for leisure and consumption" (Bird on Grossberg, p. 170). Drawing from this observation, it should be obvious that the production and circulation of fan-produced concert videos are highly dependent on fans having the appropriate economic and technical capital. In order to empirically validate this supposition, it is useful for future researchers to supplement unobtrusive community observations (to reveal the more nuanced aspects of fandom) with ethnographic methods like interviews and survey studies (to reveal the demographics of fandom). Traditionally, gender has played a significant role in fan studies (Baym on female soap opera fans; Bird on female Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman fans; Fiske on female Madonna fans; Jenkins on female Star Trek, Beauty and The Beast 83 fans; and Prandstaller on female Adam Clayton fans). For this particular research, I have opted to exclude gender from the analytical equation, simply because the fan-produced concert video, unlike a web-based discussion on soap operas, or a fan fictional story based on the popular television characters, does not really focus on publicizing emotional and domestic issues—concerns that are usually tied to the female audience. With that said though, there are many conceptual links between gender, music and technologies that can be explored in future research. For example, in Fonarow's study on British indie music, she observes that since the subculture prides itself in being egalitarian, within an indie gig environment, females fans are much more inclined to stand near the stage (a space mostly occupied by male fans), as well as to partake in traditionally male-oriented activities like crowd surfing23 (p. 86 and 91). In referencing Fonarow's research findings, I am in no way trying to characterize the process of crowd surfing with the process of creating concert videos as comparable practices—especially, since both fan activities are driven by entirely different motivations. However, if the indie ethos of liberalism does impact gender uses of technologies in a concert setting, this observation does provide a stirring platform to begin challenging the long-held assumption that collecting music, sharing and circulating music knowledge are 23 In Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetic and Rituals of British Indie Music, Fonarow defines crowd surfing as "an activity in which an individual is hoisted above the crowd, and supported by other members of the audience, rolls about on top of them" (p. 82). 84 gendered activities which privilege male music fans who consider the "homosocial information-mongering" as an expression of male power (Straw, 1997, p. 4). As I have already hinted, it is imperative to acknowledge the findings generated in this study are closely tied to the philosophical foundation grounding "indie" music. While I am not suggesting that the observations derived from this research cannot be mapped on to other concert videos recorded from a country music or a pop music concert. However, I do wish to make it explicitly clear that within the indie music enclave, there are certain circumstances that actually encourage music fans to create and circulate concert videos. For example, since indie music fans regard the live concert as the "essential domain where a band can reveal itself as a conduit of 'true' music, thereby demonstrating its own authenticity" (Fonarow, p. 79), under this ideological framework, I would argue that indie music fans (much like the rock music fans Marshall describes) are more likely to capture concert footages via their handheld devices, because they see their actions as humanizing and celebrating variations in musical performances (Marshall, p. 123). Finally, it must be stressed that within an indie concert setting, it is much easier to record concert videos without having to deal with security hecklings. Since many of the indie acts (and the smaller concert venues/clubs they play at) have a laissez-faire approach to the uses of digital cameras, often music fans 85 openly take pictures and record concert videos with no interruptions from the band, the fans, or security personnel (if there are any) working inside the venue. From personal observations, I would argue this flexible atmosphere does not always transpire at larger venues when more mainstream acts are performing. If the ideological and physical spaces of indie music do facilitate