DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media

Ellis Jones

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501359651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique et affaires

The emergence of social media in the early 21st century promised to facilitate new "DIY" cultural approaches, emphasizing participation and democratization. However, in recent years these platforms have been criticized as domineering and exploitative. For DIY musicians in scenes with lengthy histories of cultural resistance, is social media a powerful emancipatory and democratizing tool, or a new corporate antagonist to be resisted? DIY Music explores the significant challenges faced by artists navigating this fraught cultural landscape. How do anti-commercial musicians operate in the competitive, attention-seeking world of social media? How do they deal with a new abundance of data and metrics? How do they present their activity as "cultural resistance"? This book shows that a platform-enabled DIY approach is now the norm for a wide array of cultural practitioners; this "DIY-as-default" landscape threatens to depoliticize the call to "do-it-yourself."

1

The problem?

Welcome to the democratic, DIY music business

In the world of popular music, things – as always – aren’t what they used to be. The once-rigid sureties of the music industries have been challenged by the disruptive potential of new technologies for making, circulating and experiencing music. We have arrived, apparently, at a radically different set of relations. As evidence, take this excerpt from the blurb of a recent book by Ari Herstand (2016), entitled How to Make It in the New Music Business: ‘In the last decade, no industry has been through as much upheaval and turmoil as the music industry. If you’re looking for quick fame and instant success, you’re in the wrong field. It’s now a democratic DIY business.’

The arrival of a democratic, DIY music business sounds like fantastic news, if true. It sounds like particularly fantastic news for any music practitioners who may have had an aversion to the ‘old’ music industries and who may have already been actively seeking and building alternative formations of popular music culture.

These alternative formations exist. Despite the above rhetoric of radical disruption, DIY music is not a new phenomenon. It is an approach to the production and distribution of music that, at a conservative estimate, dates back over forty years. It is often associated with punk, post-punk and indie, as well as electronic music genres, including rave. But more than an association with any particular genre, DIY scenes have historically often been affiliated with particular aspirations relating to the democratization of culture. They have questioned the organization and purpose of the music industries, and have called, implicitly and explicitly, for those industries to be radically re-organized or even wholly dismantled.

DIY might mean prizing the intimacy of a small venue, and the temporary community created within it, as an end in itself, rather than seeing it as a stepping stone. It might mean acknowledging the harmful aspects of competition invoked by a music industry that celebrates stars at the expense of valorizing a wider range of creative endeavours, and opting out of that race for fame and commercial success. It might mean seeing musical training as a manifestation of elitist distinction, and therefore emphasizing an ‘anyone can do it’ aesthetic over precise technical ability. These are some of the ways in which DIY music cultures have historically made claims for the distinctiveness of their approach in relation to the ‘mainstream’.

But DIY today is mainstream. And when the case for the emergence of a ‘DIY democratic music business’ is made, the internet – and social media specifically – is usually offered as a major catalyst for such democratization. The internet, it is suggested, offers musicians a new, unguarded doorway to awaiting audiences. Media scholar David Croteau argues that ‘while “independent,” “alternative,” and “DIY” media have long existed in many forms […], one key to the Internet’s unique significance is that it provides the infrastructure necessary to facilitate the distribution of all forms of self-produced media to a potentially far-flung audience’ (2006: 341). Of course, the fact that this ‘far-flung’ distribution is possible does not mean that engagement with a worldwide audience is guaranteed, and it by no means assures the democratization of the media landscape, but it has certainly brought about substantial change.

Whilst social media may not be a panacea, what I wish to emphasize here is the extent to which it has realized, in a meaningful way, some of the core aspirations of DIY music, and has impacted on the lives of far more people than, say, punk ever did. Or to put it another way, there is a substantial overlap between the aspirations of DIY music and the kinds of communicative potentials opened up by social media. DIY has historically been presented as a story of people who ought to be consumers rejecting the role prescribed to them, turning the tables on ‘popular culture’ and becoming producers, and finding a sense of self-realization and political subversion in this act. Jello Biafra, singer of seminal US punk band The Dead Kennedys, has offered the mantra: ‘don’t hate the media, become the media’ (Biafra 2000). This is, broadly, the promise of DIY, and it has also been a key promise of the internet and social media.

