Experimenting with Fandom, Live Music, and the Internet: Applying

Insights from Music Fan Culture to New Media Production

Tim Wall and Andrew Dubber
Birmingham City University, UK
Abstract
This article maps and theorizes online jazz fandom
activities around live music, and then reports on applied
experimental work that the authors undertook with jazz
promoters and musicians to explore ways in which live
music can be situated in the activities of online fandom.
Three theoretical themes of online taste-maker-led fan
communities, narratives of online fan experience, and
modularization of content are explained and discussed.
Two case studies, where the theoretical themes are
applied to the practical needs of live events organizers,
are then introduced, discussed and evaluated. The
authors then draw conclusions about the extent to which
an understanding of fan practices and the possibilities of
online platforms can be combined to extend the
experiences of live musical events into online experiences.
They also consider the possible ways in which online
media re-address a series of questions about narrative
and narration, agency and subjectivity, expertise and
accessibility.
1. Introduction
This article reports on some experimental production
work the authors undertook with promoters and
musicians, in which we applied theoretical insights
developed in earlier studies of fan practice to explore
ways in which new media texts can be constructed to
mesh with the activities of online fandom. Although we
reect on the texts we produced, we do not report
extensively on the reception of these texts. Our work was
mainly formal in its aim and practice. In other words, we
seek to explore the implications of our current under-
standing of music audiences for new forms of produc-
tion, and to report on our experiments in creating online
texts which are led by theoretical and practical under-
standings of the way in which fans operate, rather than
determined by the forms of technology we are working
with or by accepted ways of constructing music websites.
The specic cases we discuss were just two of a much
larger number that we have been working on as part of
the Interactive Cultures research team at Birmingham
City University. One was initiated as part of an Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded Knowl-
edge Transfer (KT) Fellowship project, and the second as
a KT commission. This is pertinent because, although the
cases started as two of the thirty projects dened for us by
our knowledge transfer partners, in these two instances
we used the opportunity as a jumping-o point for more
developed experimental research. Our partners here were
the promoter of an international jazz festival and a
musician with a signicant commitment to experimenta-
tion in the development of live music events. In each case,
in line with the brief set by the partner, we attempted to
extend, and expand upon, the involvement of audiences
in live events. We drew upon our understanding of jazz as
a cultural community, online activity as a social practice,
and the internet as a set of interactive technologies, in
order to develop the ideals of live performance amongst
both regular audience members and new recruits. In both
cases, we established prototype technological solutions to
meet the partners needs. Intrigued by the possibilities,
though, we worked with our partners to develop these
prototypes further, outside the scope of the KT funding,
to produce fully working solutions.
Correspondence: Tim Wall, Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University, City North Campus, Perry Barr,
Birmingham, B42 2SU, UK. E-mail: tim.wall@bcu.ac.uk
Journal of New Music Research
2010, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 159169
DOI: 10.1080/09298215.2010.489645 2010 Taylor & Francis
Although we are keen to identify the origins of these
projects in knowledge transfer work, and recognize the
support of that works funders, we want to make it
equally plain that the research element of our additional
experimental work is not based on evaluating the success
of the knowledge transfer prototypes in attracting new
audiences. That will have to wait for another piece of
longer-term investigation. Here we report on practice-
based research, which within media and cultural studies
is a well-founded, if relatively undeveloped, paradigm. In
such work, producers explore ideas about form, produc-
tion process or meaning by making innovative texts in
the form of written, video or audio media. In this case we
work across these forms, taking in newer aspects of
interaction and of social media which are at the centre of
online media. The key question we work with, then, is
how could and should we respond as producers to key
ideas about fandom which are derived from more
abstract theoretical work, and more empirical data
collection? In doing so, we hope we are oering an
innovative approach both to understanding audiences
for live music, and to experimental, practice-based new
media research.
This article, therefore, does two things: it maps and
theorizes online music fandom activities around live
music based upon the work of others and our own earlier
research; and it reports on our experimental work in new
media production. We start by exploring online fandom
around jazz and associated forms as specialist musics,
and outline recent research and theorizing that account
for the ways that fandom is contained within commu-
nities dominated by an unocial and uid hierarchy of
esteem and prestige, ordered around knowledge and
access to music. Specically, we look at a range of
activities involved in sharing, discussing and ordering
music; the way these activities build taste-maker com-
munities, the journeys and narratives of the online fan
experience, and the way these lead to a modularization
of content; and the function of live performances within
those practices.
In the second part, we explain how these ideas were
used as the foundation for production decisions and
work processes involved in producing online content
associated with the jazz festival and separately the
development of a collaborative music project which
leads to the staging of a live event. In doing so, we want
to explore how ideas from the theorization and research
of music consumption could be useful to new media
producers as they design and make content for the very
audiences on which the earlier research was based.
The relationship between live music and online music
fandom is an interesting one. Perhaps they can be seen as
polar opposites in the experience of music. As we will
show, live music is most often understood to be the most
authentic of consumption experiences, and the ability to
play live is often constructed as an index of authenticity
in popular music as a whole (Frith, 1996, pp. 237241).