the production of fan concert videos, this example further illustrates the fan collection (much like the official cultural collection that exists in a museum) is uneven and that it also privileges certain tastes over others. My research findings have confirmed that the production and circulation of self-produced concert videos are complex and contradictory. Earlier in my thesis, I have postulated that one of my research objectives is to take up the nuances in fandom in order to assess the implications underlining the current market treatment of fan culture. In closing, I wish to contextualize this concern by evoking Jenkins' discussion on "affective economics" (2006a). In Convergence Culture, Jenkins identifies "affective economics [as] a new configuration of marketing theory, still somewhat on the fringes but gaining ground within the media industry, which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions" (2006a, p. 62). With regards to the topic of fan- produced concert videos, it should be noted that at the time of writing, the 86 entertainment industry and the commercial technology industry have both appropriated these fan practices, and swiftly transformed them into a marketing language. In doing so, these initiatives do not only enable businesses to cursorily validate fan behaviours, but more importantly, they afford companies to seek out and further promote new services and applications to the most media and techno- sawy fans. As I have persistently argued in this thesis, it is important to reiterate that fan productivities are closely tied to class divisions. Under this condition, it should become obvious that a central problem with the commodification of fandom remains that consumer empowerment is a marketing gimmick that speaks directly to individuals with the appropriate form of economic affluence and technical literacy. With that said though, I do not want to simply reduce "affective economics" as an exploitative practice. As past researches firmly reminded us that In the fall of 2006, MuchMusic (a music television station in Canada) launched "Show Me Yours," a user-driven portal where fans are asked to submit various content including concert photos and concert videos captured on handheld devices. MuchMusic has also collaborated with the wireless service provider, Virgin Mobile, to promote the annual rock music festival, Virgin Festival (which takes place in both Vancouver and Toronto, Canada). For more information, please visit: http://www.showmeyours.tv/ 25 In 2007, AT&T Wireless introduced a 15 second TV ad, in which features a group of enthusiastic music fans deploying their mobile phones during a concert performance by the American indie band, Mates of States. To view commercial, please visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM7081 fGeRO It should also be noted that in the summer of 2007, the Casio brand launched a line of digital cameras with a special "YouTube Capture Mode" to facilitate the video sharing process. For more info, please visit: http://www.pointshootupload.com/ 87 media fans are acutely aware (and more importantly, critical) of the production structures of the culture industry. 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[http://news.com.com/Is+YouTube+a+flash+in+the+pan/2100- 1025-6089886.html?part=dht&tag=nl.e703] 94 Straw, W. (1997). Sizing up record collections: Gender and connoisseurship in rock music culture. In Whiteley, S. eds. Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. Routledge: London and New York, 3-15. Terranova, T. (2004). Network culture: Politics for the information age. London: Pluto Press. Theberge, P. (2005). Everyday fandom: Fan clubs, blogging, and the quotidian rhythms of the Internet, Canadian Journal of Communication, 30 (4), 485-502. Trendwatching.com. (2006). Trend Briefing: Customer-Made. May/June 2006. [Accessed on August 4, 2006: http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/customer-made.htm] YouTube Videos Death Cab for Cutie. (2006, October 31). Crooked Teeth at Massey Hall, Toronto, Canada. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjORQpQds4A • http ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=791 tQVdTcgs Arcade Fire. (2005, November 5). Boys Don't Cry at Union Square, New York, United States. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r04jox3Ulhg David Cross with Spoon. (2006, September 3). The Beast and Dragon Adored at Bumbershoot Music Festival, Seattle, United States. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_SzjfBTCcg • http://youtube.com/watch?v=eolZEKq038c • http://youtube.com/watch?v=Oo3bVHqHlpM • http://youtube.com/watch?v=6GPd5hyGvnU Broken Social Scene. (2006, June 24). Various performances at Olympic Island, Toronto, Canada. (Search results as of July 6,2007) • http://youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=oly mpic%20broken%20social%20scene&search_sort=relevance&search_cate gory=0&search=Search&v=&view_type=G 95 Broken Social Scene. (2006, August 6). Various performances at Lollapalooza, Chicago, United States. (Search results as of July 6, 2007) • http://youtube.com/results?search_type::=search_videos&search_sort=relev ance&search_query=lollapalooza+Broken+Social+Scene&search=Search 96 Appendix A: YouTube Video Samples from Toronto Table 7: Broken Social Scene at Olympic Island, Toronto, June 24, 2006 # Of Views, #/Value Length/Title of Comments, ID Date Username of* Performance Favourites, Links ratings (Clicks) Tl 25-Jun daveekuhronic T2 25-Jun RonniDP l) i'J (m?. .ill ullicr T3 strangetheapple 25-Jun S.tf\ /-. • n/'.'r.Vi./ \.u i.ihk-> n >i I -lift It \ Mi donna Id 12. till uiher T4 strangetheapple 25-Jun }',i\'nk \.niahlcs n n n/a n:*4 /'•//•#i,ifi.« .•/ T5 25-Jun bruan rx'. S ~.-15) I'.iw nh-iii T6 25-Jun ^aurendorphin 1:04 " -4 iShnrsliHci 424.2.2.1(1) ' 1/5* T7 26-Jun RonniDP T8 26-Jun qinnn T9 26-Jun qinnn T10 26-Jun shakedown I:.'2 'Alnit>!>t('rimr* Til 27-Jun daveekuhronic T12 27-Jun wakeman48 • i.21 ('IIIM- /"//«. MS. 2. -. >d ') : 0/0 T13 28-Jun wakeman48 ii 13 Suit\ ,\- S'I/.V 1"2.(i. 2. 'Mi ' 1/5* l:.v ••/tShr-t-Jiiwi T14 30-Jun industryindustry 3ftft. I.d, I(1) 0.0 - clip 1 0.41 / i.S'"/.•»./.»«•. T15 30-Jun industryindustry !'»•). 0 o. II II (i • i lip 2 T16 30-Jun industryindustry (I Wl I »//•'.'. Vi id 1.1). II. II (I (i T17 30-Jun industryindustry II 21 l.'/i, -if /•') •. !.'". (' 'I. 'I 2 *" T18 30-Jun industryindustry H:2d Ai( 1.1.1. >..'.;.' imi. II 2.2 I2I I -• T19 03-Jul raindownyourlove (I Id !fW'7n»-% •"!'». •'. 1. II ^ 5 • (i I- T20 19-Jul xFireEyedGirlx l^'i. ii. (i. (i (i II S/r i '• • »iili .. .J (i n T21 21-Jul tdotrocks (I .'I " /.-Ni. ' .'.'/ •• 4-4. II. II. (i Notes The Toronto sample consists of 21 video clips captured at the Olympic Island concert on June 24, 2006. As of June 15, 2007, three videos (T3, T4 and T10) included in the original analysis (first carried out between June to September 97 2006) have been deleted. Since these videos were included in a YouTube Oft member's play list prior to their removal , basic statistical information such as view counts have been tracked and recorded, in the chart above. Since immediacy is a central concern in my research, I have opted to include the three videos in the current analysis. Any limitations as a result of their exclusion from YouTube have been addressed in the text accordingly. In addition, as of September 2006, two extra videos have been added when I run a YouTube search for "Broken Social Scene" and "Olympic Island." These videos are not included in the sample, because 1) the video entitled broken social scene - 7/4 [shoreline] was recorded from another concert at the Olympic Island venue on September 10, 2006; and 2) I created and uploaded the video entitled BSS @ Olympic Island performing "Anthems. "28 To prevent personal biases, my contribution is not included in the final sample of videos. For more information on my attempts to create/upload concert videos, please see Appendix D. Data analysis Immediacy • Total number of videos uploaded: 21 26http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A9FDADB4257BB985&page=l 27http://youtube.com/watch?v=oBxioeWR5C4 28http://youtube.com/watch?v=xtY7W_MVtBo 98 • Total number of unique users/tapers uploading content: 13 • Most video uploaded within the first 48 hours: 1. 6 videos on June 25 2. 4 videos on June 26 Aesthetics • Fan-concert videos are sorted into three categories based on their lengths 1. Snippet (less than one minute in length): 11 videos 2. Short (1 minute to 2.59 minutes): 4 videos 3. Full-length (3 minutes plus): 6 videos • Number of views (range) based on length of video 1. Snippet: between 159 to 1283 views 2. Short: between 366 to 1012 views 3. Full-length: between 928 to 12630 views • Ratings (number and value received) based on length of video (Note: the owner of each video cannot assign a star rating for his/her contribution to YouTube). 