Playing to the Crowd

Front matter

PLAYING TO THE CROWD

POSTMILLENNIAL POP

General Editors: Karen Tongson and Henry Jenkins

Index

About the Author

31 54

77 105

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1. Zoé Keating, performing at the Intel booth, Consumer Electronics Show, 2011

Figure 1.1. Kristin Hersh

Figure 1.2. Stuart Braithwaite, 2011

Figure 1.3. Michael Timmins

Figure 1.4. Nacho Vegas, LAuditori, Barcelona, January 2009 Figure 1.5. Greta Morgan, The Pike Room, Pontiac, Michigan Figure 1.6. Billy Bragg at SXSW, 2008

Figure 1.7. Jill Sobule and Steve Lawson at All2Gether Now, Berlin Figure 1.8. Richie Hawtin performing as Plastikman

Figure 3.1. Mark Kelly

Figure 3.2. Turbojugend at a Turbonegro show in the Netherlands, 2016

Figure 3.3. “Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll”

Figures 3.4 and 3.5. Tape trading, 1986 Figure 3.6. Sivert Hoyem

Figures 4.1 and 4.2. Happy Tom

Figure 4.3. Stephen Mason

Figure 4.4. Lloyd Cole, 2012

Figure 4.5. David Lowery with Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven at the merchandise table

Figure 4.6. Kate Schutt Figure 5.1. Honeychild Coleman

Figure 5.2. Roger O'Donnell of the Cure, in concert in Boise, Idaho, 2016

Figure 5.3. Brian Travers Figure 6.1. Erin McKeown

Introduction

The Intimate Work of Connection

The relationship between musicians and their audiences has changed. No more disappearing into skies or mansions, today’s musicians are earthbound, under pressure to build connections with listeners. Audiences, especially those who came of age in a time of ubiquitous media, expect the musicians they follow to be “constantly accessible, especially on social media, offering unique and intimate moments to their fans”? Where once the audiences for mass music had no “real” relationship with powerful and distant performers,” today musicians relentlessly seek relationships with audiences, following listeners from platform to platform, trying to establish a presence for themselves and build connections. Day in and day out, the work of relating is never done. “People are so busy,’ says the savvy young songwriter Greta Morgan, “If you can't find a way to sneak into their daily routine, they'll miss your show?

The music industries of the second half of the twentieth century were never really stable, but for many working within and around major and independent record labels, they came to feel natural. The path for a certain kind of musician to make playing into a steady gig was unfair and unlikely, but it was clear. You got a band together, you made demos, you performed. If you were lucky, you got “discovered” by the A&R (artist and repertoire) guy from a record label. The label would pay you up front and then finance, distribute, and publicize your work. Fame and fortune would follow.

Brian Travers, saxophone player with the British band UB4o, was one of the lucky few who made an enduring career in this system. In 1983, several years after they first started playing together, their cover of Neil Diamond’s “Red, Red Wine,” recast as a smooth reggae number, became a breakout hit. The band, two siblings and a bunch of friends from the working-class town of Birmingham, went on to sell more than 70 million records. To their shock and continuing confusion, they got rich. They dont have all their original members, but they’re still going, and they still draw huge crowds.

Now, Travers wonders whether anyone can ever be as prosperous doing what he did again. “Tm probably part of that last generation that sold vinyl, and then everybody re-bought your vinyl on CD, and then the record company sold them your CD in a different packet 55 times and really milked an album, he reflects. “But that’s not a bad thing,” he adds quickly. “I mean, that’s got nothing to do with music. That’s got more to do with being an industrialist.

Few recording artists liked the old model—even Travers derides it as industrialism rather than music—but at least they felt like they knew the game. Music businesses were among the first to be upended by the internet, as audiences’ abilities to create and distribute media and interact among themselves undid the centralized control that recording and related industries had long enjoyed. Recorded music sales have dropped precipitously from their 1999 heights and the industry has contracted. Where once there were only labels, radio stations, magazines, and face-to-face conversations with friends, now there are more ways to release, hear, read about, and discuss music than anyone could have imagined when people like UB4o were starting their careers.