The relationship of music fans to music through the
internet, by contrast, is consistently associated with
debates about problematic changes in the way music is
consumed. The most high prole of these is linked to
music industry concerns that sharing music over the
internet undermines record sales; this activity is often
presented as theft, and much of the sharing activity is
widely portrayed as illegal. Less dominantbut for this
article, more signicantis the sense in which the online
experience is a virtual one and therefore unreal, not
live or even hyper-real. Questions about virtual
experiences are often structured within a discourse which
builds upon earlier cultural debates about recorded
versus live music (Thornton, 1995, pp. 3450).
It is important to note, though, that jazz and the sorts
of fusion musics explored in this article are among a
number of popular music cultures which have a strong
emphasis on live music culture, even when music is
recorded or further mediated by the distribution channels
of radio, cinema, television and, latterly, the internet
(DeVeaux, 1995). At the same time, our research shows
that jazz and associated fandom shares many notable
characteristics with other specialist music communities,
and that these characteristics have been elaborated upon
and extended in the cultural spaces created by online
media (Wall & Dubber, 2009b). In the discussion of our
experimental work, we will raise important questions
about the ways in which the liveness of live events can be
represented online; the way dierent live and online
audiences can be encouraged to participate in the
mediation of a live jazz event; and the degree to which
the structuring activities of promoters, venue sta and
editorial enablers of online coverage should be explicitly
revealed. More philosophically, but with greater bearing
on the economics of live jazz events, we touch upon the
dicult issues of ownership and intellectual property.
Finally, we want to open up discussion of the way in
which online media re-address a series of questions which
have pre-occupied media scholars: narrative and narra-
tion, agency and subjectivity, expertise and accessibility.
In engaging with all this, the article raises interesting
questions about audience cultures, the online mediation
of liveness within jazz culture, and the value of research
through experimental work.
2. Online fandom around jazz and associated
forms as specialist musics
In media and music industry terms, jazz is a specialist
music. Record companies organize their business activ-
ities around a general music division (which makes the
most money, but incurs the highest costs) and specialist
music divisions (with smaller, but more consistent,
revenues, but where specialist knowledge is required),
160 Tim Wall and Andrew Dubber
and radio companies use these ideas to organize their
formats or programme schedules around general and
niche provision (Barnard, 1989; Negus, 1992). These
industrial activities respond both to popular music fans
and to musicians who are drawn to work in distinct styles
with small musical communities (Borthwick & Moy,
2004). In these musical communities, music fandom is
exercised through the command of specialist forms of
knowledge of a named specialist music, and activities of
collecting and sharing which dene the boundaries of a
community or scene. The particular specialist music is
usually understood to be purer, or more demanding,
than mainstream popular music (Hesmondhalgh, 1996).
Musicians will be self-consciously associated with the
music, and will see the fans as their audience, and the
record industry and radio professionals as essential
elements in providing a living.
Senses of authenticity, notions of art, and/or commu-
nal practice are common in all forms of specialist music
(Frith, 1983). Fans of popular music in general, including
specialist music forms, behave in many ways that are
common across the genres. The ways in which the music
is consumed, celebrated, collected, examined and enjoyed
is largely inscribed by dominant practices among the
recorded and live music industries. However, what is
perhaps more interesting is the ways in which these
behaviours dier from one niche music to another. The
activities characteristic of (if not peculiar to) jazz fans
include a particular interest in improvization; an
encyclopaedic attention to details such as the names
and discography of side players on recordings; and an
emphasis on collectable recordings. Signicant weight is
also given to the value of live performanceand this is
true both of recordings of live performances and actual
live concerts. It is this latter emphasis which, along with
ideas of musicianship, is at the core of jazz fans senses of
authenticity. Certainly most research into the activities of
jazz fans reveals a strong emphasis on attending live
musical events (DeVeaux, 1995; Riley & Laing, 2008).
The importance of live music is also very prominent in
a major survey of specialist music fandom that we
undertook in 2008 for the BBC. This work involved a
three-month survey of the online activity of urban music,
indie rock and jazz fans at over 250 online locations, as
well as an examination of the BBCs specialist music
provision and production processes. An overview of the
research was published in a BBC report and a peer
reviewed journal (Wall & Dubber, 2009a, 2009b). In
these published analyses, we drew a very broad denition
of fandom, examining fan practices rather than trying to
dene the status of being a fan as distinct from a non-fan.
We tested out various approaches to theorizing fandom
in terms of the empirical data we produced. The studies
were, however, qualitative, and although we sought
representative samples to study, we were interested in
drawing out the underlying practices rather than
quantifying dierent sorts of occurrence. Rather than
outlining the evidence for all of our ndings and
arguments here, our aim is to provide some broad
perspective and then draw out three of our main
conclusions. Readers interested in nding out more are
directed to the other publications.
Most substantially, this work pointed to the cultural
importance of the online experience to jazz and other
specialist music fans, and contrasted this with the
perception of the internet implied in the use of online
media by music companies and musicians as simply a
promotional media space or distribution channel. When
constructing or commissioning websites, music organiza-
tions approach the web from the perspective of brochure
or yer design, and to the extent that they consider the
interactive potential of the online environment, this is
usually done as gimmickry or to generate extra content
that would draw attention and maintain stickiness on
the promotional site. In addition, the fact that recorded
music, concert footage or audio can now be accessed
online in a quantity that was not previously available,
while signicant, is not sucient to explain the impact of
the internet on music consumption and fan activity.
Rarely is the online environment deliberately used by
recording industries, live promoters or performers as a
means by which cultural production and artistic expres-
sion itself can take place.