1. Snippet: Six of the eleven videos have no star rating; three videos receive 5-star ratings by one community member; one video receives a 5-star rating by two community members; one video receives a 5-star rating by three community members; one video 99 has a n/a rating, because the entry has been removed from YouTube. 2. Short: 2 videos have n/a ratings due to their removal; one video has no rating; and one video has been designated a 5-star rating by one community member. 3. Full-length: Interestingly, all videos in this category receive 4-star ratings. While this may suggest that they are less popular than videos with 5-star ratings, however, this is not the case. In comparison to other documentations, all six of the full-length videos have significantly higher number of YouTube members assigning these star ratings (for example, video T7 receives 68 ratings in total). In other words, full-length videos have the most number of recommendations/approvals by other YouTube members. Subsequently, these ratings are more representative of the fan community. Content • Most common song/performance recorded: 1. 7/4 (Shoreline): 6 videos 2. Almost Crimes (with special guests appearance): 4 videos 3. Anthems for a 17-year-old Girl: 3 videos 100 Appendix B: YouTube Video Samples from Chicago Table 8: Broken Social Scene at Lollapalooza, Chicago, August 6, 2006 # of Views, #/Value Length / Name of Comments, of ID Date Username video Favourites, ratings Links (Clicks) CI 07-Aug djottercreek 1:52 / Ibi - end of set j 2505. 9, 14. 5 (10) 12/5* C2 07-Aug hmh21384 0:26 •' Anthems 304,0.0.5(6) O.'O C3 07-Aug Smackdogl3 C4 07-Aug simplesinger 1:3.3 • //;/ lh cuius oj C5 07-Aug simplesinger 1006. 07-Aug Accoum C6 stereogum 1:12 ?4tShnrilini-i Sii^nendcd C7 07-Aug mellowbonsai s C8 08-Aug jessnci II 5K ililinl'l*- I". 0. 2. ? l4l I ' s C9 08-Aug jessnci i)-.:' I n, /1,••.,•/•" .i 21 l.li.(i.5( 'i I * II 15 /''.•/)#..i-i/s <•; C10 08-Aug meeii05 :*(<. (i. 'I. 1 (J) n II /'.;ri i>h 'ii Cll 08-Aug meeii05 'i 25 I nnu niy Is". ii. i) II (Hi C12 08-Aug birstenkoeder H2S hirh /'iv >,';/• / l"n. I. I.n 1 "!' s C13 08-Aug birstenkoeder II.M .l/://ii-'«\ ..'•/•: l^h. 1.2. Id) 2 * 2 07 IHnrt.mntf C14 10-Aug mansun79 1SIV-8. l(i) " 1* C15 10-Aug steevay I -."ft " J (Sin •i-.liiu-i "-1'»''. 2. I. 2( .51 h4" ... - , ... . \ixnuni 11-Aug stereogum I 14 4 iSnnr,-nm.i . . n .i C16 " Suspended C17 13-Aug philiprmccarthy d'l rm.kiiiili.ihk- l*X. 2. 0. 0 II ii C18 13-Aug philiprmccarthy II. i'» " , iS»".i.r, /;»li ||' II ll. 'I II (i II 2.X l C19 13-Aug philiprmccarthy 'l. II. II. II n n V,"i t. • 'in. «./••,' C20 13-Aug philiprmccarthy " 2J V./-'.iv»i '(.n.n.oii (Ml 14-Aug beheadtheromant *• »* C21 •.-.'•.- ,[ BMUMSyiajyM ic 2. s C23 18-Aug kunpango 2.DS Uulh-m IHM.0. -.0 2 * 101 Notes The Chicago sample consists of a total of 32 videos. As of September 2006, two videos (C6 and CI6) by the user "stereogum" have been removed, since the user's account has been suspended. Again, the videos remain in the sample, and limitations due to their removal have been addressed in the text. Data analysis Immediacy • Total number of videos uploaded: 32 • Total number of unique users/tapers uploading content: 22 • Most video uploaded within the first 48 hours: 1. 7 videos on August 7 2. 6 videos on August 8 102 Aesthetics • Fan-concert videos are sorted into three categories based on their lengths 1. Snippet (less than one minute in length): 13 videos 2. Short (1 minute to 2.59 minutes): 13 videos 3. Full-length (3 minutes plus): 6 videos • View counts (range) based on length of video 1. Snippet: between 94 to 492 views 2. Short: between 70 to 4006 views 3. Full-length: between 1130 to 18311 views • Ratings (number and value received) based on length of video (Note: the owner of each video cannot assign a star rating for his/her contribution to YouTube). 1. Snippet: 8 videos have no-star rating; one video has one three-star rating; one video has one four-star rating; 3 videos have 5-star ratings (unique votes range from 1 to 2). 2. Short: 2 videos have n/a rating; 2 videos have no-star rating; 5 videos receive 4-star rating (number of votes by YouTube members range from 1 to 9); 4 videos have 5-star rating (votes range from 1 to 12). 