As a result, everyone is winging it. People who've been making music professionally for decades are as confused about how to build a career as those just starting. “My friends and I have been having the same conversation for the last ten years,” says Roger O'Donnell, who has had a forty-year career in music, sometimes as a solo jazz artist and most notably as keyboardist with the Cure. “Were now no closer to knowing what the answers are.” O'Donnell worries that today young people who would like to turn music from hobby to career will split between a very few who become industrial stars and those left behind to “slug around.” “You have a job. You work like a slave, and you tour and dont make any money. And you sell a few albums at gigs.”

Canadian band Cowboy Junkies had a huge hit in 1989, coincidentally also with a cover, this one of the Velvet Underground's “Sweet Jane.” Unlike UB40 and the Cure, they need the income that comes from continuous work. It’s hard now to figure out where that money will come from. At this point in his life, their songwriter and guitarist Michael

INTRODUCTION | 3 Timmins reflects, it’s “not like Pm going to go become a lawyer.” It’s a recurring topic of conversation with his music friends too. They lament “the fact that money’s drying up and you can’t get any money to do this or money to do that, and nobody wants to pay to do this, and everybody’s calling on you to do stuff on spec and ‘Come do my free concert’ and blah-blah-blah.” Ultimately, though, “it’s just like “Well, this is what we do, so we do it? At least we have the benefit of really loving what we do, you know?” He laughs. “I mean, you kind of just sort of hope. How are you going to find food is a whole other question. You just do it because you love it, and that’s what we do. That’s basically what it comes down to at this point.’

The cellist Zoé Keating was a child when Travers and O’Donnell found fame and fortune on major label contracts. Today, like Timmins, she is one of the many musicians trying to find a way to earn a middle-class living somewhere between the “slugging around” O’Donnell fears and the hit-centric industry machine Travers scorns. To say she is unusual is an understatement. Classically trained, she performed with the cello rock band Rasputin and collaborated with indie/alternative acts like Amanda Palmer and Imogen Heap before launching a solo cello career composing and performing uncategorizable instrumental music somewhere between new classical and alternative. She oversees the creation, production, distribution, and sales of her recordings, using the direct-to-fan platform Bandcamp, which allows her to sell her work at a minimum price she sets and allows buyers to overpay if they choose. She makes her money through album sales, live performances, performing with other artists, and licenses and commissions for film, television, and dance.

Though she is one of a kind, Keating exemplifies the entrepreneurial musician best suited to these new times. Having worked in information visualization at a San Francisco tech company during the 1990s, she’s at ease with computers and with online interaction. She knows how to code and creates open source tools for other musicians. She is a frequent speaker at music conferences, one of the few who (pays attention to, let alone) shares the financial data from her career. She is a policy advocate who works on behalf of other musicians. She was an early internet adopter, webcasting concerts from the Bay Area artists’ warehouse where she lived in 1996, long before most people had broadband. In the

Figure 1.1. Zoé Keating, performing at the Intel booth, Consumer Electronics Show,

2011. © Jon Fingas, and made available under a CC BY-ND 2.0 license. https://www. flickr.com/photos/jfingas/5337722042.

early days of Twitter, an employee put her on a list that new users could use to populate their feeds with a single click. It got her more than a million followers, most of whom continue to follow. This is complemented by a loyal adoring audience on Facebook and hundreds of subscribers to her mailing list. She has posted to all regularly for years, sharing details of her daily life. When she tweets something like “There is a light at the end of the tunnel. My son just got up and POURED A BOWL OF CE- REAL AND MILK WITHOUT ME,” dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people “like” it within hours.