For better or worse, the lineage of DIY culture no longer has sole dominion over certain aspects of ‘do-it-yourself’ practice. DIY is increasingly acknowledged as an obvious choice for all sorts of musicians. Moving forward then, this book is premised on an understanding that there are two kinds of DIY music, which are at least theoretically separable. One is a broad but ultimately coherent tradition of cultural resistance, often undertaken in the name of greater aesthetic diversity, economic equality and access to participation – and often with inherent or implicit connections to larger ideas of social justice. The other is largely a socio-economic consequence of changes in the music industries, as well as in the ICT (information and communication technologies) industries. These changes in turn articulate to an increasingly prominent neoliberal discourse which emphasizes the need for individuals to ‘take responsibility’, rather than to seek or expect support from state or corporate institutions. What follows is an investigation into how these two versions of DIY music are interacting, and what the consequences are. If social media was the key tool by which popular music activity became increasingly ‘DIY’, what might it offer for music that was already DIY?

In defence of the alternative

This book is part of a series called Alternate Takes, which encourages its authors to challenge or re-frame conventional wisdoms in the world of popular music studies. When I proposed this book, my ‘alternate take’ was that, despite the rhetoric of democratization outlined above, social media has in lots of ways been quite bad for DIY music – at least, for the kind with a long history of politicized independence from the music industries. I still think this, and it is a key argument of the book. But this position feels far less controversial now than it did when I began my research in 2014. We are increasingly aware that the current, platform-dominated internet constitutes an extremely lopsided economy that is bad for musicians of all kinds and a communicative environment that, more generally, seems to be quite bad for all kinds of people.

Critical internet and social media scholars have problematized optimistic rhetorics of user empowerment and unfettered cultural production. They have highlighted the uneven economic relationship between a handful of platforms and their billions of users (McChesney 2013, Nieborg and Helmond 2018, Srnicek 2017a); suggested that new opportunities for autonomy (i.e. the freedom to act on one’s own will, rather than following the dictates of others) might also lead to insecurity, compulsion and self-blaming (Duffy 2017, Kuehn and Corrigan 2013); and that the collection and application of data from our everyday online communication might represent the ‘capture’ of hitherto un-commodified dimensions of human activity (Andrejevic 2007, Dean 2010, Manzerolle and McGuigan 2014). As well as all this, the peak participatory ‘moment’ seems to be more or less over; platforms like YouTube increasingly play host to content produced by powerful ‘old media’ corporations (i.e. major labels, large film studios, TV networks etc.), influenced by advertisers who ‘do not want their advertisement next to low-quality home video content’ (Kim 2012: 54).

What now feels more like the ‘alternate take’ is the idea that this politicized version of DIY music is something that is worth defending and protecting. There seems to be very little faith in ‘alternative’ music as a viable political project, and widespread scepticism that it even exists as something meaningfully distinct from other kinds of engagement with music. This scepticism is not new: the politicized distinction between ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ music cultures is, in a sense, always facing an existential crisis. In the next chapter I suggest that this is a built-in consequence of DIY’s ambivalent (i.e. love–hate) relationship to popular music. But it does seem that in the last two decades in particular, alongside the rise of social media and the new ‘DIY’ music business, a number of discursive threads have cumulatively questioned the idea that such claims to alterity could reflect anything other than a kind of social posturing.

There is a pessimistic, Frankfurt School-esque bent to this relativism: the idea that cultural choice is an illusion (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002), mangled as an apolitical postmodern cynicism. But its closer academic relative is Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural taste as ‘distinction’ (1984). It suggests that the only reason people are interested in ‘indie’ or ‘underground’ cultures is because it gives them a certain kind of credibility or status.

