POPULAR MUSIC FANDOM AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE:
A ONE DAY SYMPOSIUM
UNIVERSITY OF CHESTER
FRIDAY 10TH APRIL 2015
Speakers are listed in alphabetical order, not by presentation time:
Chris Anderton - Curating, Collecting and Archiving: Fan Labour and the
Conflicts of Copyright
In this presentation, music fans are characterised as cultural intermediaries who have
important roles to play within popular music culture. They are active not only in
curating, collecting and archiving the material culture produced and circulated by the
music industries, but also in creating, organising, discussing and circulating their own
materials/information. The development of online networks of communication,
storage and distribution has allowed more fans to engage in these practices, but has
also led to conflicts regarding copyright and ownership, and to the apparent co-opting
of fan networks, products and free labour for the commercial gain of the music
industries. This talk will discuss two forms of fan-led cultural production. Firstly,
there is the not-for-profit trading of live concert recordings, including remaster
projects and pseudo- record labels created by fans and fan networks. These curate,
collect and distribute recordings of live performances that would not otherwise be
available through ‘traditional’ commercial record company sources, and so build
alternative canons and histories for artists. Secondly, there are blogging sites that
curate rare, private press and OOP (out of print) recordings that are otherwise
impossible to find from legitimate streaming and download sites, or from primary
retail sources (though some may appear as ‘second-hand’ copies in online
marketplaces such as Musicstack, Eil, eBay, Gemm and so on). The blogging sites to
be discussed not only discuss the music, but offer cyberlocker download links in order
to facilitate free distribution of the recordings they present. In both types of cultural
production, fans are providing forms of free labour (material, immaterial and
affective), whilst also highlighting, negotiating or sidestepping a variety of issues
related to ownership and copyright that will detailed and discussed in the talk.
Dr Chris Anderton is the lead author of Understanding the Music Industries (Sage
2013), and the author of scholarly articles and book chapters that examine the history,
geography, branding and cultural economy of music festivals, the geography and
history of progressive rock, and the phenomenon of not-for-profit bootlegging. His
current project is a book on British music festivals, due for publication by Ashgate in
2016. His other interests include the future of the music industries, creative audiences,
artist-fan interactions, and alternative distribution and copyright regimes. He is a
Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Southampton Solent University where he leads
the BA (Hons) Music Promotion course and co-produces the SMILE Festival – an
annual music industries conference and live music event.
Daisy Asquith & Lucy Robinson - Crazy About One Direction: The Public and
Private of Documentary and Contemporary Fan Culture
1 This paper is a collaboration between film-maker Daisy Asquith and contemporary
historian Lucy Robinson. Asquith’s recent film for Channel 4 Crazy About One
Direction, was the most tweeted about documentary recorded, and created a ‘twitter
storm’ around rumours of 42 fans who had committed suicide in response to the
documentary. The film gave a section of female Directioners a public voice and space
to explain and analyse their own fan cultures for themselves. In the process the film,
and the girls in it, have been accused of breaking the subcultures’ secret codes.
Combined with the twitter rumours of suicides amongst ‘Larry Shippers’ (a
subculture within the wider subculture of Directioners) the film has been accused of
both literally and metaphorically killing off a fandom. In this paper we will explore
the documentary and the fans’ responses to it asking what lessons we might learn
from the fans in terms of the public and private of fan cultures, and in terms of the
research methodologies that we use to analyse them.
Daisy Asquith has made 21 films for Channel 4 and the BBC since 1996 and won a
number of awards including the RTS Best Documentary Series two years running,
and a Bafta nomination. She is currently undertaking PHD research at Sussex
University.
Lucy Robinson is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of
Sussex. She was academic lead on the JISC funded Open Access project ‘Observing
the 80s’ and part of the organising committee of The Network for Subcultures,
Popular Music and Social Change. She is currently writing a book on popular culture,
politics and the meaning of time in Thatcher’s Britain.
Safa Canalp - Reading Collaborative Music Database as a Public Sphere
Before twentieth century, in the times when coffee houses were spaces of public
debates in which political decisions were being discussed as Habermas tells it, writing
about music was under the monopoly of scholars of prestigious magazines and the
debates on music that were being carried on were realized mainly in academic terms.
Later, in the age of artwork’s mechanical reproducibility, the mediums for the transfer
of information about music were changed, and as Adorno argues, the power of control
passed into the hands of music industry and mass media. Finally, in the Internet age,
the passive audiences of the past became able to demand autonomy on commenting
on music, and their dreams turned into reality with the emergence of social media. In
this environment, collaborative music databases have become online spheres of public
discussions on musical matters. Therefore, in a sense, Benjamin’s vision on the
democratization of art appreciation has come into reality. But, what would Bourdieu
think of it? Drawing on recent debates on the notions of online deliberation and
cyberspace, and with reference to the recently developed concept of digital labor, this
paper aims to realize a Habermasian analysis and a post-Habermasian critique of
popular collaborative music rating and reviewing websites. In the analysis, I argue
that those websites can be considered as spaces of debate for deciding on matters like
which music is better, and for determining new meanings for certain music types
through attaching classifications to them. Ratings and reviews result in decisions
through communicative action, and with the support of popular search engines,
decisions obtain political character. On the other hand, in the critique, at first, I
2 question the autonomy of audiences through explaining the coexistence of political
authorities like admins and sponsors. Secondly, with regard to Bourdieuan theory of
class distinction, I discuss that many subcultural spheres are created within those
public spheres through exposition of cultural capital by audiences with different
tastes, and in this sense, those spheres’ public character becomes questionable.
Safa Canalp is from Istanbul, Turkey. As an undergraduate, he studied sociology at
Bogazici University, Istanbul. He is currently studying Historical Musicology at
Istanbul Technical University, MIAM - Center for Advanced Studies in Music as an
M.A. student and will graduate in June 2015.