Keating is the opposite of the 1980s rock star, rich not in money but in the business, technical, and social skills it takes to run her own career. She likens herself to “a small family grocery store” where shoppers realize that choosing not to pay “might actually hurt them.” She conveys this message to her followers in part by saying so explicitly, and in part by building a more intimate relationship with them than any 1980s rock star ever could. She reaches out to her audience continuously on social media, talking about topics like baking, child-rearing, and, when tragedy came, her husband's illness, death, and her ongoing mourning. “I need to let people know that I do live entirely on album sales,’ she told me: “I just need to be vocal about that. Once they know that, then they might actually buy a record. Because I know that these people might be listening already. I get these emails a lot, like people have been listeners for a while and then it wasn’t until they got to know me on Twitter that they bought my album.” Keating sells beautiful music in part by offering her audience her self. They listen to her music already. They buy it because they get to know her.

The Uncertainty of Connection

In 2009, I was asked to speak about connecting with online audiences for recording industry and artist representatives at MIDEM (Marché International du Disque et de LEdition Musicale), Europe's biggest music tradeshow. Held in the French resort city of Cannes as the global economy crashed, the event featured champagne brunches and yacht parties. The theme that year was “connecting with” and “serving” audiences. “Monetizing” lay just below the surface, the implied and sometimes explicit point of connection and servitude. If musicians connect, the logic went, audiences will pay, artists will make a living, and so too will we. The musicians on stage at MIDEM, and events like it that I have attended since then, told compelling tales of how they had used the internet to run successful promotional campaigns or raise money directly from fans.

But when I heard the musicians in the audience ask questions, or talked with them after my own talks, I didn’t hear confidence or enthusiasm.

“Do I really have to use all the sites?” they'd ask.

“I don't know what to post,’ they worried.

“I have nothing to say?

A musician’s path to a sustainable career was being redefined as maintaining a never-ending, always-engaging, continuously innovative conversation with their audience, one self-promotional enough to remind people that they have something to sell, yet interpersonal enough to make listeners feel connected and eager to spend money on them. All they had to do, it seemed, was get on social media, post, respond, and let the likes roll in. It struck me as a bit like telling someone who's moved to a new town and has no friends to “connect and engage!” as though that were actual advice for how to go about doing it. No one was discussing the daily practices of engagement, let alone what it takes to build and live in relationship with audiences day in and day out, month after month, year after year.

I wasn't surprised to hear onstage pundits’ uncritical enthusiasm about social media as a recipe for entrepreneurial success. Anyone familiar with the history of technology knows how common it is to succumb to utopian visions of new media, as though they offer simple mechanistic solutions to complex social problems. Similarly, their silence on the relational opportunities and challenges of these quasi-magical connections that could transform follower counts into cash was expected. Having taught courses in interpersonal communication for more than twenty years, I know how common it is to see relationship building and maintenance as common sense rather than strategic accomplishments. After all, we all do it every day. Give us a few good examples and we'll catch on, right?

No.

Teaching that class showed me that those most convinced relational communication is intuitive rather than scientific and artistic tend not to do it as well as those who take time to learn about it, understand its challenges, and make conscious choices about their practices. Every conversation, Id tell my students, everything we say to someone or do in their presence sends messages that further support, redefine, or undermine our relationships.

When we ask musicians to be direct, unique, and personal with their audiences, we ask them to redefine a relationship that has been structured in particular ways for decades. We ask them to do more work, work that requires relational, communicative, self-presentational, entrepreneurial, and technological skills that music work had not previously demanded. Where once organizations and media created many boundaries for their relations with audiences, it’s now musicians’ job to “draw the boundaries of what works and what doesn't” No one was addressing the personal ramifications of this relational labor. No one was asking what those relationships and interactions look like or mean to the musicians who are expected to live them. What, I wondered, would musicians have to say if asked?

To find out, I began interviewing as many as I could get to talk to me. This book draws on those interviews, a variety of other materials, and my observations and experience over decades to paint a holistic portrait of the historical, cultural, and technological contexts that give rise to the expectations that musicians connect with their audiences in more intimate ways, the dialectic tensions this ongoing relational maintenance entails, and the ways that musicians make sense of and strategically manage their connections with audiences. Musicians are the focus, but this book is not only about them. Musicians are cultural forerunners. The tensions they face as they try to negotiate the boundaries of their relationships with audiences, and the strategies they devise to manage these tensions, have implications for workers in countless fields as they strive to build and maintain markets for their work. If anyone has insight into playing to the crowd, it’s them.

