Music Fans

W. Lizé, « La réception de la musique comme activité collective. Enquête ethnographique auprès des jazzophiles de premier rang » in A. Pecqueux et O. Roueff (dir.), Ecologie sociale de l’oreille. Enquêtes sur l’expérience musicale, Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 2009, pp. 49-83.

Research in consumer culture focuses on the role of fans in creating social spaces or fandoms in contrast with larger society where new cultural meanings and values are socially negotiated. Drawing on media and cultural studies, this article describes fandoms as a process rooted in the larger phenomenon of fanaticism and its interaction with the current society. The article posits the study of fanaticism as a fruitful lens for a deeper understanding of the role of consumption and brands in today’s consumer societies.

Email me for full version of the chapter.

In recent years, the use of mobile internet and social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and SMS text messaging has changed the live music experience for some popular music audiences quite considerably. Within music fandom, live concerts have been determined as constituting a “powerful meeting” place where individuals come together to “enact the meaning of fandom” (Cavvichi 1998: 37).  The arrival of these social tools has permitted a powerful interjection into the behaviour within this meeting place, by not only allowing music fans to find and connect with each other, but also to tweet and text concert set-lists, photos and other information as they happen, thereby allowing non-attendees around the world to feel part of the event (Bennett 2012).  This chapter will examine the process of texting and tweeting by live popular music concert attendees in an effort to connect with a non-physically present audience.  Through empirical research, in the form of a questionnaire conducted with fans of prolific touring artist Tori Amos, the impact of this practice on the physically present audience will be explored, in an effort to understand and unravel the consequences of this process on their live music experience. I will examine the responses of those engaged in this activity during concerts, and how non users perceive it, in order to ascertain the extent and manner with which use of technological tools and subsequent connections with non-physically present individuals are changing, and can change, an audience’s engagement within the live listening process.
Subsequently, an important consideration of the study will be to ascertain what fans at live music concerts perceive is gained or lost by the incorporation of these emerging social platforms into their live music experience. For example, mobile phones are now increasingly held in the air during concerts, replacing the tradition of using cigarette lighters (Strauss 1998) and being “constantly present” (Chesher 2007) within the audience.  I will question how this may disrupt the concept of “flow” which involved an understanding that, “the very conditions of live performance help focus attention on the music” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990 [2002]: 110) and and how the engagement of a live music audience is viewed as being affected and impacted by the new tools.   
        Finally, the analysis will also strive to question how the music and technological industries are working together to encourage this presence of the remotely located audience and to determine the subsequent effects of this on the physically present and their immersion in the show. With some music acts tweeting and texting their audiences during the show, offering exclusive access to online viewers, downloads of live performances, and encouraging the participatory use of mobile phones during some songs, I will explore how this impacts on the concert listening experience and expectations of crowd members.
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The book was written for people who would like to learn more about Polish K-Pop fandom, but it can also be of help for those who are looking for some basic information about fan studies or K-Pop in general. It is not only meant to provide a set of basic information on Polish K-Pop fandom, but also to connect Polish and international fan studies, which at this point are often focused on products of English-speaking cultures. There are many publications on fans of sports, celebrities or TV shows but K-Pop is different from these fields as it is something between a celebrity fandom and a music fandom, with many cultural elements influencing its shape. Some fans call K-Pop a “complete product” as it provides music, choreographies and visually refined music videos, but also a type of lifestyle, with elements of food, cosmetics, and everything South Korea has to offer. It is also a phenomenon that can be analyzed from many different perspectives – not only sociological or related to culture studies, but psychological or connected to political science or media studies as well. This text will focus more on people who form Polish K-Pop fandom, how they communicate within those communities and how they establish structures, instead of the media text itself and its interpretation.

