Music, Social Media and Global Mobility

MySpace, Facebook, YouTube

Ole J. Mjos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136463273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

This book is about the relationship between media, communication and globalization, explored through the unique empirical study of electronic music practitioners' use of the global social media: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. To understand the significance of the emerging nexus between social media and music in a global context, the book explores various aspects of production, distribution and consumption among electronic music practitioners as they engage with global social media, as well as a historical, political and economic exposition of the rise of this global social media environment.

Drawing on interview-based research with electronic music artists, DJs, producers and managers, together with the historical portrayal of the emergence of global social media this pioneering study aims to capture a development taking place in music culture within the wider transformations of the media and communications landscape; from analogue to digital, from national to global, and from a largely passive to more active media use. In doing so, it explores the emergence of a media and communications ecology with increased mobility, velocity and uncertainty. The numerous competing, and rapidly growing and fading social media exemplify the vitality and volatility of the transforming global media, communication and cultural landscape.

This study suggests that the music practitioner's relationship with MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and the key characteristics of these global social media, alter aspects of our practical and theoretical understandings of the process of media globalization. The book deploys an interdisciplinary approach to media globalization that takes into account and articulates this relationship, and reflects the enduring power equations and wider continuities and changes within the global media and communications sphere.

1 Introduction

In 2005, Skatebård (Bård Åsen Lødemel), the Bergen-based electronic music artist, producer, and DJ, and one of the subjects of the research in this book, started a profile on the social media service MySpace:

I had been thinking about creating a ‘website’ for my musical activities for many years, but I could not afford to pay someone 20,000 Norwegian kroner (approximately $3,500–4,000) to construct an html site. I did not even know how to rent a domain name on the internet. I am sure there were many in a similar situation that created MySpace profiles. It was easy to create a website (on MySpace) where you could present music and have direct contact with others, and have complete control over the site despite having no knowledge of web design. This was back in 2005. (Skatebård, March 2009)

Skatebård was not alone in signing up with MySpace. Music artists and bands not only in the US but in different parts of the world were flocking to the social media. Halfway through 2005, the American music magazine Billboard claimed 240,000 amateur and professional bands had created profiles on MySpace to promote their music. At that time, MySpace had reportedly around 15 million members, and new users continued to join at an astonishing rate, rapidly expanding the MySpace universe (Bruno, 2005; Cohn, 2005; News Corporation, 2005).

MySpace appealed particularly to young people, and American teenagers had started to use MySpace ‘en masse’ in 2004 (boyd and Ellison, 2007). Although bands and music artists “were not the sole source of MySpace’s growth,” as the pioneering social media researchers boyd and Ellison (2007) point out, “the symbiotic relationship between bands and fans” was vital for the services popularity and expansion especially among youth. Both parties benefited from the “bands-and-fans dynamic”. The former was interested in reaching fans, while the fans wished to be noticed by their favored music artists and groups. MySpace enabled contact between the two as fans used the ‘friend’ function to “signal identity and affiliation” on their MySpace profile, and bands could communicate and distribute information to their network of fans’ profiles (2007). MySpace, then, provided opportunities within the global media and communications landscape that had not been available previously and consequently many music artists and fans embraced the service.

While artists had relied on physically promoting themselves, distributing flyers, fanzines, videos, and music on CDs and hoping that their music videos were shown on local or national television shows or specialist television outlets such as MTV, the emergence and take-up of social media began to influence their practice. MySpace let artists create profiles where they could present their music, incorporate YouTube music videos, display band photos, and list upcoming concerts. They could distribute flyers to—or contact—other MySpace members. Importantly, it was also possible to link their MySpace profile to other profiles.

The usability of the pioneering MySpace appealed to millions of people, not only bands, and a growing preoccupation with the commercial potential of such online services soon caught the attention of the media and communication industry giants. In 2005, the same year as Skatebård, the Bergen-based electronic music practitioner, adopted MySpace, News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, bought MySpace for $580 million—at the time, the largest sum paid for a social media entity (News Corporation, 2005; Siklos, 2005). With powerful new owners and increased attention in the international mainstream press, MySpace expanded fast. In January 2007 it was the most popular website in the US (Angwin, 2009: 254). Vast numbers of bands and artists were among the millions attracted to the multimedia online service. “I know we have 5 million bands,” Chris DeWolfe, (former) CEO and co-founder of MySpace claimed in 2008: “Virtually every artist has a profile on MySpace” (DeWolfe quoted in Locke, 2008). However, these formative years of the global social media and music nexus are characterized by flux and shifts. Facebook was already outperforming MySpace globally in mid-2008, and the popularity of Twitter also grew rapidly in this period (Arrington, 2009b).