Following Marshall McLuhan, we can understand
communication media like music and the internet as
cultural environments, in which any environmental
changes shift the operations of producers and consumers,
alters the ratio between the number of options available
to producers and consumers (McLuhan & McLuhan,
1988). Thinking along these lines, we should understand
online media as reshaping (rather than replicating or
replacing) traditional music presentation and represen-
tation formats. Any study of online fandom, therefore,
must explore the audience/fan relationship to the whole
environment, not just to a single mediation, whether
live, in a physical recorded format, broadcast experience
or internet engagement. This is a little abstracted, but
we found signicant evidence in our analysis of fan
activity to support a claim that such a perspective is
useful.
The array of internet and web technologies used by
specialist music fans to explore and consolidate their
enthusiasms will be familiar to anyone with any
experience with music online. We found that these
technologies are deployed for specialist music content
in exactly the same way that they are for more
mainstream music, and specialist music fans almost
always use existing technologies and applications, rather
than establish their own. The most prominent technol-
ogies and applications where we found fan activity were
blogs, discussion boards and fora, dedicated web site
pages, online radio stations and other forms of streamed
Experimenting with fandom, live music, and the internet 161
and downloaded audio and video services, including Last
FM, Spotify, YouTube and MySpace.
However, for fans we found that each of these
technologies forms part of an infrastructure created by
their particular activities. So, for instance, while some
of the technologies are used to provide access to
professionally-produced content, the quantity of fan-
established locales is many times greater than those
oered by professional providers, but the latter tend to
attract more visits, probably because of their strong
brand identities, often associated with o-line activity in
publishing and broadcast media. The professional
providers are, therefore, most often (and obviously)
associated with commercial exploitation of the web or
other internet technologies, and the content of these sites
is most often associated with commercially released
studio recordings of jazz. Having said that, it would be
mistaken to see the space available for fan activity as
limited to non-commercial space because commercial
providers tend to use content from unpaid contributors
as a way to lower costs and encourage participation, and
many fan sites take advantage of the opportunities for
advertising or click-through revenue streams.
While there were certainly examples of niche provi-
sion, in most cases content utilized by jazz fans is made
available through generalist platforms. The more niche
provision tends to be organized by commercial compa-
nies and is more likely to use professional editorial sta,
while material uploaded by fans is more likely to be
found through highly branded applications commonly
associated with ideas of Web 2.0. For instance, video
material of jazz performances can be accessed through
the same technologies that oer more mainstream
content, for instance YouTube.
What is notable, though, is the quantity of fan activity
devoted to live jazz performances within the non-
commercial spaces on the internet. These are apparent,
amongst other materials, in the availability of recordings
of live events, fan-produced reviews of live events,
information about live performances, encyclopaedic
listings of musicians live performances, and discussions
about performances. Of course, one will nd such
materials available for any specialist music. What is
perhaps interesting from our ndings is that in jazz and
associate musics, though, concert performances are
hardly dierentiated from commercially available studio
recordings and, in fact, live music recordings tend to be
ordered with hard to nd, out of print studio recordings.
These are issues to which we return below.
In our empirical study we identied a series of core fan
practices, which in the report to the BBC we also
developed into implications for BBC broadcast and
online production. In this article we want to bring out
three in particular that have become central to our own
production-based research work. The rst relates to the
ways in which fans produce narratives out of the material
they order, which in turn form the basis of the frame-
works through which they understand the specialist
music that is the object of their fandom. Before the
widespread use of the internet, this material was
constituted by the music media, journalism and comment
found in the press and broadcasting, and by the
memorabilia associated with musicians lives and their
performances. Online fandom has reproduced these
materials in digital form, and added to them with an
even greater array of re-engineered and self-generated
content. The second idea we refer to as taste-making, as
it relates to the role that key members of fan commu-
nities have in identifying and interpreting the signicance
of dierent forms of material out of which fan practice is
ordered. The nal idea we want to highlight is the
product of this fan activity, which we term modulariza-
tion. That is the tendency to divide up existing media
material for use in fan activity, the creation of original
material in similar modular elements, and the assembly
of such modules into larger fan artefacts like web pages
and blogs.
It is worth addressing each of these ideas in a little
more detail before we show how they were applied in our
case studies.
2.1 Order and narrative in fan culture
The online environment in which jazz fandom takes place
utilizes technologies formed into an infrastructure. The
environment is particularly amenable to communal
activity. Although fandom is often presented as a
decidedly individual activity, its key activities are more
often social (Jensen, 1992). While it is possible to
understand specialist music fans use of the internet as
very personal search activity through a forest of
information sources, the majority of the fan activity we
observed can be seen at some level to be social (Baym,
1999). Broadly speaking, this communal aspect of
fandom online has clear precedent in the oine environ-
ment, where the activities of music fans were primarily, if
not exclusively social. For instance, the making of mix-
tapes for friends and fellow music lovers pregures the
online creation of mixes and playlists; the practice of
writing, copying and distributing fanzines provides the
prototype for webzines and fan blogs; and, where like-
minded music enthusiasts would gather together, sit and
talk, online fora and other online social media have
arisen to enhance and amplify that impulse (Atton,
2001). The most striking example of this phenomenon is
probably the reproduction of the practice of tape trading
online. Again, this is not restricted to jazz fandom, but is
particularly strong within jazz culture. Tape trading
refers to the swapping of prized recordings of live
performances by jazz musicians. The tapes have tended
to be called bootlegs (boots for short) in an echo of
the activities of the purveyors of alcohol during the
162 Tim Wall and Andrew Dubber
American prohibition. The term merely denotes that the
concert recordings have not been sanctioned for com-
mercial release, although they are as likely to be
recordings made directly o the mixing desk in the
concert hall as they are audience recordings made with
portable equipment. Often these recordings are made
available in the same way as commercial recordings
through Torrent-based distribution, or le-sharing tech-
nologiesbut there is an increasing tendency for access
to the shared material to be in private, invitation-only
small communities, in which people contribute as well as
download.