Qu’ont en commun le groupe de pop BTS et la série Squid Game ? Tous deux appartiennent à la nouvelle vague de produits culturels sud-coréens, connue sous le nom de Hallyu, qui déferle sur le monde et surprend par l’engouement qu’elle suscite.
Cet ouvrage, le premier en langue française consacré au sujet, montre comment cette pop culture, fruit de l’écosystème politique et économique sud-coréen, mise sur l’exportation massive de produits culturels à l’esthétique innovante. En s’appuyant sur ces leviers de soft power, la Corée du Sud promeut une globalisation culturelle alternative à l’hégémonie américaine et japonaise dans le domaine des imaginaires juvéniles.
À travers de nombreux entretiens, les deux auteurs analysent la ferveur des jeunes fans français, qui ne s’appuie sur aucune proximité culturelle préexistante, témoigne d’une nouvelle ouverture esthétique et les autorise à imaginer des ailleurs désirables, par-delà les assignations de genre, de classe ou d’origine.

https://www.amazon.fr/K-pop-soft-power-culture-globale/dp/2130830501

Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience explores the processes and experiences of attending live music events from the initial decision to attend through to audience responses and memories of a performance after it has happened. The book brings together international researchers who consider the experience of being an audience member from a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives. Whether enjoying a drink at a jazz gig, tweeting at a pop concert or suppressing a cough at a classical recital, audience experience is affected by motivation, performance quality, social atmosphere and group and personal identity. Drawing on the implications of these experiences and attitudes, the authors consider the question of what makes an audience, and argue convincingly for the practical and academic value of that question.
Contents: Preface; Prelude. Part 1 Before The Event: Preparing and anticipating: Marketing live music, Daragh O’Reilly, Gretchen Larsen and Krzysztof Kubacki; Musical, social and moral dilemmas: investigating audience motivations to attend concerts, Stephanie Pitts; Safe and sound: audience experience in new venues for popular music performance, Robert Kronenburg. Part 2 During The Event: Listening and connecting: Interlude - audience members as researchers, Stephanie Pitts and Karen Burland; The value of ‘being there’: how the live experience measures quality for the audience, Jennifer Radbourne, Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow; In the heat of the moment: audience real time response to music and dance performance, Catherine J. Stevens, Roger T. Dean, Kim Vincs and Emery Schubert; Texting and tweeting at live music concerts: flow, fandom and connecting with other audiences through mobile phone technology, Lucy Bennett; Moving the gong: exploring the contexts of improvisation and composition, Karen Burland and Luke Windsor with Christophe de Bezenac, Matthew Bourne, Petter Frost Fadness and Nick Katuszonek; Context, cohesion and community: characteristics of festival audience members’ strong experiences with music, Sidsel Karlsen. Part 3 After The Event: Responding and remembering: Interlude - lasting memories of ephemeral events, Karen Burland and Stephanie Pitts; ‘The gigs I’ve gone to’: mapping memories and places of live music, Sara Cohen; Warts and all: recording the live music experience, Paul Long; Staying behind: explorations in post-performance musician-audience dialogue, Melissa Dobson and John Sloboda. Postlude; References; Index.
About the Editor: Karen Burland is an Associate Professor in Music Psychology at the University of Leeds. Her published research focuses on jazz audiences and their engagement in live performances in different contexts; the environmental conditions leading to childhood musical success and the professional development of musicians during career transitions; professional and amateur musical identities; and music therapists’ use of music technology in therapeutic settings. Karen is a member of the SEMPRE committee and Reviews Editor for British Journal of Music Education.

Stephanie Pitts is a Professor of Music Education at the University of Sheffield, UK and author of A Century of Change in Music Education (Ashgate, 2000), Valuing Musical Participation (Ashgate, 2005) and Chances and Choices: Exploring the Impact of Music Education (2012).

Este artículo describe el desarrollo de la industria discográfica
internacional y el libre acceso a los contenidos fonográficos
por parte de los consumidores, con base en la pregunta ¿por
qué los melómanos perciben la música como un bien público,
mientras las disqueras insisten en su concepción privada?


ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This article describes the development of the international record industry and the free access to the phonographic
contents by the consumers, with based on this question: why
internet and its users have transformed music into a public
good, while the labels insist on its private conception?