Leonieke Bolderman - Have You found What You’re Looking For? On Music
Tourism as Fan Practice
Music tourism can be defined as the phenomenon of people travelling to places
because of a connection with music. Despite interesting finds in music tourism
research, there has not been much empirical research exploring the perspective of the
tourist: who are these ‘people’ and why are they travelling to specific locations
connected to music? This project aims to explore these questions, drawing on the field
of fan studies. In his work on Ibiza fans, Cornel Sandvoss (2014) explains the tourism
activity of Ibiza fans from the sense of belonging gained from travelling to the island.
This theory is expanded upon through comparative qualitative research into three
different examples of music tourism, using the research question ‘how, and in which
ways, do tourists experience music-related locations? Focusing on tourism to U2’s
Dublin, ABBA’s Stockholm and Wagner’s Bayreuth, participant observation of
tourist behavior is combined with semi-structured interviews among tourists (15), tour
guides (6) and relevant tourist policy agents (3). The examples chosen allow for a
comparison involving different timeframes (for the focus of music tourism research
has been predominantly on Sixties’ popular music) and crossing the distinction
between the meta-genres of popular and classical music for the first time in music
tourism research. The results of this fieldwork delve into the range of motivations
tourists give for partaking, ‘music tourists’ turning out to be a diverse group of people
– from the accidental tourist to the devoted fan. Underlying the experience of music
tourists is not only gaining a sense of belonging, but also a complex process of
identity work, in which personal and collective cultural fan identities are negotiated.
Through examining this process, this research shows how music tourism and music
fandom are not exclusively positive experiences.
Leonieke Bolderman is a PhD-candidate in the Department of Arts and Culture
Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the role and
meaning of music tourism in contemporary culture. This research is part of the NWOfunded project Locating Imagination: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Literary,
Film and Music Tourism.
Rachel Cohen, Julian Hunt & Charles Musselwhite - Prog and Punk Collisions:
A Lifecourse Approach to Fandom, Affect and the Public Display of Emotion
3 Today’s popular music press would have us believe that Progressive (Prog) Rock and
Punk are at extreme ends of the genre spectrum. In this paper, we argue that the two
are perhaps not necessarily as dichotomous as was once suggested, exploring this
argument not from a musicological perspective, but in terms of the ways in which
Prog and Punk fans interact and engage with the music, and with each other and,
further, asking how this might be understood as a lived and embodied experience.
Taking a psychocultural approach and combining this with a life-course perspective –
adding a chronosystem layer - we examine whether and to what extent the trajectories
of affect change over time for fans of each genre, how age might bear significantly
upon the psychodynamics of their emotional engagement in this context and,
importantly, the impact of changing ideological expectations associated with the
apparently appropriate (or inappropriate) public display and “performance” of
emotion for fans themselves. We draw upon contemporary fan studies work (e.g. Hills
2012, Springer 2013, Bennett 2012, Anderson 2012), and also give consideration to
the notion of how both musical genres function as technologies of the self (de Nora
2000) and as symbolic resources (Zittoun 2007).
Dr Rachel Cohen is an experienced lecturer with a background in popular music
studies, film audience studies, psychosocial studies and forensic linguistics. She
currently works as a mental health care planning research officer, is a professional
musician, and fronts UK rock band The Reasoning. www.thereasoning.com
Dr Julian Hunt is Research Associate at Swansea University. His research relates to
the changing nature of work, communities, and of the movement of labour. He has
combined this with a keen interest in historical sociology and the impact of class and
place upon social, cultural and economic life.
Dr. Charles Musselwhite is Associate Professor in Gerontology at the Centre for
Innovative Ageing (CIA) at Swansea University and leads the Environments and
Ageing research strand. With a background in psychology and sociology, his research
examines how the socio-cultural environment affects and is affected by people as they
age.
Pete Dale - Unpacking My Record Collection: The Matter of the Fan
Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay ‘Unpacking my Library’ argues that, for the book
collector, the objects of desire do not merely ‘come alive in him’; first and foremost,
‘it is he who lives in them’ (Benjamin 1970). For Benjamin, books matter;
particularly so when the ‘intimate relationship’ of collector and object involves a
certain ‘feeling of responsibility towards his [sic] property’. Much of this also applies
to records and record collecting in a contemporary popular music context: for vinyl
junkies, records matter; and the sensuous experience of slipping the record from its
sleeve animates the record collector (and vice versa) in a manner which I would
suggest is somewhat similar to the relationship described by Benjamin. Additionally,
post-internet, the owner of a rare record will often be driven to share his rarity; a
phenomenon which merits scholarly attention precisely because it raises the question
not only of subject and object but, also, of inter-subjectivity, competition and
generosity. At stake, here, is the relation between the private sphere (private listening)
and the public one (the economy, that is, of sharing, trading and purchasing or
4 selling). Benjamin’s assessment of the private book collection in 1931 is that ‘time is
running out’. Can we say much the same of the record collection as a material
presence in the average Western household today? Perhaps so; after Benjamin,
however, maybe we should hesitate before mourning this loss: a Marxist reluctant to
consider the radical transformation of material relations could hardly be worthy of the
name, after all. Whilst capitalism remains the dominant mode, though, it seems likely
that records will retain much of their status as privately-owned commodities which,
for the fan, feel like talismans.
Pete Dale has worked as a bookseller, musician, teacher, promoter and, currently, as
Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Manchester Metropolitan University. His
monograph Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground
was published by Ashgate in 2012. He is currently writing a second monograph
entitled Popular Music and the Politics of Novelty for Bloomsbury Academic with a
third, on the topic of DJ decks, MCing, urban music and education, due for
publication through Routledge in 2016. Dale remains active in punk-related bands
such as Milky Wimpshake and has been described by the Guardian newspaper as
‘legendary’.