This book shows how these recent developments have consequences for our comprehension of how media globalization unfolds and develops. It focuses on understanding how these global social media have evolved, and how one group of users—electronic music practitioners—have come to take up and use these services in their music practice and work. These practitioners are part of the wider group of bands and artists that was of key importance in the development of MySpace. MySpace, along with YouTube, was the first to enable these practitioners to participate and operate within the global communications infrastructure in an unprecedented way. Later, Facebook and Twitter became part of the global social media milieu and were adopted by many music practitioners. It is clear that during the formative years of the global social media environment (2005 to 2010), these services facilitated an increased potential for communicative and virtual mobility for such music practitioners (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry, 2006; Elliott and Urry, 2010: ix). Still, several factors may influence or limit the users’ virtual mobility—the ability to communicate, operate, and initiate within this online space. It is therefore vital also to explore the relationships between the users and the corporate strategies of these global social media as they roll out across the world—not least the services’ monetization strategies, as they may all have an impact on the users’ mobility. Therefore, to understand the impact and significance of the various components that drive this development, we need to examine it from both a user and a corporate perspective.

At the center of the book are electronic music practitioners in the city of Bergen, Norway, and the role global social media have in their practice. Since the late 1990s, Bergen’s electronic music scene has been particularly thriving and outward-looking. This scene has been part of the international electronic and dance music scenes that emerged in several cities in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the US, UK, and continental Europe (Hesmondhalgh, 1998; Reynolds, 1999; 2008). These scenes, often seen as part of ‘club culture,’ soon became a ‘global phenomenon’ (Thornton, 1995: 3). The popularity and international expansion of electronic music was partly made possible through sampling techniques and low-cost technology that required no formal skills of writing or reading music. The term ‘electronic music practitioners’ used in this book is, like McLeod’s term ‘electronic/dance music,’ an ‘umbrella term’ or ‘metagenre’ that is used “to label a heterogeneous group of musics made with computers and electronic instruments—often for the purpose of dancing. Electronic/dance is a metagenre name that is vague enough to describe the broad variety of musical styles consumed by a loosely connected network of producers and consumers” (McLeod, 2001: 60; see this and Reynolds, 1999: 398–436, for extensive lists of sub-genres). This book, then, applies the term ‘practitioners’ in a wide sense. It refers to artists, producers, DJs, club organizers, and promoters all working within this genre.

The most internationally well-known Bergen-based band is Röyksopp—an electronic music duo whose debut album Melody AM (2001) reportedly sold more than a million copies worldwide. Alongside Röyksopp, internationally known artists and DJs such as Annie, Datarock, Bjørn Torske, and Skatebård, together with both amateur and semi-professional DJs, club promoters, and music producers, have populated the small but highly active Bergen electronic music scene. These artists are key interviewees in this book (see Appendix for discographies of the interviewed artists). (Note: I worked with interviewees Bjørn Torske and Torbjørn Brundtland, the latter now part of the duo Röyksopp, in the 1990s and several of the interviewees are among my current acquaintances and friends.) Many of these practitioners have operated both locally and internationally for several years, and some (in particular the members of the Bergen-based Datarock, as well as Mikal Telle, record label owner, DJ, and event organizer) also have links to and within music genres such as indie rock. Since the turn of the millennium, these Bergen-based artists have achieved artistic or commercial success (or both) and received considerable attention, not only in the niche music press, but in the international popular and mainstream press. The electronic music practitioners in this book have frequently been described by the press as central in the Bergen music scene. The Lonely Planet Guide for Scandinavia points out how:

(T)he so-called “Bergen Wave” was largely responsible for putting Norway on the world electronica circuit in the first years of the 21^st century. Röyksopp (www.royksopp.com) in particular took the international electronica scene by storm with their debut album Melody A.M. in 2001 and they’ve never really left the dance-floor since. (Ham et al, 2008: 52)

In a piece on the artist Annie, the The New York Times points out the city is “one of Scandinavia’s most peculiar and vibrant musical corners,” and furthermore “in recent years, Bergen has produced a number of pop musicians of international stature” (Rosen, 2005). Along similar lines, in a review of Datarock’s album, the BBC describes Bergen as “the seaside town with the ridiculously vibrant scene that spawned Annie, Royksopp, Erlend Oye and countless others” (Kutchinsky, 2007). The British newspaper The Guardian refers to the “‘Bergen’ scene that, as well as Röyksopp, has also given the world the like-minded Annie and the Whitest Boy Alive” (Hann, 2009). The Huffington Post, the influential American news website and blog, points out that “Bergen, Norway, nestled on the country’s craggy west coast, is an unlikely hotbed for new music. But that’s what it has become over the last decade” (Mohr, 2009), and the online music site Clash Music describes Bergen as having “one of Northern Europe’s most vibrant music scenes” (Clash Music, 2009).