This study discusses about how One Direction fans use interactivity features on Tumblr in order to gratify their emotional needs. The purpose of this study is to identify the activities of One Direction on Tumblr and how they use interactivity features on there. This qualitative descriptive research involves a few theories such as uses and gratifications, active audience, motivations, and needs in order to find out the relations between the usage of Tumblr by One Direction fans and their motivations and their emotional needs i.e. the need to feel close to One Direction members and get connected to them emotionally. The researcher chose in-depth interview and observation as the data gathering techniques.

The results of this study show that interactivity features on Tumblr such as reblog and like buttons, hyperlink, search engine, several types of posts on the menu, Fan Mail, and Ask Me Anything support One Direction fans activites in gratifying their emotional needs. They get their emotional needs met when they find pictures, videos, news, audio posts, and fan fictions of One Direction on the site. They also get their emotional needs met through the interactions between them on the site which include topics about the boy band.

The data show that One Direction fans on Tumblr use the site to express themselves as fans and fulfill their One Direction fantasies. Such fantasies are actualized through reading fan fictions and ‘shipping’, which means supporting romantic relationships among One Direction members. They also create their own fandom on there so they can discuss anything related to the boy band more freely with each other.

Just what is it about a musician like Frank Turner that can inspire devotion and motivate his fans to travel the world in pursuit of his concerts? What comparisons can we draw between such a musical fandom and religion? I explore these questions from the inside out of Turner's fandom and pin-point when an imagined community became a force of empowerment, and a chance at escape.
Written as my final paper for my course on Musical Subcultures. This paper won the award of the Best Media Studies Scholarly Essay for 2015-2016 from the Queens College Media Studies department.

Since 2012, Beatles fans have been commemorating the 50th anniversary of a number of key milestones in the band’s career. Perhaps the most notable was the release of the Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do,” on 5 October 1962. To celebrate this occurrence in 2012, there was a series of events largely instigated by local Do it Yourself (DIY) initiatives in Liverpool and beyond. This renewed global, mainstream attention demonstrates how the resonance of the Beatles’ legacy still endures. It also shows how fans still want to mark their role in the Beatles story through often overlooked DIY practices, despite legal protection upheld by Apple Corps over the Beatles brand.  In order to investigate how the beginnings of Beatles heritage practice was actually born out of DIY initiatives, this chapter will first explore the origins of Beatles related tourism in Liverpool (Cohen 2007; Leonard and Strachan 2010) and what implications the resulting institutionalization of that agenda has had on the DIY heritage practice by Beatles fans. Arguably, despite the tightly controlled corporate hold on the Beatles brand, there are still small, yet significant, ways in which fans are able to insert themselves into the Beatles story. In their work on heritage and identity, Graham and Howard (2008, p. 2) argue that value is not placed on heritage itself, but rather on “artefact and activities” that have imprinted on them meanings that provide insight into culture and society. Using this idea as the impetus for this research, this chapter investigates two main case studies: New York City artist Rutherford Chang’s exhibition We Buy White Albums, and the Liverpool Mural Project’s John Lennon Mural in the Litherland area of Liverpool. Chang’s collection of White Albums is an archive of the personal histories of the often anonymous previous owners, while the Liverpool Mural Project aims to unite Northern Irish and Liverpudlian artists otherwise divided by sectarianism. While there has often been a problematic relationship between copyright protection and fandom made all the more difficult in the digital age, these examples uncover the innovative ways in which Beatles fandom perseveres 50 years on.

This chapter explores the burgeoning field of popular music archives in the online world. We examine the types of authorized and unauthorized practices that are developing in online spaces and place this activity within the field of community archivist practice.

In the first half of the chapter we explore sites devoted to the online archiving and sharing of digitized music amongst particular communities. We highlight tensions between activist archivists and rights holders of the sound recordings shared online. In the second half of the chapter we study a number of sites concerned with preserving and celebrating the popular music heritage of the city of Birmingham, in the English midlands.