Helen Elizabeth Davies – ‘Something Private to me’: Closet Music Fandom and
Gender Identity in the Everyday Lives of Young Teenage Girls
As Hills points out, ‘Fandom…is never a neutral “expression” or a singular
“referent”; its status and its performance shift across cultural sites’ (Hills, 2002, xixii). Furthermore, how a fan claims or disclaims their fan status depends on ‘an
estimation of the immediate social context’ (Duffett, 2013, 29). For the young
teenage girls who participated in my ethnographic research in Merseyside in 2008,
music played a vital role in their everyday lives, particularly in their social
relationships, which are central to understanding what and how music means. Among
friends and peers, the songs, artists and genres they listened to, liked and owned were
crucial to the ways in which they negotiated their identities and relationships. For
most of them, at some time, their affiliations with certain music threatened the
security of these identities and relationships, in relation to its lack of currency, lack of
originality or, most notably, its gender identification. For young teenage girls,
liminally positioned between childhood and youth, negotiations of identities in
relation to age and gender are particularly fraught and, while fandom can ‘offer a
space where individuals can investigate the possibilities of their gender identities’
(Duffett, 2013, 196), these investigations must sometimes be undertaken in a hidden
or closeted way. Headphone use for private listening was a common strategy used by
the girls when listening to music deemed ‘abnormal’ by their peer group. However,
closet fans could be outed in various ways, often with dramatic and socially
devastating consequences. Although, as Sedgwick observes, the ‘seemingly
unambivalent public siting’ of coming out (Sedgwick, 2008, 71), can make it safer to
be out of the closet than in, the ‘vulnerability, paranoia and threatened privacy’ of
coming out (Edwards, 2009, 47), or being outed, as a fan of unacceptable music, can
present a powerful challenge to the identities and relationships of young teenage girls.
Helen Elizabeth Davies has a PhD from the Institute of Popular Music, University of
Liverpool. Her key research interests are popular music in everyday life,
5 ethnographic research methods, and the relationships between gender/sexuality and
music consumption and performance. She is currently a Lecturer in Music at the
Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts.
Lucy Dearn - Audience or Fan Community: Exploring Ideas of Fandom and
Public Spheres in Classical Music
Often referred to as ‘aficionados’, the core audience for a classical music concert
series typically show their admiration for the art form by being loyal to both the arts
organisation that provides the series and the resident musicians. They also
demonstrate to others in the audience their knowledge of the art form and of the
concert culture at a particular venue. I am interested however, in placing the
‘aficionados’ into a populist sphere by analysing their behaviours in line with popular
culture and viewing them as ‘fans’. By understanding classical music audiences in
this way, it allows for comparisons to be made with other fan communities in popular
culture, which becomes particularly interesting when exploring Jürgen Habermas’s
concept of the public sphere. Drawing on empirical research, this paper will explore
the temporary community that is created around a classical music event. Classical
music concert culture requires very different listening habits than is seen more readily
in popular music, as it demands still and silent listening. In turn this encourages the
intrinsic displays of emotion within the listening community and only allows for a
public and collective display of emotion at selected points of the concert experience.
With such a radically different listening culture it may not seem natural to view a
classical music audience as a fan culture, but I propose that this community does
emulate fan-like behaviours, such as shared tastes or knowledge exchanges, and does
function as a fan culture. In understanding a non-populist audience in this way, I
question how audience members mediate between such private and public listening
experiences. Moreover, I will explore the construction and performance of fandom in
this community and question whether it may function as a public sphere for these
people.
Lucy Dearn is a second-year AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award Student with the
Sheffield Centre for Performer and Audience Research at the University of Sheffield.
Lucy is working in partnership with regional chamber group, Music in the Round,
under the supervision of Professor Stephanie Pitts, to investigate classical music
audiences.
Simone Driessen - ‘Larger than life’: Insights in the Post-youth Fandom of the
Backstreet Boys
When exploring fan narratives, many studies focus on the ‘becoming or being a fan’stories (cf. Bielby & Harrington, 2010). Whereas research that does address aging
fans or subculture members, often focuses on bodily issues of aging (cf. Hodkinson &
Bennett, 2012). This study wishes to expand the field of fan studies by providing an
exploration of why people stay committed to a fandom for a longer period of time.
Drawing on 24 in-depth interviews with female Dutch Backstreet Boys fans, findings
indicate that the band forms a constant factor in the (adult) fans lives. Although this
relevance may in-/decrease at times (cf. Hills, 2002); the music is besides being a
6 time out from their current social role (e.g. being a mom, working full-time), also a
moment to return to a previous version of the Self. Yet, because of their current social
role – in which they are financially and socially independent -, they can engage in
practices they previously could not engage in (e.g. going on a 3-day-cruise with the
band, or buying after-party tickets). While the fans are able to appropriate their fan
practices to their adult lives, this does not per se mean that this is (more) accepted by
acquaintances: Many of the fans hide their fandom. The interviewees argue that being
an adult boy-band fan is (still) considered a taboo. The fans respond to this by either
declaring their fandom openly, or feel an urge to (no longer) defend their position as
an adult fan. Although the fans feel like their relationship to each other and the band
has matured, the ‘outside world’ remains a site of struggle to discuss their fandom as
post-youth fans.
Simone Driessen is a PhD candidate/ lecturer in Media and Communication at
Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her dissertation highlights how postyouth audiences give meaning to and value music from their recent past, and how this
plays a role in the construction of their cultural identity.
Bethany Easton - Apple Scruffs: An Oral History
In the case of the Apple Scruffs, fandom can also be considered in relation to perhaps
one of the most important popular music events of the 20th century. Beatles fans are
often only linked with Beatlemania, an expression coined by the British press in 1964
and used ever since. Yet such clichés hide narratives of arbitration and rituals of daily
life rather than outsidership and unsocial mores. Surely there is more to learn from
fandom as a daily existence and way of life, particularly in cases such as the Apple
Scruffs. In a very interesting way even issues of travelling across London, relations
with parents, jobs, and siblings, and relationships with the icons can teach us to
consider how fandom can level issues between icons and fans and that distances can
be reduced via such fandom. One major issue which needs to be addressed and is
missing from popular music research is the idea of the removal of playing live. This
research would therefore explore the lack of the artist appearing live and how fandom
may have faced alteration due to the replacement of artists’ appearances from on stage
to at the ‘stage door’. Using an oral history approach a number of Apple Scruffs will
be interviewed about their experiences with a variety of questions arising. Questions
relating to gender, sexuality, age and fandom will be asked and then explored. This
research project will span many different areas but will focus centrally on the topic of
fandom and how important it can be as a reflection of society.