Given that jazz is accorded such a small amount of
time on mainstream media, and makes up such a small
part of total record sales, its prominence on the internet
is notable. It is common in the academic literature to
portray this social online activity as evidence of the
basically democratic nature of both fandom and online
activity. Perhaps the most obvious example of this are
those activities which are associated with what has come
to be called folksonomy (Vander Wal, 2004). This is the
notion that the tagging of items of digital data by
individuals in aggregate creates a categorization system
that enables others to nd your contribution. Because
both the system of categories, and the order the
categories give to information, is the result of many
individual actions, rather than a denitive system created
by an authority, it has been argued that these locales
of folksonomic activity provide an ad hoc and participa-
tory method of organizing information useful to a
community.
For example, users of Last.fm can assign tags to the
music they listen to. While many of the tags will be
meaningful only to the person who applied them, many
of the tags will be shared by a wide range of other users
and, in aggregate, they create a folksonomy. This cloud
of tags represents a communal semantic map that allows
users to explore music. Likewise, video site YouTube
allows users to apply tags to individual videos, which are
then grouped and can be navigated by topic of interest in
a manner that allows for a meaningful system of organic
terms, rather than simple genre classications. Book-
marking website del.icio.us applies this tagging system to
websites all over the internet, which can be annotated,
tagged and stored for ease of reference, and to allow
members of the service to easily locate and connect with
other, similar sites. Live recordings are also usually
presented with even larger amounts of meta-data. The
convention is that full details of the concert date and
location, band members, details of the themes played and
information on the origin of the recording are provided,
along with the history of its technical transfer to the
present form. At the most developed, it has been
suggested that such aggregated ideas embody the
wisdom of crowds characteristic of Web 2.0 environ-
ments (OReilly, 2005).
2.2 Leadership in fan communities
However, the online fan communities we studied were
more prominently characterized by social hierarchies of
the type termed powerless elites by John Tulloch
(Tulloch & Jenkins, 1995). Within jazz fan communities,
le sharing sites, fora, bulletin boards and mp3 blogs,
there exists an unocial and uid hierarchy of esteem and
prestige, ordered around knowledge and around the
provision of access to music. Opinion leaders, taste
makers, specialist music savants and people possessing
expertise concerning specialist music share their knowl-
edge and provide routes to otherwise inaccessible assets of
fandom, and in so doing are accorded respect and
deference by members of their peer communities. On le-
sharing peer-to-peer sites such as Kazaa and Limewire,
members who have comprehensive catalogues of certain
subgenres andscenes of music are knownandreferredtoas
reliable sources of introduction to unfamiliar albums and
tracks. In discussion groups, people who regularly share
expert knowledge are often elevated to the status of
moderators, and given positions of responsibility and
stewardship within the community. Knowledgeable com-
mentators on mp3 blogs, as well as the bloggers
themselves, inhabit status positions within the commu-
nities those sites attract. On Last.fm, Mog and other music
taste-sharing communities, esteemcan be measured by the
number of followers to which a user can lay claim.
To some extent these tastemakers constitute a similar
group to the one dened as curator-savants by the
authors of a media industry market research report
(EMAP, 2003). The term is somewhat unhelpful in
analysing music fandom, derived as it is from common
ideas of savantism as indicative of individuals with poor
social skills and exceptional ability to store and recall
signicant amounts of information. This value-laden
term connects to a wider perception of male attitudes to
record collecting as nerd behaviour. However, the
Phoenix projects less negative denition of this group
as having a self-identity determined by extensive musical
knowledge, relates far better to the sorts of public
display, dandy activity apparent in record collecting
and online fora (Straw, 1997).
If we set aside the terminology of the Phoenix project
as the result of their attempt to map commercial markets
for products and advertisements, their analysis has some
analytical value in relation to ideas of online taste-
making. The larger savant group is understood to
constitute 7% of adults under 45, for whom music is a
major preoccupation, and this proportion is broadly
similar to the proportion of online music fans we
identied in our research who run blogs, moderate
message boards, or are given esteem within online
debates. A larger groupperhaps broadly similar to
the Phoenix projects enthusiasts (21% of adults)
participated in these social media (Hills, 2002).
Experimenting with fandom, live music, and the internet 163
2.3 Modularization
The main disadvantage of limiting ones sense of the
internet to that of a distribution channel is that the
mediation process is ignored and online content is
understood in terms of its origin. So, for instance, studio
recordings are understood as CDs, live recordings as
concerts, and programmed music as radio. This takes no
account of how the raw content material that is utilized
online is manipulated by its users and online content
creators. This former approach also ignores the
signicant way in which listening is integrated into
practices of sharing and interacting, and the way these
activities t into the community hierarchies of the social
media in which the music is listened to. In addition, it
ignores the way in which most online radio takes a far
more narrow-cast orientation than that found in over-
the-air radio.
