Popular Music and Society Artists As Entrepreneurs, Fans As Workers

This article was downloaded by: [James Madison University] On: 03 November 2014, At: 16:54 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Popular Music and Society Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpms20 Artists as Entrepreneurs, Fans as Workers Jeremy Wade Morris Published online: 15 May 2013. To cite this article: Jeremy Wade Morris (2014) Artists as Entrepreneurs, Fans as Workers, Popular Music and Society, 37:3, 273-290, DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2013.778534 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2013.778534 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions Popular Music and Society, 2014 Vol. 37, No. 3, 273–290, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2013.778534 Artists as Entrepreneurs, Fans as Workers Jeremy Wade Morris This paper uses the increasing integration of social media into music making and marketing to reflect on the work artists and their fans perform. While new technologies are celebrated for making cultural production more accessible, there is also more pressure on artists, as cultural entrepreneurs, to produce and distribute their own work. At the same time, fans are facing greater invocations to participate through overt calls to become co-creators or through more passive participation like behavior tracking. Fans cannot really consume without working. Using an analysis of British musician Imogen Heap— including press articles and data scrapes from Heap’s social media accounts—this paper focuses on the changing occupational and creative roles for artists and fans and the attendant implications for the circulation of cultural goods. Introduction In 2009, British ambient pop singer Imogen Heap undertook a massive social media campaign to produce and promote her new album Ellipse. Using video diaries, blog posts, and status updates across sites like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, Heap kept fans apprised of the album’s progress, solicited their input on demos, and included them in other aspects of the production process, such as the design of her album art and the writing of her press biography (Bascaramurty; Fusilli; West). As the cultural industries experience ongoing aftershocks in the wake of digitization, the case of Imogen Heap shows how social media and online distribution have occasioned a Downloaded by [James Madison University] at 16:54 03 November 2014 re-thinking of how artists, authors, and musicians go about the business of their art. Heap’s case also highlights the different occupational and creative roles that are emerging for users and fans and the shifting ways users are engaging with cultural content and with the creators and producers of that content. Accordingly, this paper uses the increasing integration of new media into music making and marketing as an opportunity to reflect on the idea of the artist as entrepreneur and on the cultural labor of fans. While new technologies have been routinely celebrated for making the tools of production more accessible (Anderson; Breen and Forde; Jones; Kot; Kusek and Leonhard), there is also more pressure on q 2013 Taylor & Francis 274 J.W. Morris artists, as entrepreneurs; expertise they may neither have nor be interested in attaining (The´berge, Any Sound). On the other side of the equation, fans are facing far greater invocations to participate (Burkart; The´berge, “Everyday Fandom”). Be it through overt calls to help artists make and market their content, or through more passive participation such as the ambient tracking of users’ habits, patterns, and preferences, fans cannot really consume without working. Using Imogen Heap as a case study of a cultural entrepreneur, this paper focuses on the changing expectations of artists and fans in light of the digitization of the music commodity and on the subsequent implications for the circulation of cultural goods like music. It questions the applicability of terms like “work” and “labor” to user and fan practices and argues that the artist’s production practices are increasingly part of the “product” they are offering. Social Media and Cultural Entrepreneurs The digitization of the music industries is now well into its third decade (Burkart and McCourt; Garofalo; Tschmuck). While digital formats do not yet dominate all markets or genres their effect on the music industries is undeniable: What is clear, however, despite resurgences in vinyl sales and the relative stability of CD album sales, is that there has been a shift in music consumption toward the virtual, or at least toward complex imbrications of virtual and physical artefacts in everyday musical practices. (Beer 223) The decline in dominance of traditional ways of marketing and selling music (e.g. the dwindling economic and cultural influence of radio, music video television, and “brick-and-mortar” retailers) has sparked an explosion of new business models (Van Buskirk). Musicians of many stripes and genres are experimenting with new media/social media to connect with their fans, explore variable pricing models for their songs, and to find new audiences. While these strategies range from major label artists to independent musicians and from sincere efforts at connecting with fans to uninspired marketing spam, it is hard to ignore that the ways of doing business, as a musician, are changing. The digitization of the music commodity creates economic and structural opportunities (Byrne; Krasilovsky and Shemel; Thomson and Zisk). The economics of Downloaded by [James Madison University] at 16:54 03 November 2014 digital formats eliminates a number of traditional production costs (e.g. packaging, physical shipments of products, etc.) and greatly reduces some of the others (e.g. retail, distribution). There are still studio fees, marketing and advertising campaigns, time and effort for discovering new talent, and administration fees, but these pale in comparison to the costs for physical products (Byrne). This has been especially important for independent artists, who have long been accustomed to handling much of the administrative aspects of their music themselves (i.e. marketing, promotion, touring). While the emerging uses of social and other new media are just the latest iteration of this do-it-yourself ethos, the significant cost savings and proliferation of Popular Music and Society 275 available platforms through which to communicate with audiences and other artists has helped make independent production and distribution a less costly model for artists to experiment with (Anderson). Aside from economic benefits, the larger hope for digital music lies in the structural changes it portends. Artists now have greater access to a wide variety of tools that allow them to produce, distribute, and market their own music and to circumvent the traditional paths of circulation for the music product. Digital technologies can put artists directly (or at least more directly) in contact with their fans (FMC, “Digital Infrastructure,” “Manifesto”). Cutting out the intermediaries makes it, in theory, cheaper to produce and market music and it potentially affords artists more intimate and meaningful relationships with their fans. In some cases, this seemingly direct contact with audiences presents opportunities for co-creative relationships to evolve. Again, it is not that these relationships are entirely new; musicians have previously relied on the labor of fans and audience members (e.g. fan clubs, word-of-mouth, tactical promotions, etc.). Rather, the widespread use of new and social media platforms and relative ease with which they can be put at the service of developing co- creative relationships makes the practice a more common and viable strategy for emerging and independent artists. This seemingly direct connection between artist and fan is perhaps clearest on social media platforms or technologies that make up what is known, for better or worse, as “Web. 2.0.” Proponents praise the democratizing effects of technologies and services that allow anyone with a creative idea to participate in artistic production (O’Reilly; Shirky; Tapscott and Williams). Others are more critical (Allen; Fuchs; Jarrett; Kawashima; Zimmer) and contend

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