Some Bergen-based musicians have voiced skepticism about the label ‘Bergen scene’ or ‘Bergen wave.’ Tenold, in his historical study of the wider music milieu in Bergen (not limited to electronic/dance music) also points out that “the references to Bergen might be seen as a kind of branding, though one that the artists did not necessarily endorse themselves” (Tenold, 2010). It is easy for the press to slap the term on a group of artists, which risks exaggerating the cohesion between them and contributing to the hyping of an exotic and remote part of Europe. Still, there are a number of facts that relate specifically to the Bergen-based electronic music practitioners studied in this book. These artists have for longish periods been based in the same geographical area, they have all released key records on the Bergen-based label Tellé Records (founded by interviewee Mikal Telle), and many have done remixes of each other’s work and collaborated in various ways (see Appendix for discographies of the artists). Furthermore, many of them know each other personally and professionally, and all have frequented and played at the same venues and club nights in Bergen run, in particular, by interviewee Vegard Moberg Nilsen (i.e., Electric Café, Straedet, Café Opera). Several of these practitioners have also organized and played at regular club nights in Bergen at the same venue, Landmark: Hot!Hot!Hot! (co-organized by Mikal Telle), Digitalo (organized by Vegard Moberg Nilsen and Skatebård), and Powerblytt (organized by interviewee Lars Jacob Tynes Pedersen, and Kjersti Blytt—also forming the duo The Work). Lastly, as we shall see, a number of these artists discovered MySpace through each other. The book, then, shows how this group of Bergen-based electronic music practitioners, as well as practitioners from a related electronic music scene in East London, worked before and after the arrival of global social media, how they adopted these services, and the role these services have in their music practice at both a local and an international level.

The rapid adoption of global social media by hundreds of millions of internet users across the world stands in contrast to the development of traditional media in a number of ways. From a user perspective, television, for example, has never been able to allow its users to create personalized profiles and communicate in the way global social media have done. From a corporate perspective, these new online services attempt to exploit user involvement commercially in unprecedented ways, employing surveillance systems to collect information on users for commercial purposes. At the same time, the global social media and music industry collaborate in an effort to reach potential customers among these users. Therefore, only an examination from both corporate and user perspectives can give us sufficient insights into the significance of the global social media and music nexus.

Drawing on interview-based research with these electronic music practitioners in Norway and the UK, together with the historical portrayal of the emergence of global social media, the book aims to situate this development in music culture within the wider transformations of the media and communications landscape; from analog to digital, from national to global, and from largely passive to more active media use. These changes also influence the making, promotion, distribution, and selling of music, although the extent of the impact is debated. Some point out how “the transformation is of such a magnitude that it is relevant to talk about ‘new’ industry dynamics” (Wikström, 2009: 4). What characterizes these changes is the dramatically declining significance of “physical music distribution” and the escalating role of the internet (Wikström, 2009: 5). Others claim that “the response of the music industry to Internet distribution, social networking sites, home-copying and the creation of noncommercial distribution mechanisms has been complex and even chaotic” (Lister et al, 2009: 193). Still, some argue that “digitalization hasn’t yet killed the music business as we know it and there is little prospect that it will” (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 254). For this reason, the example of the music industry indicates that one should be careful not to overstate the impact of the internet on “existing cultural industries” (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 255). The examination of the connection between social media and music in a global context can therefore contribute to understanding these ongoing changes.

The popularity of the pioneering cross-national MySpace shows how the development of the social media environment can be unpredictable and characterized by sudden shifts and changes. Soon after it was established, MySpace faced extensive competition, first in the US and then across the world. When in 2006 Facebook ended its membership restrictions—inviting anyone with a working email address to join the service—and with Microsoft joining as minority owner in 2007, it soon surpassed MySpace as the most popular social media site in the US and internationally. In 2006, the internet-based enterprise Google followed fellow industry giants News Corporation into the social media environment by acquiring the popular video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion. YouTube then also played a role in making MySpace popular, as the users of the social media could incorporate, or ‘embed,’ the video service on their profiles as an online video channel (Angwin, 2009; Burgess and Green, 2009). As with MySpace and Facebook, powerful new owners helped YouTube grow. By early 2008, web metrics services reported that YouTube was among the most visited websites worldwide (Burgess and Green, 2009). Meanwhile, MySpace was increasingly portrayed to be struggling by the press and scholars alike. Social media scholar danah boyd pointed out that “MySpace’s status among teens had begun to fade” (2008: 62). The newspaper Financial Times, for example, published an article titled “The Rise and Fall of MySpace” (Garrahan, 2009). Similarly, scholars Patchin and Hinduja pointed out that “a significant number of youth appear to be abandoning their profiles or MySpace altogether” (2010) and the newspaper The Guardian claimed that, since early 2008, “Facebook secured its dominance over MySpace in the UK early last year, since when MySpace’s user base has declined regularly” (Arthur and Kiss, 2009). In contrast, YouTube and Facebook have continued to expand—the latter attracting over half a billion users across the world at the end of 2010 (Facebook, 2010), among them many music bands and artists. Although Facebook has outgrown MySpace in terms of numbers of users and is described by the press as the winner in the race for worldwide social media dominance, in a wider perspective, MySpace was the first social medium to receive broad attention in the international mainstream press and experienced rapid adoption not only by bands, but also millions of internet users worldwide. The two, together with YouTube, therefore represent pioneering global social media services in the second half of the 2000s—the formative years of the global social media environment.