Listening online, then, is almost always a form of
interaction at a number of dierent levels, and it usually
takes place within the context of two further activities
around organizing music and knowledge. Digital music
les, especially in the areas of specialist music, are hardly
ever simply downloaded. Firstly, they are increasingly
accessed through sites which oer social fora, large
amounts of metadata, and the ordering agency of the
tastemakers who control them. Secondly, these sites are
largely understood to constitute spaces for sharing, for
actively linking the music and metadata, and for making
sense of the specialist music form. Finally, the music is
actively collected and ordered on local computers in such
a way that the individuals computer is conceived to be
part of a wider plane of music culture activity.
These characteristics can be seen on both Last FM,
and the increasingly important phenomenon of le-
sharing blogs. In their own way, both of these
technologies also represent the nal area of online fan-
activity: repurposing and modularization. As the blog
technologies have developed, they have given a particular
emphasis to a model of modularization, where the blog
owner can build the content of their blog through a series
of widgets. Although many of the modules which are
used to build a blog are oered as technologies, provided
commercially or through open source community devel-
opment, we can understand other aspects of the blog as
modular. While le-sharing is often simply organized as
the opportunity to download music les, the links to le
downloads are increasingly set within the context of a
range of other activities. These include the presentation
of information on the music being shared, for which it is
expected that the blogger will be thanked, or comments
made about the music being shared, including additional
information. Some bloggers produce original accounts,
often built around placing the music within their own
maps of meaning, or evaluating the worth of the music
against other available options. More often, though,
evaluations originally published in online sources are
reused, the artwork for the record release is copied and
pasted into the blog, and widgets that allow video of the
artists performing part of the music from YouTube or
equivalent online sources are included.
3. Experimenting with live music online
In this section we outline two primary pieces of
experimental work we developed in partnership with
promoters and musicians to extend participation in live
music events online. The intention was not to simply
distribute the musical performances, but to represent
some of the experiences which are characteristic of these
events. In particular, we examined ways to incorporate
our understanding of ordering and narrative, taste-
making leadership, and modularization into the online
experience.
In one case, we worked with the promoters of the
Scarborough Jazz Festival, a well-established weekend
event which features an international line-up of artists
performing to audiences drawn from across the UK and
beyond. The audience prole tends towards an older age
group, with a mean age of around 60. The range of music
is quite diverse, and perhaps belies common assumptions
about the tastes of an audience with this demographic
prole. In 2009 the headliners included the jazz-funk of
Kyle Eastwood, former Miles Davis saxophonist Steve
Grossman, and pianist vocalist and entertainer Liane
Carroll, and support acts as diverse as contemporary jazz
dancers Jazzcotech, rising young jazz collective If
Destroyed Still True, and a specially commissioned
Greek Gods suite from the Andy Panayi Big Band. The
promoters wanted to raise awareness beyond the regular
attendees, and in particular to attract younger people
throughout the UK. They could see that part of this
objective could be achieved by putting the festival
online, where they could raise awareness about the
festival and share the festival experience with a far wider
group. In the second case, we worked with the organizers
of Aftershock, a relatively recent project, in which
composer Nitin Sawhney brings together a group of
musicians from young players at the beginning of their
professional careers from jazz and world music back-
grounds to develop his compositions for a one-o live
performance. The performances take place in dierent
cities around the world, usually as part of a larger arts or
music festival. Audiences vary from location to location,
but the majority of the audience tends to be between 20
and 40 years old. There have, to date, been eight
Aftershock events, and we were involved in the six
events in Genoa, Marseille and Manchester. The
organizers were keen to publish a website for this leg of
the Aftershock project, but were at a loss about the
approach to the site.
164 Tim Wall and Andrew Dubber
In Scarborough the promoters, regulars, and venue
sta perceive the festival as a unique jazz experience
characterized by its diversity and the distinctiveness of
the venue, a Victorian spa pavilion and concert halls
located on the edge of the North Sea on the north-eastern
coast of England. We therefore wanted to create a
montage of snippets from the perspectives of dierent
people who were involved in organizing and experiencing
the festival as it unfolded. Equally, we were keen to draw
on as many ways of capturing experience as we could in
the time we had, and to draw upon dierent forms of
reportage. Accordingly, we used still and moving images,
sound, and pieces of writing generated by an assorted
group of people, including the promoters, the technical
sta, the musicians, diverse audience members, profes-
sional photographers and video production crews, as well
as members of the four-strong Interactive Cultures team
who attended the event. We were keen to generate and
make the material available on-the-y, so that the
representation we produced would unfold as the festival
took place, and yet we wanted the material to be
available to be explored through a range of dierent
avenues after the festival was over.
The purpose of Aftershock is to embody the idea of
collaboration, and so publishing an electronic brochure,
or distributing the concert online, seemed contrary to
their aims. Instead, we established ways in which the
musical development of the workshops through to the
nal performance and the narrative and character
development that emerged through the experience of
the participants could be represented online. We there-
fore focused our representation on the musicians
themselves as the key content creators, the practice and
performance spaces, and something of the distinctiveness
of each locale as a cultural space, alongside reections on
the activities of music making.
