Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: \nHow do cultural producers square customary understandings of what it means to be authentic and autonomous creators in new contexts characterized by digital-era entrepreneurial pressures and online platform-mediated financial opportunities? This study examines how heavy metal recording artists experience these pressures; how some of them engage in platform-based crowdfunding, argue over its legitimacy, and rationalize varying degrees of acceptance and dependence. First, my analysis centers on a case study which follows the experiences of a progressive metal band as they navigate a new financial relation in conjunction first with the fundraising platform Pozible and then the patronage-based crowdfunding platform Patreon. Second, I undertake a political-economic analysis of the Patreon platform, interpreting it as a rent-seeking technology company situated in the broader context of platform capitalism. I suggest that Patreon perpetuates long-standing power disparities in the culture industries by concentrating the risks and duties of production, marketing and retailing more squarely upon its fundraisers. Third, I examine recording artists’ interpretations of the neo-patronage relation based on data culled from interviews with Patreon users. The results indicate that online crowdfunding remains an ideologically contested practice among cultural producers stamped with late twentieth-century masculinist “rock values.” The cultural weight of the older “recording contract”-based institutional model poses a problem for heavy metal recording artists who struggle to validate their participation in more entrepreneurial, platform-mediated work.
Author: Jason Netherton
Language: English
Topic: Music History and Culture
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3170278159