Overall, the democratic nature of online practice raises questions for the place and meaning of popular musical heritage as well as the very nature of the archive, history and heritage.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415824507/

ABSTRACT
Rap music is a musical genre that has become a musical preference of the youth of the country over the last decade. A review of various music websites and a dialogue with fans of rap music indicates that it has its own song writers, composers, and even reporters and websites. However, few studies have been done about this genre in Iran. Most foreign studies on rap music have shown the tendency of the youth to this style of music on the basis of a causal explanation and have revealed a causal relationship between this genre of music and some social deviations. This paper tackles with the perception of the fans of rap music towards this genre and its effects on the society. After reviewing the theoretical frameworks and research findings for and against rap music, this study attempts to answer its main questions based on a phenomenological approach and use of the technique of interviewing. The results indicated that the fans of rap music considered this genre as a media to express their problems and pains and believed that the use of vulgar words by rappers was due to the pressures they suffer in life. Moreover, listening to rap music encouraged and strengthened the adoption of critical political and social positions

Este artigo analisa a representação midiática de fãs do sexo feminino através das fãs do cantor Justin Bieber. A pesquisa se estrutura em dois momentos: uma revisão bibliográfica dos estudos de fãs, junto de publicações de sites que discutem música e cultura pop e, por fim, uma análise de reportagens sobre as fãs do cantor em portais virtuais usando as palavras-chave histéricas, loucas e descontroladas. O estudo busca observar como representações misóginas operam na construção do imaginário social acerca de mulheres que são fãs.

This chapter examines the practices and dispositions towards information and communication technologies (ICTs) of a group of music fans that produce websites about local and global music scenes. It is based on nine months of fieldwork (2011) in Santiago, using an ethnographic approach, following the everyday practices of the creators of eight music websites through which cultural flows are mediated, organized, and circulated. Also, it explores how music websites operate as spaces through which music fans objectify their dispositions towards ICTs, as well as representations of the scenes and their flows.

he diaries and correspondence of Ferdinand de Beaufort  (1797–1868) provide a unique insight into the experience of opera goers in the nineteenth century. Initially, De Beaufort mainly kept track of the works he saw during his travels in Germany, France, and England, but in later years he increasingly focused on the qualities of the soloists, especially the female ones. His observations fit the concept of music tourism (the large number of first-class opera soloists performing in London constituted his primary motivation to visit the city on a yearly basis) but also of early fandom. Especially the latter aspect comes to the fore in his impassioned and highly partial reports on the (alleged) rivalry between Giulia Grisi and Jenny Lind.

The book was written for people who would like to learn more about Polish K-Pop fandom, but it can also be of help for those who are looking for some basic information about fan studies or K-Pop in general. It is not only meant to provide a set of basic information on Polish K-Pop fandom, but also to connect Polish and international fan studies, which at this point are often focused on products of English-speaking cultures. There are many publications on fans of sports, celebrities or TV shows but K-Pop is different from these fields as it is something between a celebrity fandom and a music fandom, with many cultural elements influencing its shape. Some fans call K-Pop a “complete product” as it provides music, choreographies and visually refined music videos, but also a type of lifestyle, with elements of food, cosmetics, and everything South Korea has to offer. It is also a phenomenon that can be analyzed from many different perspectives – not only sociological or related to culture studies, but psychological or connected to political science or media studies as well. This text will focus more on people who form Polish K-Pop fandom, how they communicate within those communities and how they establish structures, instead of the media text itself and its interpretation.

Based almost entirely on unpublished ego documents (private correspondence, diaries, etc.), this book shows how nineteenth-century Dutch music lovers experienced music and integrated their musical activities in their private lives. The book covers aspects such as going to the opera, visiting public and (semi-) private concerts, the culture of listening, home music making (with special attention for the role of the piano in female music making), music festivals, the question of musical national identity, the (contested) emergence of the canon, the furnishing of special music rooms at home as an expression of one's music preferences, and the rediscovery of early music and Bach's Matthew Passion.

The diaries and correspondence of Ferdinand de Beaufort (1797–1868) provide a unique insight into the experience of opera goers in the nineteenth century. Initially, De Beaufort mainly kept track of the works he saw during his travels in Germany, France, and England, but in later years he increasingly focused on the qualities of the soloists, especially the female ones. His observations fit the concept of music tourism (the large number of first-class opera soloists performing in London constituted his primary motivation to visit the city on a yearly basis) but also of early fandom. Especially the latter aspect comes to the fore in his impassioned and highly partial reports on the (alleged) rivalry between Giulia Grisi and Jenny Lind.