As social media and cultural theorists we were
interested in applying ideas about the way that editorial
interventionsthe way material is collected, the technical
andcommunicative formthat it takes, andthe way that it is
structured onlinerelate to the practices of fandom
around specialist music forms. Using the funding from
the AHRC, we drew on our existing research to produce
bespoke prototypes which met the needs of our partners as
nished products and as processes that they could repeat
themselves. We then incorporated this work into the
longer project of the Interactive Cultures team, to reect
on how dierences in approach required dierent tech-
nologies and production processes, resulted in dierent
outcomes, and implied dierent general principles about
the way technology, media text and fan activities relate.
In both projects we used relatively cheap video
cameras as our key capture technology. These included
Flip cameras costing around US$100 and the Disgo at
about half the price. At Scarborough, we also used a
compact digital stills camera, iPhone cameras, digital
audio recorders and the voice recorder on the iPhone,
and a laptop with WiFi for writing live concert reviews.
The professional photographers and TV production crew
used very high-end equipment.
The marked dierence between the two projects was
the way in which we organized the editing of the content
we had captured, and then the way that we employed
social media to engage audiences. For the Scarborough
project we used the new blogging platform Posterous,
which enables the user to make blog posts of text, audio
or still and moving images by sending les by email. We
created a working protocol of tagging each le with some
common terms that included the artists names, the
media form (reviews, photos, interviews), the location or
function within the festival, and the name of the
specialist contributor. We set up a production table
from where the capture technology was handed out, and
where captured content could be delivered for uploading.
We were positioned in a main thoroughfare of the
festival so that people could come up and look at what
we were doing and, if they wanted, get involved.
Our main aim was to create a ow of modular
content, which we then aimed to present in a number of
ways online. This opened up an even greater range of
ways to experience the content, and so the representation
of the festival. Over three days, we produced over 230
items of content created by four key Interactive Cultures
production sta, two professional photographers, thir-
teen contributors from the festival attendees, and ten
festival sta. The Interactive Cultures team reviewed
each festival set, writing as the bands performed and
posting at the end of their performance; used video and
audio to interview musicians, promotion and venue sta,
and audience members; lmed short clips of the live sets;
and produced pieces of reportage on video and written
blog posts. We processed the constant ow of still images
and video clips created by other contributors, as well as
recorded music clips provided by the musicians.
Anyone visiting the justlikejazz.org site we created
could experience some sort of written, image, video or
audio blog post every few minutes. This experience
broadly matched the chronology of the festival pro-
gramme: as a band nished a set, visitors to the blog
could read a review; then view up to ten stills and video
clips from the performance. Within a few minutes there
would be an interview with the band to watch or listen
to. Between performances we uploaded colour pieces
on the venue, the personalities who created the event,
and those in attendance. Anyone could explore any of
the modular material provided either by following
the chronology, or through the themes of the tags we
applied. This enabled multiple journeys through the
material, creating dierent narrative constructions.
These narratives could be built around the individual
artists, individual contributors, forms of media, or
dierent aspects of the venue or festival.
Experimenting with fandom, live music, and the internet 165
We also wanted to ensure that we maximized the
dissemination of the modular material, and encouraged
the network of jazz fans to share and promote the online
content. Over time fans would take the modular material
and re-engineer it into their own fan productions, and
tastemakers would start to direct other fans to the
justlikejazz site, and so we took advantage of the ability
within Posterous to syndicate the modular content across
other internet technologies. Accordingly, every video
post was also autoposted to YouTube and Vimeo, still
images to Flickr, and the tweets to Friend Feed. Our
Facebook page automatically received the content from
Posterous and displayed the videos, photo galleries and
links to text-based blogs that we posted to justlikejazz.
org. On Twitter, we incorporated a custom hashtag in
all our non-automated tweets. The hashtag #scarbor-
oughjazz allows those searching on a topic to nd posts
relating to an event and to add their own tweets to a
group of messages on that subject. It can be a useful tool
to create interest around a live event or hot topic for a
short period of time.
The approach to Aftershock was markedly dierent.
The live music activities culminated in a one-o live
performance lasting an hour or less; we focused the
content on the lead-up to that nal event. We empha-
sized the artists as characters, and their journey through
the musics developmentfrom meeting their collabora-
tors and learning to work with them, through compos-
ing, developing and rehearsing, to the nal performance
of the songsformed the basis for a range of narratives.
We gave handheld digital cameras to each of the twelve
musicians working with Nitin Sawhney, to Nitin himself,
to the Aftershock producers and to key members of the
technical team. One member of Interactive Cultures was
present to capture material and still images, in order to
provide an outside, looking in perspective, as well as to
upload and tag the source materialbut the majority of
the content was made up of video provided by
participants in the Aftershock experience. Initially the
open-source blogging platform Wordpress was employed
to present the material and allow comments and tagging,
and this was automatically created from an RSS feed
generated by Blip.tv, a video hosting site where the
content was being uploaded and tagged. After experien-
cing some technical diculties with this system we moved
the project to Posterous.
Musicians were encouraged to carry the cameras with
them at all times and capture whatever they found
interesting, creating content allowing fans to get closer to
the music and the players themselves, as well as setting a
context within which the musical activity was taking
place which fans seldom get to share. The content was
tagged by character, context, development stage, and
song title. Each artist appearing in a video was tagged by
rst name as a character in that particular clip (e.g.