Bethany Easton has been teaching English, Media and Drama for seven years at a
variety of establishments. Whilst teaching, she completed my MA at Liverpool Hope
University in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society. She is now about to commence
a PhD exploring the Beatles fans: the Apple Scruffs.
Mat Flynn - Valuing Fan Engagement in a Recorded Music Attention Economy
Herbert Simon proposed, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
(1971 p.40) Arguably, music users’ attention is now the scarcest commodity in the
production and consumption of record music. Meaning the economic value of
7 recorded music is increasingly dependent on the amount of listening attention ‘paid’
to it. As digital streaming platforms, such as Spotify and Deezer, develop business
models that seek to increase subscriptions and audience engagement based upon their
individual usage data, fan engagement becomes commoditised within an attention
economy. A report by the world economic forum, “Rethinking Personal Data:
Strengthening Trust” (2012) states, ‘Even though it is a virtual good, data is no
different. Data needs to move to create value. Data alone on a server is like money
hidden under a mattress. Safe and secure, but largely stagnant and underutilised.’ The
report suggests that one of the key economic resources of the 21st century is personal
data. As streaming platforms increasingly move customer data to create value, fans
listening habits will influence and be influenced by the protocols, functionality and
business models of the platforms. At its extreme, what fans perceive as choice is very
open to manipulation by the programme architecture that underpins the streaming
service. This paper proposes to explore issues faced by fans such as privacy,
permission and participation as their usage data is increasingly used to add value to
the nascent streaming industry.
Simon, Herbert A. (1971). Designing Organisations for an Information Rich
World. in Greenberger, Martin. Computers, Communication and the Public
Interest. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins,
World Economic Forum (2012) Rethinking Personal Data: Strengthening
Trust. (Available online)
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_IT_RethinkingPersonalData_Report_20
12.pdf
Mat Flynn is Senior Lecturer in Professional Development at the Liverpool Institute
for Performing Arts (LIPA) where he has taught business skills, the music industries
and professional development since 1999. He is a current PhD candidate at the
University of Liverpool, researching music as an economy of attention.
Neil Fox - We Made This Together: How ‘Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!’
Foresaw changes in the Live Concert Experience brought about by Digital
Technology and Social Media
This paper explores the now commonplace and somewhat contentious practice of
recording concert experiences through portable devices and sharing them online via
social media platforms. It argues that the Beastie Boys concert film “Awesome; I
Fuckin’ Shot That” (Hörnblowér, 2006), which documents a New York show by the
band at Madison Square Garden, explicitly recognises the audience as participants.
The film also acknowledges the role audiences can play in documenting a live
experience. The paper analyses the practice of recording gigs and concerts from a
contentious, contemporary starting point before discussing the practice as something
participatory and alternative, and involving creative and democratic elements of the
capturing and sharing of everyday life. To do this it draws on the work of Jenkins
(Convergence Culture) and Atton (Alternative Internet and Alternative Media). The
paper highlights how the film contains these various elements and reflects different
sides of the debate between audience and artist and also how it problematises
accepted ideas around the authorship of a live experience. Ultimately, the paper hopes
8 to show how this practice reveals the position of the artist in the experience as
something that suggests audience participation and ownership but more realistically
seeks to control and dominate the experience. Also, how the Beastie Boys and their
film Awesome! bring all these ideas to the fore.
Dr Neil Fox is course co-ordinator for BA Film at. He is a writer/producer of award
winning short films, founded and directed the Filmstock film festival (2000-2009),
writes for Clash magazine and The Big Picture and has published academically on
rockumentaries, film education and Manchester in the movies.
Georgina Gregory - The Power of Love: Imitation, Embodiment and Erotic
Capital
As there is a lack of research on fandom in relation to the body and on mimesis as a
fan practice this paper aims to address both neglected areas by examining mimetic
embodiment on the tribute scene. While fans of popular music and other forms of
popular culture have often shown allegiance to an admired musician, group or
celebrity by copying their hairstyle, make-up, accessories and dress sensibility,
wholesale efforts to perform the identity of the admired artist require a further level of
skill, commitment and emotional labour. However the rewards can be higher and I
will show that for some fans the embodiment of a popular music artist’s identity is the
ultimate form of expressing admiration and depth of knowledge about the object of
fandom. Through the application of Hakim’s (2010) theory of ‘erotic capital’ I will
demonstrate that the rewards for this kind of activity can be conceived as somewhat
different to those usually assigned to fan practices. Where traditional theories of
cultural capital suggest that socially valued information, objects and images can raise
stature within fan communities as can high levels of knowledge about cultural texts or
practices, using the body to imitate an iconic performer opens up opportunities to
amass erotic capital and all that this entails.
Georgina Gregory is Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at University of
Central Lancashire where she teaches modules on the visual culture of popular music
and youth and popular culture. She is also author of the monograph Send in the
Clones: a Cultural Study of the Tribute Band (2012).