This intersects with a populist discourse – sometimes called ‘poptimism’ in music criticism circles (Rosen 2006) – which has questioned the political worth of any allegiance to alternative styles or scenes. This discourse negates a long-acknowledged tension between art and commerce by suggesting that popular music’s commercial impetus is, in a sense, the very thing that forces it to engage with and reflect the cultural and political zeitgeist. Alternative music’s relative hermeticism is consequently a source of aesthetic and political impoverishment. This in turn implies a kind of organic, frictionless inevitability to the social positioning of musical genres and traditions: alternative music is all fine and good for its own niche audience, it suggests, and mainstream popular music is good for its big, global audience.

Another discursive threat to DIY’s validity relates to what the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher termed ‘capitalist realism’, whereby we come to see the presence of competitive market dynamics in our social lives as inevitable and unchangeable (2009). This is most evident, in this context, as a depoliticizing of cultural actors’ decisions to engage with industries and practices that might once have been considered a betrayal of shared principles – the old notion of ‘selling out’ (Klein 2020; Klein, Meier and Powers 2017). These decisions are now seen as inviolably individual (‘it’s their choice’) or as structurally overdetermined (‘what else would you do?’), in such a way as to put them beyond critique. This perspective undermines any sense of collectivism in the setting of ethical norms and boundaries. The other consequence of this ‘realistic’ perspective is to see any alternative ethical position as, ultimately, a marker of privilege: for example, rejecting the profit motive is seen as a gesture only available to those with the economic security to afford it.

An increasing focus on representational politics in contemporary society – in both left-wing and right-wing forms – has devalued DIY’s emphasis on organizational change as a mode of cultural resistance. DIY has historically valorized the building of alternative distribution networks, and these tend to come with inherent restrictions on audience size. But if the focus is on gaining representational visibility, then bigger is better. This perspective is reinforced as our understanding of the cultural industries – arriving both through academic research and through social media granting access ‘behind the scenes’ – draws new attention to the significant levels of agency operating within structures once caricatured as hegemonic monoliths (including major record labels). What makes the DIY musician so different, in terms of political potential, to the up-and-coming artist working to be heard in a fragmented and uncaring music industry? Isn’t the latter navigating the same tensions between art and commerce, and perhaps negotiating them more successfully? The recent glut of best-selling, politically conscious, critically revered works from star US-based artists (King 2019) seems to beg the question of quite what the problem with the music industries was ever supposed to be.

I have sympathy for most of these arguments. I do think that music should be something it’s possible to make a living doing, although I don’t think that means accepting a moral equivalency between different kinds of music-making, or concluding that people should do ‘whatever it takes’ to make money. It’s true that ‘alternative’ resentment towards chart music often continues a long history of misogynistic critique of young women’s engagements with popular culture (Ewens 2019). It can also be dismissive or suspicious of African-American musics, sometimes seeing its capacity for ‘technological innovation and stylistic change’ as evidence of commercialism (Bannister 2006a: 88–9). And, undoubtedly, DIY does struggle to embrace and support the participatory diversity that is so central to its rhetoric. Some of this does relate to the uncommon material advantages that DIY practitioners might take for granted, although the economic security of DIY practitioners should not be assumed, and I think it’s sometimes patronizing and wrong to suggest that not-for-profit principles inherently exclude certain social groups. (The tax-avoiding super-rich do not seem particularly interested in not-for-profit activity.)

The UK DIY scene that I have studied and been a part of seems at least as prone as other music scenes to abusive behaviour and prejudice. People I considered friends have taken advantage of their power, or of others’ vulnerability, in a scene that was (and still is) specifically presented as a safer space. The question of whether DIY (in the specifically ‘indie-punk’ incarnation that I study here) is systemically sexist or racist is not one I answer thoroughly here. But it is certainly true that it has often failed to properly account for intersectional injustices, tending to reflect instead the often-narrow social positions of its practitioners.¹ The scene I studied showed disheartening historical continuity in this regard: during my research period there were several flashpoints at which problematic racial politics were brought to the fore. There are times when DIY has been an important space for emancipatory struggles, most notably in its capacity to give voice to feminist and queer politics. But it’s important to recall that this space has generally been hard-won by marginalized groups, rather than simply offered up willingly.