Rachael, Samira, Nitin). The context of the clip (e.g.
Socializing, Rehearsal, Soundcheck, Performance) and
the songs that emerged were tagged as they progressed
from sketch to fully-realized version. This gave audiences
dierent ways to interact, engage with and construct
their own narrative and meaning from the wealth of
material presented. In the case of Aftershock Marseille,
over 500 video clips were produced and uploaded in four
days from material sourced from fteen digital video
cameras. Fans were able to navigate this wealth of
content by interest, following the activities of an
individual performer or the development of a single
song, watching the event near-chronologically by
stage, or however else the visitor wished to assemble
and make sense of the digital narrative surrounding the
music.
4. Evaluation
Our primary concern had been to provide solutions to
the aims set for us by each of our knowledge transfer
partners, and so their response was uppermost in our
judgements of success. We certainly had very supportive
feedback from both sets of organizers, and the modular
and multiple narrative structure had a strong appeal
amongst both groups. The individual elements of content
were felt to have captured dierent aspects of the festival
in dierent ways, and the whole collage of experiences
was viewed as rich and diverse. Our justlikejazz
philosophy of creating a structure in which we then
improvised with other content creators, and which the
users of the modular content could explore in ways that
suited their interests and inclinations, was seen as a solid
success. In the Scarborough case study, we were
particularly eager to devise a production process which
could be used by festival promoters or local jazz clubs
themselves, without the need for professional contribu-
tions like our own or those of professional content
creators. The simplicity of use and relative cheapness of
the still and video cameras, the familiarity that most
people have with emailing, and the ease of conguration
and use that characterize the Posterous technology were
all successes in this regard. Members of local jazz clubs
have taken the idea back to their own locales, we will
repeat at the next festival and Aftershock event, and we
have invitations to duplicate the approach with other
jazz organization on regional and national levels in the
UK, and in other places in Europe.
The response of musicians to both completed proto-
types has been particularly interesting. In the case of
justlikejazz, the majority of the band leaders and many of
the individual musicians visited the production table
during the event and were intrigued by the approach. It
was clearly common amongst younger musicians in
particular to have an interest in the way in which
the internet represented them as working bands and
166 Tim Wall and Andrew Dubber
musicians, and certainly how live events tted within that
coverage. They seemed to value the content, and we
received compliments for the quality of coverage. As
one might expect, a sizable number of the musicians
raised issues of intellectual property. The festival
organizers had asked in writing for permission to
record and disseminate content based on the bands
sets as part of the agreement and arrangements for the
festival. Our production work was presented as an
extension of the usual recording activities which were
undertaken at the festival which included professional
photographers, and the audio and video recording for
non-commercial use of the whole festival. We limited
our video recordings of the sets to two or three minute
encapsulations of the music played, and the main basis
of the permissions associated with our work related to
putting them online. However, there were a small
number of concerns, including one band leader who
asked for his material to be removed from the
justlikejazz site, and a second who was happy for
interviews and other material to be on there, but not
syndicated to YouTube or Vimeo, which he hoped to
use just for performance pieces. There is some evidence
that either the musicians had not appreciated what they
were giving permission for, or their agents had not
passed the information on. Our approach was always to
be guided by what the musicians felt comfortable with.
The response amongst participants and visitors to the
Aftershock site has varied, but has been overwhelmingly
positive from the perspective of the producers and
organizers. Some artists expressed misgivings at rst,
others were initially reluctant to use the cameras, and
some, after a burst of enthusiasm, began to forget their
cameras and needed to be reminded from time to time.
Equally, there were some very keen participants who
more than made up for any shortfalls. Approaches to
the technology were more varied than anticipated.
Some chose a video diary approach, some simply
surreptitiously lmed their colleagues while they were
not themselves performing, others took a narrated
documentary approach to the use of the cameras, and
others a more avant-garde and improvisational ap-
proach. However, with the Aftershock project, it was
only after the event that artists were able to make
sense of the whole of which their individual contribu-
tions were part.
The response of online users has been particularly
impressive. There were nearly 2000 unique visitors and
nearly 5000 pageviews during the festival weekend for
Scarborough, and within a week the gures had reached
5000 unique visitors from ten countries, although the UK
accounted for 75% of the trac.
1
The syndication and
use of Twitter was also a success, with quite widespread
social media activity around the festival modular
content. We built up a network of 296 friends on
Facebook who were subsequently exposed to the
content through their own news feeds. On Twitter, we
picked up 159 followers during the course of the three-
day event.
The tagging systemand possibilities for narrative order
certainly worked very well in the on-the-y approach we
took in the justlikejazz coverage of the Scarborough jazz
festival, and the syndication of the modular material
eectively established an existence for the 2009 festival as a
Web 2.0 experience well beyond the idea of a single site.
However, when accessing the justlikejazz site after the
festival, in line with blog conventions, the nal post is the
one that is seen rst, and one has to take up the invitation
to explore in the header, or select one of the other posts
about links which sit below each post, to take advantage
of the diering paths through the content. In Aftershock,
although we used a blog platformthe rst post to be seen is
actually an introductory video, and the early posts as one
scrolls down are early in the chronology of the event. This
raises some interesting questions about the experiences of
live and mediated chronologies, and about the degree of
internet competence that dierent users would posses.