Bethan Jones – ‘My Music was on Shuffle, One of Their Songs Came on and I
Had to Hit Next...’: Navigating Grief and Disgust in Lostprophets Fandom
In 2012 Ian Watkins, lead singer of the Welsh rock band Lostprophets, was charged
with a series of sexual offences against children. A successful group in the UK and
beyond, Lostprophets had gained a large fan following, many of whom initially
protested Watkins’ innocence. Once the singer pleaded guilty and the group
disbanded, however, fans were faced with questions on whether they could (and
should) separate the man from the music; if they could continue to be fans of the
band; whether their expressions of bereavement were appropriate (and if so where
should they grieve); and how their previous fannish engagement with the band had
been affected. While much work has been done on celebrity death, fandom endings
and fans’ grieving processes, less has been done on the tensions that occur between
9 fannish attachment and instances of abhorrent behaviour by the object of fandom. In
this paper I suggest that the grief that fans felt in response to the allegations against
Watkins and his subsequent conviction is similar to the grief fans feel when faced
with the death of a favoured celebrity or text, but unlike the latter there are fewer
ways of expressing that grief. While tribute pages on Facebook abound for Peaches
Geldof and Stephen Gately, and REM fan groups discuss the band’s influence even
after their split, pages mourning the break-up of Lostprophets are scarce, and when
they do exist are closed groups with few members. I analyse responses to Ian
Watkins’ arrest, trial and imprisonment on music forums and blogs and argue that this
can be framed in a similar way to which Rebecca Williams (2011) frames celebrity
death using Giddens’ ontological security. I further suggest, however, that fannish
grappling with issues of morality and ethics complicates both the fannish sense of self
and post-object fandom.
Bethan Jones is a PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television
Studies at Aberystwyth University. She has written on a range of topics relating to
gender, fandom and digital media and has been published in the journals Sexualities,
Participations and Transformative Works and Culture.
Milena Popova - Real Person Fan Fiction as a Public Sphere
In this paper, I investigate how music fans use real person fiction centred around the
bands they love to produce social commentary and explore issues of sexuality and
consent. Real person fiction (RPF) is fan fiction based on real celebrities, often actors
or musicians. “Bandom,” a popular subtype of RPF, is fan fiction centred primarily
around the bands Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Panic! At The Disco.
Like other fan fiction, Bandom fiction is predominantly written by women, is often
sexually explicit and involves relationships between the male band members. While
there has been some recent research into fan activism in the field of fan studies, it has
predominantly focused on activities such as philanthropy and fundraising (e.g.
Jenkins & Shresthova, 2012). Where fan works themselves have been examined as a
form of activism (Leavitt & Horbinski, 2012), the focus has been on issues such as
censorship and copyright which threaten the fandom community specifically, rather
than wider social issues such as consent. In my paper, I build on Fraser's (1990)
concept of subaltern counterpublics and theories of cultural activism. I show how
fanfiction discourses can create safe spaces for the exploration of difficult subjects
and the renegotiation of the private-public boundary. I use textual analysis and close
readings to examine a small number of fanfiction stories. I show the techniques fan
writers in the Bandom community use to subvert and recreate traditional narratives of
consent and explore feminist models of consent largely absent from popular culture.
Fraser, Nancy. 1990. "Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the
critique of actually existing democracy." In Social text, no. 25/26.
Jenkins, Henry, and Shresthova, Sangita. 2012. "Transformative Works and
Fan Activism," special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10
Leavitt, Alex, and Andrea Horbinski. 2012. "Even a Monkey Can Understand
Fan Activism: Political Speech, Artistic Expression, and a Public for the
10 Japanese Dôjin Community." In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism,"
edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative
Works and Cultures, no. 10
Milena Popova is a PhD researcher at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE
Bristol. Her research focuses on representations of consent in fan fiction as a form of
cultural activism.
Shanika Ranasinghe - ‘So I Thank ABBA for the Music, for Giving it to Me’:
ABBA Fandom in the Twenty-First Century
Despite the fact that it is not, never has been and likely never will be cool to be an
ABBA fan (as exemplified by the film ‘Muriel’s Wedding’), the Swedish group
continues to be popular. This paper will theorise why this is, by discussing some of
the forms in which ABBA’s music survives – including ABBA Gold (1992), Mamma
Mia! the musical (1999) and the subsequent film (2008) – and focusing on fan
activity. I will argue that many fans have reinvented and reappropriated ABBA to
create their own twenty-first century sociocultural phenomenon. By focusing in on a
Singalonga ABBA event that took place in Oxford, UK in November 2009, the paper
will highlight how ABBA’s music and the fandom surrounding it creates an accepting
environment for ‘camp’ activities, e.g. cross-dressing/wearing fancy dress and
dancing amongst males. The paper will question whether there is something intrinsic
about the nature of ABBA and its fandom that allows for and celebrates this kind of
performativity.
Shanika Ranasinghe is a music PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of
London. Her thesis constitutes an ethnographic study of nostalgia in popular music
fandom – specifically, looking at ABBA fandom and why ABBA’s music continues
to be so popular, despite the band never reforming.
Ciaran Ryan - Transforming Personal Music Fanzine Collections into Public
Displays of Fandom
In small, localised music scenes (see Straw 1997; Shank, 1994), there is a limited
barrier between performer and audience. This is evident in communities that align
themselves to the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos; there is not a great deal of physical
space between band and audience, and most participants tend to know each other
personally. In participatory communities such as these, an almost hidden fandom
exists, with almost every participant an active member in one way or another. This
fandom was often articulated in DIY scenes through the production of homemade
fanzines. The places where they were sold and distributed – independent record stores
and shows – provided an outlet for discussion on the topics featured. That in itself –
coupled with the political content (animal rights, anti-capitalism, environmental
issues) that featured in fanzines – made it an influential discursive media. While
physical fanzines are becoming less of a fixture in independent music scenes,
numerous individuals have retained their collections of these somewhat amateur
publications. As part of ongoing research into the role of fanzines in Ireland, this
proposed paper looks at how fanzines take on a different meaning when they are part
of a collection, and how accumulation leads to a sense of (sub)cultural capital
11 (Bourdieu, 1984; Thornton, 1995). It explores how the containment of fanzines for
personal usage is demonstrative of individualistic fan behaviour, retained within the
private sphere. However, by distinguishing between those domestic collectors and
those who view collecting as a curatorial responsibility, this work looks at how the
meaning of the collection is transformed when it forms a part of a public exhibition as
in the case of Dublin’s The Forgotten Zine Archive. Finally, it questions whether
material that is often two or three decades old can still be influential and provide for
public activism within DIY music fandom.