So, I will not at any point make the claim that DIY is an ideal kind of music culture. I don’t think it constitutes anything so grand as a revolutionary political practice or a comprehensive social movement, and it also isn’t unique in being a musical culture that shows marked differences to mainstream popular music, aesthetically, organizationally or economically. But I will claim that DIY, for all its imperfections, has the capacity to mitigate one problem in particular: the distance that popular music culture has from the lives of most people. Therefore, I offer a critical defence not of the entirety of DIY music as we find it now, but of the broader notion of the alternative – the idea that musical activity outside of the commercial popular music industries might bring us closer to experiences of culture that work towards and sometimes embody social justice. I suggest that DIY music has characteristics that can make it a valuable form of ‘cultural resistance’. That’s a term that has fallen out of favour somewhat in academic literature, and I attempt to justify my use of it in Chapter 2.

All of this doesn’t say much about whether the music produced in DIY scenes is, in itself, at all superior or preferable to other kinds of music. That isn’t really the focus of this book, which is more concerned with how DIY is organized, and how it communicates political values within and outside of its borders. DIY can sometimes be a space for music that seems to be commercially unviable, as in the kind of ‘abrasive sonic tinkering’ that Stephen Graham locates in his study of ‘underground’ music (2016:3); sometimes it is home to music that sounds quite similar to pop music found elsewhere. But regardless of the aesthetics that are favoured, I think the particular value of DIY is that it presents opportunities for a particularly close kind of ‘articulation’ (i.e. connection) between music and social life, which can (and sometimes does) have empowering, democratizing effects.

DIY as the new default

So, DIY music is a cultural form with a long history of distinguishing itself from ‘mainstream’ music by means of specific ethical precepts. I’ve suggested that these might be valuable, and worth retaining and building upon. But social media and the internet have clouded some of the central ethical precepts of DIY music. These technologies intersect with, and often exacerbate, the existential crises I’ve listed above – of relativism, populism and pragmatism – as well as blurring distinctions between DIY and the music and ICT industries in other ways.

Take the ‘not-for-profit’ ethos as an example. DIY practitioners have historically tended to see a broad rejection of profiting from music, or variants on this theme (e.g. paying musicians but not promoters), as central to a vision of fair and ethical musical activity. But the internet has massively complicated notions of how much music costs, how much it ought to cost and even precisely what the music commodity is (Morris 2015). Automated surveillance of online activity is an important new site of profit which serves to underwrite ‘free’ access to culture in new ways (Andrejevic 2007), especially via targeted advertising, and many musicians today seek a similar kind of ‘free lunch’ model to that employed by tech companies. Street and Phillips, writing on music and copyright, quote one musician outlining such an approach: ‘My attitude is like a start-up […] – you build up a community and then you monetize it […], give it away free, remove all the obstacles that would normally be there’ (2016: 423). Clearly, this kind of approach to ‘freeing’ music is something quite distinct from a not-for-profit ethic. And there are concerns that the aspirational equation underpinning this activity – that free work now equals paid work later – might be economically infeasible and therefore subjectively harmful (Duffy 2017; Kuehn and Corrigan 2013).

Another key tenet of DIY has been independence or ‘self-sufficiency’. This has been understood as important not only in terms of artistic autonomy, but also in order to have control over economic and organizational decisions that might otherwise exploit others (e.g. avoiding extortionate ticket prices). As noted above, the internet has been seen as a substantial boon for independent artists; even the internet itself has at times felt ‘independent’, insofar as its disruption of old music industry business models was sometimes presented as a grassroots, people-powered phenomenon. But the music industries being a more ‘DIY business’ means new expectations of ‘self-management’ – a form of independence that does not hold the same political potential. Record labels have become more risk-averse, and increasingly seek to shift the costs of production onto artists. Music industry scholars Mazierska, Gillon and Rigg suggest that major record labels now offer contracts ‘only to those musicians who can prove their potential by having a significant following on social media or winning amateur competitions’ (2018: 7). Part of DIY’s approach, at least historically, has been to critique this notion of non-professional music as primarily a ‘talent pool’ for industry to draw from. That sense of DIY and mainstream music as ‘separate worlds’ c...