While one canexpect this fromthe younger age groups that
the promoters were eager to encourage, it may constitute a
barrier for full engagement amongst older jazz fans.
To many of the Aftershock musicians, the site has
become a memento of a unique experience, and a way of
reconnecting with and learning more about their fellow
participants. One of the Marseille musicians commented
on the site:
Its a real pleasure to see all this video and pics, eternal good
souvenir for me, rst time with real musicians, not only
electronic, really, ill never forget this gig and the all week we
spend together! (Gabriel aka Abraxxxas)
To the producers, who not only wish to promote future
Aftershock concerts but also to promote the theme of
collaboration in music and demonstrate the value of the
project to their funders, the site provided a comprehen-
sive yet navigable way to engage in and interact with the
project. Additionally, the modularization and tagging of
the content aords fans of the individual artists, of
leader/curator Nitin Sawhney, of localized niche musics,
or of the Aftershock experience itself, a wealth of
material from which to build and reinforce existing
bodies of specialist knowledge and savant activity.
1
Two free Google services were employed to monitor visitor
information, trac statistics and RSS subscriptions: Google
Analytics and Feedburner. With these tools, we were able to
monitor hits; trac ow; referrals from other websites
that might be linking to us; RSS subscriptions and analyse
the overall success of the project.
Experimenting with fandom, live music, and the internet 167
5. Conclusion
We set out to undertake these projects with a dual purpose:
to apply our understandings of music fan culture and the
possibilities of social and interactive media for the benet
of a knowledge transfer partner, and to experiment with
the possibilities of modularization, narratives and taste-
making in online media. Our knowledge transfer partners
approved of the work we had undertaken and we have
plans to repeat and develop our work at the next festival
and Aftershock event. We also generated signicant
experience about the processes of online production, and
the ways in which notions of fan practice can be utilized in
production. We took a position that experiences of live
jazz events were not in any simple way reducible to the
performances of the musicians on the stage, and that a
wider sense of live music culture needed to be generated
and represented. The metaphor of online production as
just like jazz gave the project a coherence we could
explain well to fans, musicians, promoters and venue
organizers. Although we took a key role in the pilots we
have discussed here as case studies, we were also interested
in using technologies which could be made available to
these groups of people to undertake a similar project for
themselves. We foundthat it was very easy tosparkinterest
in these practices amongst individuals and we will be
building on this to examine ways in which we could make
the technology, our approach, and the production
processes we designed more widely available.
These more practical outcomes are paralleled by three
benets of a more philosophical nature. These relate to
the ideas of professionalism within new media produc-
tion, the challenges of nding new ways to inscribe or
enable narratives in media products, and the role of live
events in jazz as it increasingly becomes an idea which is
mediated through products like our pilots.
As experienced media producers, we were able to create
content quite quickly, and we relied heavily on the
contributions of professional and amateur content crea-
tors. We recognize that it would be more dicult for those
less familiar with the technology and processes to imitate
these approaches, and that wider groupings of content
creators can make the process even harder to manage. We
are also aware of the blurring of roles from those
established in more traditional forms of media. A series
of technological developmentsfrom desktop publishing,
through low cost portable recording and image-making
equipment, to increasingly accessible online production
applicationshave created the possibility of greater
media democracy. Fan production has been one of the
most obvious beneciaries of these changes. In the
production team, there was a productive tension between
those who placed a greater emphasis on the virtue of craft
skills in content sourcing and editing, and those who
argued for a get it up and let it be used philosophy. It also
raises important issues of intellectual property, especially
when the content is based upon the labour of musicians
who need to earn a living, and whose musical creativity is
the basis of the fan culture and its mediation.
The internet and the social and interactive media it
enables disrupt the standard forms and narrative
structures of traditional sound, moving image and
written media. The question of the extent to which older
forms and production techniques will be required in new
media is an interesting one, and it has a direct impact on
the work we conducted here. When what used to be a
coherent elaborated text becomes a modularized and re-
engineered text, what happens to the mediated experience
that professional practices aimed to create with some
accuracy? And what happens to our experience of music
as a live phenomenon? Jazz has largely marginalized
many of the manipulations of recording and representa-
tional technology that other contemporary music forms
have been built around. The clearest evidence of this is
the central place that liveness has in jazz culture, and the
importance jazz musicians place on live events as the
purest expression of their art. There are interesting
questions about the extent to which this can be preserved
as these events are represented in the sorts of media we
created. Will we be party to undermining the very forms
we hoped to help promote?
Our nal thoughts relate to the value of research
through experimental work. It is certainly the case that
both the process and products of these two case studies
were enormously valuable to us as scholars. While the
work reported here was built on a strong theoretical
foundation in media and cultural studies, which is
characterized by its abstraction, as a group of researchers
we have always valued work on specic cases and applied
projects. These experiments took this approach one stage
further. Although we brought many of the disciplines of
professional media producers to the projects in our aim
to create viable prototypes for our partners, we also
found that at each stage we were involved in lengthy
discussions about the implications of what we were
doing, and the extent to which our activities built upon
our earlier work and the principles we had extracted.
This was certainly an example of the reexive media
worker. Our understanding of new media production
processes, social media and participatory content crea-
tion is much more subtle and inected now, and new
questions about narrative and the idea of professionalism
and agency have been thrown up which we wish to
pursue in our next set of experimental work.
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