Imagined Audiences for DIY Music Content

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Ellis Jones, who focusses on the connections between context collapse and the imagined audience. Social media users navigate the challenge of context collapse by imagining an ideal audience for their content, and Ellis is exploring this especially in the context of DIY music content – but context collapse may also lead to the presence of an unimagined audience.

Offline, there has been a broad historical change in the boundary policing by DIY music scenes in the UK; this takes place in cooperatively run independent venues and creates a close-knit community while in effect also excluding ordinary listeners: practitioners are mainly playing to other DIY music-makers. The scene is disconnecting itself from the mainstream music performance circuit.

Online, then, the imagined audience for DIY music is relatively unimaginative, too: practitioners expect that only their peers will actually be interested in what they are doing, and are surprised if anyone else is paying any attention. Available access metrics are used to assess whether contexts have collapsed: whether only members of the small scene in-group are accessing the music online, or whether it has reached a considerably larger, unimagined audience as well.

DIY music, with its ‘anyone can do it’ mantra, seeks to reproduce the music industry in microcosm; it does not aim to make it big, but to remain with a clearly defined DIY ethos. Policing metrics and ensuring that the music remains within the in-group is important in this context, therefore; in DIY music’s logic, broader success means context collapse and a transgression of the scene’s boundaries.

The gamification of cultural practices that social media provide is actually counterproductive here; the recirculation of content that social media allow is unwanted as it undermines the self-selected insularity of the scene. The issue here is not even that online audiences are unknown, but that they are knowable enough to know that the DIY music content has circulated to outside audiences.