The rise of global social media, and their widespread adoption, is at the heart of the wider changes within the media and communications sector. This has consequences not only for how social media are studied, but also the terminology used to describe these services. Both MySpace and Facebook are described as “social network sites” (boyd and Ellison, 2007; Papacharissi, 2009). Boyd and Ellison define such sites as “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (2007). The way these sites have evolved since 2005 has consequences for how we label and define them. While communication between users and the enabling of users “to articulate and make visible their social networks” (boyd and Ellison, 2007) is at the heart of these services, their increasing inclusion of user-generated or corporate music, videos, and film clips to communicate makes, for the purpose of this book, ‘social media’ a more precise term to describe these evolving multimedia services. Still, the application of the term ‘social media’ does not dismiss the key characteristics of the term ‘social network sites,’ as pointed out above, but includes them as well.

The aim of this book is not to capture the day-to-day development and innovation and the seemingly eternal flux of the global social media landscape; instead, it tries to understand these changes as part of the wider developments taking place within the global media and communications environment: digitization, globalization, and user participation in various forms. Therefore, the book covers both the time before, the transition period, and the time after the emergence of social media and the adoption of such services by electronic music practitioners. It focuses on exploring the activity among a selection of electronic music practitioners that is taking place within a historical, political, and economic industry context. In order to explore this development, I have adopted two key methodological approaches: reflecting the user and corporate perspectives. The key approach for exploring the user perspective is qualitative interviews with the selected group of music practitioners, examining their experiences and practical work. This interview approach is commonly used as part of ethnographic studies of global social media (see boyd, 2008; Takahashi, 2010). Most of the interviewees are Bergen-based music practitioners, but they also include practitioners in the UK who are part of a local London scene, with connections to the Bergen scene. I knew most of the interviewees prior to this project since I have previously been part of this scene as a music practitioner and attended many events within this scene. As with all qualitative researchers, I also have to make reservations in regard to generalizability, as the study has a given focus and covers a limited time frame. Furthermore, the interviewees belong to a particular geographical area, are key members of physical ‘real world’ music scenes, and were early adopters of MySpace. For these reasons, they are particularly interesting to study. In addition, the examination of their use of global social media gives insight into the possibilities and limitations for social media users in a wider sense.

The electronic music practitioners were chosen according to the same criteria. First, the interviewees should have knowledge of “the cultural arena or the situation or experience being studied,” second, “they should be willing to talk,” and third, if the people within the studied sphere “have different perspectives,” they “should represent the range of points of view” (Rubin and Rubin, 1995: 66). Importantly, all interviewees were active music practitioners over a long period and were therefore in a position to reflect on their practice prior to the maturing of the internet and emergence of global social media and after adopting this technology and these services. Therefore, conducting semi-structured interviews with people selected according to shared selection criteria allows for comparison between the possible roles of global social media in their individual music practice. Interviews were carried out in the period between February 2009 and December 2010. This is a long time in the changing social media and online environment, but such a challenge is not new for researchers of the online environment: “The evolving nature of the Internet makes it a moving research target. Almost all research can only describe what has been the situation, rather than what is now or what will soon be” (Hampton and Wellman, 2002: 351). boyd has also highlighted this in her study o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Media Globalization and Global Social Media
• 3. The Emergence of the Global Social Media Environment: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube
• 4. The Global Social Media and Music Nexus
• 5. Social Media and Music Practice: Connectedness or Closed Circuit?
• 6. The Logic of Social Media: Power, Participation, and Paradox
• 7. New Spaces of Global Mobility: Re-evaluating Media Globalization
• Appendix: Discographies of the Interviewed Electronic Music Practitioners
• Bibliography
• Index