Ciarán Ryan is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media and Communication
Studies at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland. He is also a freelance radio
producer of features and documentaries, and is a partner in local independent record
label Out On A Limb Records.
Carla Schriever - The Unutterable Desire for Prince: Male Fan Adoration and
Concealing Techniques
Nowadays the self-entitled group “Purple Army”, the hardcore fanbase around the
pop-phenomenon Prince consists mainly of white, heterosexual males, aged between
40-60, who assemble in annual manner to witness ad-hoc concerts by the artist.
Without the analogue or digital interaction attending these Hit and Run shows and
aftershows becomes a mere impossibility. This network of fans operates on an innercircle level built on knowledge capital and long termed fandom. The dimension of the
public and the private aspects of fandom correlates in this group. The fans in this
circle want to be publically understood as fans of good music, as musicians, as musicscholars worshipping an in their perspective “underrated” artist. They want to be read
as objective listeners not as fans. The image of the “objective-fan” however transports
the notion of concealing private aspects of the fandom. Aspects, which tingle the thin
line between the normative and the anti-normative in the relationship between a male
heterosexual fan and his male fan object. A relation like this is very uncommon for
scholarly perspectives on popular music fandom, especially when it holds gender
questioning potential as well as the notion of an unutterable desire, which became
appeared in the motives for concert going, collecting and the fight for the front row.
This also includes aspects of fetishism, religious-like worshipping practices and
spiritual idioms. In the study that I conducted I figured out some of the hidden
motives: Heterosexual, heteronormative family fathers talked about the desire for the
sound of Prince’s heels clicking on the floor, of feeling his aura of needing him as
close as possible. Moments which come to life only for the duration of the concert
(the safe space) and need to be destroyed shortly after, by methods of reconstructing
their male identities.
Carla Schriever is Lecturer in Musicology and Philosophy at the University of
Oldenburg, Germany. Her research interests include music consumption, fan cultures,
gender, aesthetics, phenomenology.
12 Michael Skey & Maria Kyriakidou - ‘This Isn’t a One-night Event, it is a
Lifestyle’: Eurovision, Micro-Publics and the Significance of Fan-produced
Media
The Eurovision Song Contest attracts the largest multi-national media audience in the
world. Recent academic studies of the event (Fricker & Gluhovic, 2013) have
suggested that it may represent a European-wide public sphere where participants,
fans and watching audiences participate in debates around what it means to be
European. Following Sandvoss (2007: 62), these studies have seen the field of
popular culture as an increasingly important arena, where ordinary people can
articulate, engage with and reflect upon major issues and concerns. While we agree
with the importance of studying popular culture and the significance of Eurovision as
a lens with which to study wider debates around subjectivity, community and taste,
we seek to offer an alternative perspective using insights from ethnographic fieldwork
conducted at the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest in Copenhagen, Denmark. Drawing
on interviews with fans inside the event as well as participant observation and media
analysis, we note how the ESC forms a micro public sphere that is underpinned by a
range of fan-produced content, including blogs, websites, online radio and television.
These media platforms, alongside social networking, are key to ensuring that debates
about, and interest in, the contest is sustained across the year. However, those
involved in producing this content also reference their own social and cultural capital
in relation to other fans and, in doing so, demonstrate the hierarchies that operate
within this sphere. Here, it’s also worth noting that such hierarchies can also be seen
in the views of most of those attending the event where a stated ‘openness towards
others’ is sometimes undermined by classed and Western-centric discourses that only
sporadically embrace the concept of a wider European identity.
Dr Michael Skey is a Lecturer in Media & Culture at the University of East Anglia.
He researches in the areas of media and cultural studies, sociology of everyday life,
globalisation and sport. His monograph, National Belonging & Everyday Life: The
Significance of Nationhood in an Uncertain World, published in October 2011, won
the 2012 BSA/Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for best first, and sole-authored, book in
sociology. His work has also featured in a range of journals, including; Sociological
Review, Communication Theory, Nations & Nationalism, Journal of Cultural
Geography and Ethnicities.
Maria Kyriakidou is a Lecturer in Cultural Politics, Communications and Media at
the University of East Anglia. Her research interests include audience studies, the
mediation of distant suffering, the role of representation in globalisation and
cosmopolitanism.
Veronica Skrimsjö - Value in the ‘Worthless’: A Case Study of Easy Listening
and Record Collecting
Easy listening has generally been regarded as a genre containing little cultural capital
and everyday discussions tend to have a negative discourse. One might even argue
that easy listening is ‘uncool’ and lacking in authenticity. “Whilst authenticity does
not necessarily equate cool, certain genres, such as cool jazz, Britpop and dubstep,
have authenticity embedded within them, rendering them to be described as cool [and
13 as such hold certain appeal to listeners]. One might hence suggest that ‘cool’ lends
itself to the popular music sub-discipline of genre analysis, identifying who is and
who is not cool within an equally cool genre.” (Skrimsjö, 2013). Furthermore as many
easy listening LPs were produced in bulk and generally sold well enough at the time
of release to become almost ubiquitous at car boot sales today, they do not tend to be
sought-after. As a result, unlike the eponymous debut album and ‘flop’ by Ben (1971,
Vertigo Records) which was recently re-released due to post-deletion demand, they
also have little value to many record collectors, who often highlight marginalised
music by seeking out (or ‘hunting’) rare and/or unusual LPs. Yet many people,
including the former proprietor of a record collection recently donated to a colleague
and those who subscribed to the ‘loungecore’ subculture of the 1990s, find both value
and enjoyment from these, now supposedly worthless, objects. It has often been
suggested that such ‘loungecore’ interest was both ‘ironic’ and an anti-canonical postmodernist statement in the 1990s. However the aforementioned donation might
suggest that there was nothing ‘ironic’ about collecting, for instance, Geoff Love
Orchestra albums in the first case. This paper will proceed by dealing with how easy
listening fandom and collecting is dealt with and regarded within the public domain.