103 3. Full-length: 3 videos have 5 star ratings (unique votes range from 3 to 23); 3 videos have 4 star ratings (unique votes range from 13 to 49). Content • Most common song/performance recorded: 1. Anthems for a 17-year-old Girl (with full band): 9 videos 2. 7/4 (Shoreline): 7 videos 3. Ibi Dreams of Pavement: 7 videos 104 Appendix C: How do Music Fans Deploy Their Mobile Camera Phones and Digital Cameras at Live Music Concerts? All photographs were taken in Toronto, Canada from March 2006 to July 2007. Figure 3: Stars at The Docks Nightclub, March 1, 2006 105 !-^ to *'JAf**7 . Figure 4: Arctic Monkeys at The Phoenix Concert Theatre, March 21, 2006 106 Figure 5: Matthew Barber & The Union Dues at the Drake Hotel, April 27, 2006 Here, the young woman immediately reviewed her image after snapping a photograph of the band on her mobile camera phone. Figure 6: Broken Social Scene at Olympic Island Festival, June 24, 2006 107 Figure 7: Wolf Parade at the Phoenix Concert Theatre, August 5, 2006 Since clubs and concert theatres are often poorly lit (hence, not ideal for photography), in order to maximize the quality of the images or videos captured on commercial, point-and- shoot digital devices, the fan in this example rested his arms on a speaker nearby in order to keep his camera as steady as possible. 108 Figure 8: Death Cab for Cutie at Massey Hall, October 31, 2006 The individual on the left captured an image via his BlackBerry, while the individual on the right, positioned her phone receiver towards the stage in order to allow her friend(s) on the line to "listen in" as the band performed the fan favourite—I Will Follow You Into The Dark. lb*** I Figure 9: Shout Out Out Out Out at Lee's Palace, March 3, 2007 109 I Figure 10: Bloc Party at Kool Haus, March 26, 2007 Figure 11: Voxtrot at Sneaky Dee's, June 8, 2007 110 m J£l*Si Figure 12: Travis at Kool Haus, July 19, 200 111 c , * «v- -5» IHIHiiii ' * Figure 13: Travis at Kool Haus, July 19, 2007 112 During the recent Travis' concert in Toronto, guitarist Andy Dunlop climbed into the crowd (Figure 12), and performed his guitar solo amongst his fans. Wendy Fonarow points out that when fans participate at events like live concerts, they also internalize rules that define appropriate fan behaviours. To many fans, the stage is an "off-limit" zone, as it clearly demarcates the band from the audience in a concert venue (2006, p. 1). Put simply, fans are not expected to climb on stage during a performance, while band members similarly, are not expected to climb offihs stage within a concert setting. When Dunlop disrupted this convention, his gesture can be inferred as a "rare" event, which subsequently motivated his fans to capture the incident with their handheld devices (Figure 13). 113 Appendix D: Self-Produced Concert Videos In an attempt to immerse myself in the context and setting of my research interest, the following videos were captured at various concerts I have attended in Toronto, Canada (between March 21, 2006 to July 19, 2007). The concert videos were subsequently uploaded on to YouTube.com. To view these footages, please follow the URLs provided below. Video index: • Arctic Monkeys. A Certain Romance. Recorded at the Phoenix Concert Theatre, March 21,2006. http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=311gElBPiv4 • Snow Patrol. You Are My Joy (by The Reindeer Section). Recorded at the Opera House, March 30, 2006. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBQlvPZuRuw • The Stills. Retour A Vega. Recorded at the Phoenix Concert Theatre, May 11, 2006. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67mjEtdN4ao • Amy Millan. Baby I. Recorded at the Mod Club Theatre, June 10, 2006. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bua3nbYc5s 114 • Broken Social Scene. Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl. Recorded at Olympic Island, June 24, 2006. http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=xtY7W_MVtBo. Note: Please note this video is not included in the Toronto sample of videos. • Travis. Flowers In The Window. Recorded at Kool Haus, July 19, 2007 http://www.voutube.com/watch?v:=-ovxR2JPauI Note: By uploading this documentation on to YouTube a few hours after the concert, the video has over 200 views within three days of the show (this video has the highest view counts in comparison to the other five videos uploaded on to my YouTube account). Unlike the other five videos, this particular entry has also received multiple comments, star ratings, and "favourited" designations. 115