This article examines the fan practice of record collecting (Shuker, 2010) as it has translated into the digital environment of the Internet, and begins to address one of several questions posed by Mark Duffett in Understanding Fandom: ‘to what extent is collecting premised on the ownership of the collected items or their rarity value’ (2013: 179). Drawing on research into a range of music blogs, message boards and fan groupings, the article suggests that we may identify a shift from ‘record collecting’ towards ‘music collecting’, and that this shift might be conceptualised as a move from ‘secondary involvement’ (Shuker, 2010: 168) to ‘tertiary involvement’. Secondary involvement involves a typically systematic approach to acquiring and collecting material culture, such as out-of-print (OOP), rare or private press vinyl releases, whereas ‘tertiary involvement’ involves the collection and accumulation of the music encoded within that material culture, in the form of digital data file formats such as MP3 and FLAC. The music investigated in this article is that encoded in what Will Straw (2000) has called ‘obsolete objects’ – artefacts that persist long after their commercial life cycle and economic value is over; and that encoded in unofficially released recordings of live performances, whether in the form of commercially produced bootlegs (Marshall, 2005) or as not-for-profit bootlegs which are sourced, edited, remastered and packaged by fans (Anderton, 2006). Those involved in creating, distributing (via cyberlockers, torrents, direct download links or YouTube uploads) and/or collecting these music files are characterised as active and informal cultural intermediaries who curate, organise, archive, discuss, circulate and promote recordings and information, hence act as ‘expert filters’ online (Baym & Burnett, 2009). Their activities also raise interesting questions about cultural memory, the provision of ‘free labour’ (Terranova, 2004), and the contested nature of copyright, each of is investigated within the article.

References cited:

Anderton, C. (2006) ‘Beating the bootleggers: Fan creativity, ‘lossless’ audio trading, and commercial opportunities.’ In M.D. Ayers (ed.), Cybersounds. Essays on Virtual Music Culture. New York: Peter Lang.

Baym N. and Burnett, R. (2009) ‘Amateur experts: international fan labour in Swedish independent music’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol, 12(5): 433-449.

Duffett, M. (2013) Understanding Fandom: an introduction to the study of media fan culture. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Marshall, L. (2005) Bootlegging. Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry. London: Sage.

Shuker, R. (2010) Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures: Record Collecting as a Social Practice. Farnham, Surrey & Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Straw, W. (2000) ‘Exhausted commodities: the material culture of music’, Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol. 25, Issue 1. Available at: http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1148/1067 (last accessed 22/11/15).

Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture. Politics for the information age. London: Pluto Press.

In 1996 a small independent record company, Oh Boy Records, set up a ‘chat page’ on its web site where fans of its major artist, John Prine, could exchange typed messages in close to real time. The page became a place where fans could ‘virtually’ meet to get information or exchange experiences and opinions relating to Prine. Through the chat page a fan community was established, in that the chat page became a meeting place that could not exist within real-world boundaries. John Prine has had some recent commercial and critical success, but Prine fans are still a minority in most geographic communities, and are, to some extent, isolated by the lifestyle of their 35-plus age group. It could be said that the one and only place where Prine fans could regularly gather was online through the chat page provided by the record company. The Oh Boy Record's homepage became a symbolic anchor – a recognition of shared experience and a sign of community. While music communities are usually associated with ‘local’ places, ‘the notion of “communities” or localities as bounded geographic entities increasingly has been seen as problematic to the study of music in urban settings’ (Gay 1995, p. 123). Communities exist through dialogue; through an exchange of past social history and current social interaction. Developments in communication technology have contributed to a ‘deterritorialization of space within a global cultural economy’ (Fenster 1995, p. 85), to a point where ‘local’ is no longer disconnected from ‘global’ and the identity of a specific place is located both in ‘demarcated physical space’ and in ‘clusters of interaction’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, p. 8). In the absence of a communal physical space, the Oh Boy home page became the site of a ‘local’ Prine community.