It will also consider how, as academics, we preserve such a collection in a cultural
climate that may not see particular value in it by addressing issues relating to popular
music genre, cultural capital and fandom.
Veronica Skrimsjö, an adopted Scouser, completed a Ph.D. in Popular Music
Studies, entitled ‘I, Me, Mine?’: An Initial Consideration of (Popular Music Record)
Collecting Aesthetics, Identities & Practices, at Liverpool Hope University, where she
is currently working as a lecturer in Popular Music Studies. An avid defender of the
record collector, with an ever-growing collection herself, her main research interests
include record collecting, aesthetics, identity, Bossa Nova and ‘bad’ music.
Peter Smith - Making Private Experiences Public: Creating a Blog of Rock
Performance
I have always been obsessed with live performance, having attended 1,000s of rock
gigs over the last 45 years. In recent years I have been keeping a record of the
concerts I have enjoyed through a daily blog: http://vintagerock.wordpress.com/. This
started as a means of cataloguing my tickets and programmes, and reminding me of
gigs I have experienced. However it has become much more than that; and I am now
starting to use it as a way of exploring the history of rock performance. Rock
concerts are part of my identity and, as an academic (my original training is in
science), I am starting to analyse why they are so important to me. The intersection
between the public and private nature of rock performances fascinate me. I view
attending a gig as a private, personal experience. I sometimes attend concerts with
friends, but often alone; however in either case the experience remains very personal
to me. What drives me then, to share my experiences and discuss them with others,
who I have never met, through the medium of an online blog which places my private
thoughts in the public domain (Bell, 2007). I am not alone in doing so. The number of
mobile phones raised high at the start of a concert reveals how important sharing the
live event is to the audience, and YouTube contains a record of millions of events (the
search term “live” gives 645 million hits). My paper will explore the overlap between
the private and the public, by using examples taken from my blog.
14 Bell, B. (2007). Private writing in public spaces: Girls’ blogs and shifting boundaries.
Growing up online: Young people and digital technologies, 95-111.
Peter Smith is Emeritus Professor of University of Sunderland. He has published
over 250 papers on a diverse range of subjects including popular music, education,
management, and computing. Peter has attended over 2,000 concerts, from the late
‘60s onwards, and writes a daily blog on his personal concert experiences:
http://vintagerock.wordpress.com/.
Gayle S. Stever - Social Presence and Celebrity/Fan Activism: Experiencing
Virtual Fandom as ‘Real’
Presence Theory describes how objects in a mediated environment are experienced as
if they are “present.” Users forget the role that technology has played in making them
feel as if they are actually present in a virtual environment. Imagination, attention and
involvement are key variables in this process (Wirth et al, 2007). Social Presence is
defined as the sense of being with another in this virtual environment. Mediated
representations include text, images, video, and 3D avatars (Biocca et al, 2003).
Media fan forums afford places where fans come together to discuss societal
problems. Shared love of music of various types becomes a common ground where
like-minded individuals are afforded a comfortable place where the fan feels
understood. Examples explored include the songs of Josh Groban, the legacy of
Michael Jackson, or the nationalism inspired by Celtic Thunder. Currently, the places
where people share these values and ideas exist principally on the Internet. Social
media has afforded the unique opportunity for fans to actually interact in various ways
with some of their favorite celebrities, and where fans can participate together in
activities like shared concern over the environment, concern for the current state of
arts education, ways to help the homeless, or preserving ocean wildlife, all examples
of the kind of public activism that can grow out of fan culture and fan/celebrity
dialogues. Information from studies on Twitter and various fan forums explored how
fan-celebrity interaction can be a catalyst for public discourse on issues of the day.
Social Presence Theory will be used to explore the sense fans feel that they are
present within a community, knowing the participants in a “real world” way. The
impact that fans partnering with celebrities are able to have on society is evidence of
the “reality” of this environment. Examples will be discussed.
Biocca, F., Harms, C., & Burgoon, J. (2003). Toward a more robust theory
and measure of social presence: Review and suggested criteria. Presence,
12(5), 456-480.
Wirth, W., et al. (2007). A process model of the formation of spatial presence
experiences. Media Psychology, 9, 493-525.
Dr Gayle S. Stever has done participant-observer fan studies for 25 years. From
Michael Jackson to Star Trek to Josh Groban, experiences in these and other fan
cultures have enlightened her publications on parasocial theory, social media, and
adult development including attachment theory. Stever is an associate professor for
Empire State College/SUNY.
15 Alicia Stark - ‘By Regular People, for Regular People’: VOCALOID Fans as
Creators of Their Own Artefacts
A new genre of popular music is rising in popularity around the world, spawned from
voice-reproduction software called VOCALOID (created in 2003). The programme
takes a recorded human voice, digitizes it, and allows the user to manipulate it to sing
anything, crafting melodies and combining phonemes to create words. Each voice
packaged in the software is also associated with a specific animated character, or
Vocaloid. The software allows people to compose music on their home computers,
and the music is then posted online and shared across a variety of sites and fan
forums. Music videos, choreography, and covers subsequently appear from other
fans. Fan art and fan fiction featuring the characters also abound, and fans often
express their fierce loyalty to their favourite Vocaloid. Vocaloid fans form a unique
body, because the artefacts of their fandom (songs, videos, artwork) are created by
other fans. There is no corporation or record company producing the music, so the
fans rarely interact with a commercial entity. The fans who produce music, known as
VocaloidPs or Vocaloid Producers, create what they like and respond to issues of
taste in a variety of ways. Vocaloid music is sometimes sold, but usually by
VocaloidPs themselves, through digital download or at conventions. This paper will
explore Vocaloid fandom in its unique position as sole producer of its own objects,
and will discuss the ways in which this uniqueness exists in the space between public
and private. Vocaloid and the various Vocaloid characters exist in a digital realm,
and the related fandom is also largely digital. Through discussion of hierarchy and
anonymity, I will highlight ways in which the role of VocaloidPs is constantly
shifting (both publicly and privately), as well as the ways that the fan community at
large receives the musical offerings of VocaloidPs.
