DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media

Description

The emergence of social media in the early 21st century promised to facilitate new "DIY" cultural approaches, emphasizing participation and democratization. However, in recent years these platforms have been criticized as domineering and exploitative. For DIY musicians in scenes with lengthy histories of cultural resistance, is social media a powerful emancipatory and democratizing tool, or a new corporate antagonist to be resisted? DIY Music explores the significant challenges faced by artists navigating this fraught cultural landscape. How do anti-commercial musicians operate in the competitive, attention-seeking world of social media? How do they deal with a new abundance of data and metrics? How do they present their activity as "cultural resistance"? This book shows that a platform-enabled DIY approach is now the norm for a wide array of cultural practitioners; this "DIY-as-default" landscape threatens to depoliticize the call to "do-it-yourself."

Ellis Jones is a researcher at the University of Oslo, Norway, whose work investigates the impact of digitization on popular music cultures. A long-time devotee of "DIY" music, his work as a songwriter has been acclaimed by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and NPR.

In DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media, Jones presents a rich account of how social media is used in DIY music scenes and how scene participants committed to a genuine DIY ethos connected with political and cultural resistance negotiate the tensions and contradictions this produces. Going beyond presentation and analysis of the situation that exists, Jones presents ideas for new and innovative ways for music cultures to exist online that do not involve simply accepting the way of doing things presented to us by the major platforms. * Catherine Strong, Senior Lecturer, BA (Music Industry), RMIT University, Australia * Surely this is the definitive study of the politics of alternative music in our time. It's also an agenda-setting contribution to studies of social media. Part of the book's brilliance is that Jones writes so clearly and compellingly across such a wide range of challenging areas, including musical aesthetics, social theory, internet studies, the cultural importance of locality, and debates among musicians and fans. * David Hesmondhalgh, Professor of Media, Music and Culture, University of Leeds, UK *