IntroductionIn 1996 a small independent record company, Oh Boy Records, set up a ‘chat page’ on its web site where fans of its major artist, John Prine, could exchange typed messages in close to real time. The page became a place where fans could ‘virtually’ meet to get information or exchange experiences and opinions relating to Prine. Through the chat page a fan community was established, in that the chat page became a meeting place that could not exist within real-world boundaries. John Prine has had some recent commercial and critical success, but Prine fans are still a minority in most geographic communities, and are, to some extent, isolated by the lifestyle of their 35-plus age group. It could be said that the one and only place where Prine fans could regularly gather was online through the chat page provided by the record company. The Oh Boy Record's homepage became a symbolic anchor – a recognition of shared experience and a sign of community. While music communities ar...

La ópera está en crisis hace tiempo, fuera de moda. Claudio Benzecry se pregunta en esta obra: ¿Cómo percibe y experimenta la ópera un auditorio moderno, cuando esa forma de arte ha perdido tanto su característica popular como sus rasgos de distinción? El libro se concentra en el carácter afectivo del apego a la ópera –un producto cultural particularmente complejo- y en su utilización como una actividad significativa que permite a sus apasionados amantes inventar un sentido dentro de su propia vida (autoformación y auto-trascendencia).

O presente artigo trata do debate sobre o gosto e suas manifestações
nos sites de redes sociais. Discutimos a noção de performance de gosto
(Hennion, 2007, 2010) como uma relação experiencial entre sujeitos,
música e as materialidades da tecnologias. A partir da contextualiza-
ção das discussões sobre o gosto e os fãs de musica, descrevemos e
caracterizamos de forma exploratória algumas formas empíricas
dessas manifestações, tomando como exemplo a fanpage Unidos
Contra o Rock do Facebook. Dentre as observações iniciais destacamos
o amálgama entre as disputas simbólicas e distinções sociais (Bourdieu,
2008) no embate entre os gêneros rock e funk carioca; os elementos
de capital subcultural (Thornton, 1996) e a sociabilidade ora lúdica
ora combativa de fãs, antifãs, haters e trolls. Tais aspectos constituem modos de performatização do gosto musical atuando nas mediações entre a escuta e os gêneros musicais no contexto da cultura contemporânea.

Este artículo explora el fenómeno de las grabaciones caseras de conciertos de música pop como posible ejemplo de una propuesta terminológica de “cine del fan”. Mediante el análisis fílmico de numerosos vídeos de conciertos extraídos de Internet y películas que los utilizan, el texto busca comprender si la identidad fan condiciona la manera de grabar de estos, cómo esta manera se relaciona con las representaciones visuales de la música en la actualidad y si da lugar a recursos identificables. Para ello, aborda también la muestra desde las perspectivas de los cambios tecnológicos (especialmente los de la era digital), del cine doméstico, del papel del espectáculo en directo en la música pop y de las teorías del fandom.

Die Vorstellungen von Fans als hysterischen Teenies, aggressiven Hooligans oder nerdigen Einzelgängern haben sich drastisch gewandelt. Wurden Trekkies, Live-Rollenspieler oder Gothics vor einigen Jahren noch kritisch beäugt, debattiert heute jeder über die Hobbit-Filme oder die neue Sherlock-Staffel und kann sein Ramones-Shirt beim Discounter kaufen. Durch das Internet sind Fans nicht nur im Mainstream angekommen, sondern mündiger und kreativer geworden. Längst geben sie sich nicht mehr nur der Verehrung ihrer Lieblingsfiguren und Idole hin, sie erobern auch für sich selbst und ihren kreativen Output einen Platz in der Popkultur.
Der vorliegende Band versammelt Beiträge aus verschiedenen Disziplinen zu einem facettenreichen Spektrum von Fandoms, Fankulturen und Fankreationen im deutschsprachigen Raum: vom Fußballstadion bis ins Onlineforum, von Cosplayern zu Viddern, von Prince bis Twilight.