Alicia Stark is a PhD student at Cardiff University School of Music. She holds a
BME in Music Education from Shorter University (USA), and a Masters in Music,
Culture, and Politics from Cardiff University. Alicia’s work addresses image
construction and fan reception in virtual bands and VOCALOID, Japanese voicereproduction software with its own character culture.
Cibrán Tenreiro - Fan Concert Videos: Home Movies for a Music Fandom
Nowadays is common to see lots of cameras at pop music concerts. Digital
technology has made them affordable and has eased the access to practically anybody
to the making of live music videos, even through mobile phones. These videos are, for
its abundance in the Internet, a subject of interest for several areas. On the one hand,
being non-professional recordings and destined to concrete communities of
interpretation (being real or imagined), they occupy a place among the different
tendencies between the study of amateur filmmaking, personal filmmaking and home
videos. On the other, fan studies (and, of course, specifically music fan studies) can
attend to the nature of these communities. Fan concert videos have the quality of
immediacy, since they usually don't involve any later work to the moment of filming.
The simplicity of the digital camera handling makes these videos reflect faithfully the
fan's glance, his own point of view. The images themselves and their posterior
circulation (online but also often in music documentaries and music videos) thus turn
into an object right to approach the fandoms tension between individual subjectivity
16 and belonging to a community. My intention with this paper is to analyze different
examples of these videos to see if they appeal to a fan community as family, and to
see how they represent the artist. In doing so, I try to find the place of fan concert
videos in fans relationship between consumption and production.
Cibrán Tenreiro is a Communication Doctorate student at the Universidade de
Santiago de Compostela, and a member of the Estudos Audiovisuais research group.
He has a degree on Audiovisual Communication from the same university and a
master's degree in Contemporary Cinema and Audiovisual from the Universitat
Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona).
Elizabeth Wood - Intimate Connections: A Theory of Music and Technology
Technology has become a ubiquitous component of music making in Western popular
culture. I argue that a model for analyzing and discussing music that addresses this
ubiquity is necessary. Building on Thomas Turino’s model of participatory and
presentational music, I argue that music making can be mapped onto spectrums of
participation versus presentation, freedom versus fixedness, and rawness versus
mediation. These categories demonstrate to what extent any music is participatory,
improvisatory, and mediated by technology. By using this model, we can examine
how musicians are perceived as (in)authentic and what tactics artists and their
managers use in order to mitigate or promote the audience’s perception of them that
arises based on their music. In particular, I argue that musicians who create a
perceived authenticity through their music do not often need to resort to other sources
for creating intimacy, while musicians who are not musically perceived as authentic
often use social media platforms to build that relationship. To demonstrate this, I will
compare the music and social media presences of two popular artists: Dave Matthews
Band and Taylor Swift. Both artists (supposedly) write their own music, which
makes them immediately more relatable than those artists who do not. However,
while fans of Dave Matthews Band seem to feel an intimate connection with the
group based primarily on their music and secondarily on their social media presence,
fans of Taylor Swift create that relationship with the artist primarily through
interactions on social media and secondarily through connections with the music.
This difference in relationship-building tactics can be attributed in part to each artist’s
position on the model. Whereas Dave Matthews Band’s music is participatory,
improvisational, and sparsely mediated by technology, Taylor Swift’s music is highly
presentational, fixed, and mediated.
Elizabeth Wood is pursuing her M.A. in Ethnomusicology at the University of
California, Riverside. Her research interests include memory and intimacy in popular
fan culture. Elizabeth holds a B.M. in Music Industry from James Madison
University. Elizabeth currently serves as Co-Web Editor for her regional Society for
Ethnomusicology chapter.
Rafal Zaborowski - Fans, Idols and Offices: Musical Co-evolution in Japan
This paper uses original data from Japan to map the range of engagements between
producers and audiences of popular music. Drawing from interviews with and
17 observations of fan music engagements, and from interviews with representatives of
Japanese music industry, I will present and analyse the ways of interaction through
the medium as both sides view it, suggesting an ongoing coevolution of interpretative
and production processes. Two case studies are drawn to illustrate this. The first is the
Japanese idol industry and its fans, analysed here through the examples of all-girl idol
groups AKB48 and Momoiro Clover Z. Even in the times of the global music crisis,
both acts enjoy unprecedented intergenerational popularity and impressive CD sales.
In the paper I will look at the reasons behind this success and explain how these idols’
personas are produced and engaged with. The second case is the Japanese virtual idol
Hatsune Miku, and, by extension, other idols from the Vocaloid software line. Miku,
while not being human, sings and dances, performs at live concerts, stars in
commercials, and tours the world through a hologram projection. As my data
suggests, for her fans and producers Miku is a “real” entity, and the lack of a physical
body can even enhance the emotional engagements on offer during the audiencehood.
In both cases the idea of diminishing distance between performers and audiences is
compared with Western literature on stars and idol gazing. The papers suggests that
although the general concept of such proximity is not new to star or fan studies and
can be recalled through existing frameworks (such as parasocial interaction), the
Japanese phenomenon is unique and has potential to inform existing academic
conceptualisations of global music fans and idols.
Rafal Zaborowski is a PhD researcher in the Department of Media and
Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Rafal’s
doctoral project empirically looks at Japanese music audiences in a generational
context, and draws connections between audience research and media studies,
ethnomusicology and modern studies of Japan.
18