Relating in the Gig Economy

Industry and government figures often consider musicians to be exemplary entrepreneurs. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, started a 2016 blog post titled “Working in a Gig Economy” with this romantic description: “Ryan Heenan works whenever, wherever. He’s a songwriter who sells customized jingles and videos online to clients worldwide. ‘It's really a dream come true; says Heenan. ‘It gives me the freedom to set my own hours. And I can do what I do anywhere there's an Internet connection:”* One need look no further to see evidence of musicians’ leadership in the gig economy than the origins of the word “gig? a gift from American jazz musicians who adapted it from African American slang to describe work.® “Gig” made its way from music into wider parlance in the 1950s, “when the hipsters and the Beats adapted it to mean any job you took to keep body and soul together while your real life was elsewhere.”®

The gig economy prizes many of the qualities that enduring musicians have. They’re flexible, mobile, can take on a wide range of tasks, and they’re used to working in teams assembled for short-term projects.

There are reasons to wax romantic about this. The autonomy and continuous change of gigging can be exhilarating and exciting. When so many feel alienated in their places of employment, the freedom from institutions and bosses can help “keep body and soul together” even at work. While many workers must stifle their feelings to get through the workday, creative workers like musicians draw on emotions, have more opportunities to experience emotion-provoking events, and have more latitude in how they express emotion in their work.’ Yet musicians also exemplify the individualized risks, responsibilities, and precariousness of contemporary work.* Gig work is inherently unstable, and questions about where money will come from now and in the future cause anxiety. The threat of poverty is ever-present. This is the context in which forming and maintaining friendlike relationships in which artists share their “authentic” selves with audiences, online and off, comes to be seen as a potential means of maintaining their careers.

As steady jobs give way to the gig economy, people pursuing all kinds of careers now find themselves blurring lines between friendship and professional networking as they work to remain visible, stay marketable, and court audiences for their work. While a few generations ago, many workers in Europe or North America could expect to keep the same job for life, more workers are now like musicians, always on the lookout for the next gig, unsure where the money will come from, and bearing the risk of unemployment alone. Nearly 40 percent of American workers, a third more than a decade ago, are part-time, freelance, and contingent “gig economy” workers.’ Mary Gray and Sid Suri estimate from a Pew survey of contingent workers that “by the year 2027, nearly 1 in 3 American adults will transition to online platforms to support themselves with on-demand gig-work”?’ Self-employment is “fundamentally different from wage labour”; it requires distinctive communicative and relational practices, and demands that workers invest their “entire human capital” to compensate for “the lack of any organizational structure? ™

Getting a gig isn’t just about finding colleagues and employers; it’s about building relationships. To stay marketable, many people find themselves like musicians, commodifying their selves as well as their professional talent.'? Developing a “personal brand” is supposed to provide us with stability, financial success, and career advancement. °? Whether they are the creatives of New York’s Silicon Alley, socializing late into the night at networking parties where dancing girls shimmy as they drink’* or would-be Web 2.0 personalities seeking opportunity in the Silicon Valley nightlife," workers use their time off work socializing, hoping to make a name for themselves, and create the interpersonal conditions through which they can find work. Building friendly relationships with crowds of strangers is essential to the “venture labor”’® in which workers invest their time, selves, and relationships to grow their future careers.

Social media, from mainstream platforms like Facebook to bespoke apps, are central to building and maintaining these relationships and to acquiring and displaying the status markers that make people marketable.’” One manager explained to me that musicians should treat reaching out to their audience and peers online “like a full-time job.” But no matter how much they do, there is more to be done. And no matter how optimistic the dream of staying professionally afloat through personal connection, or how enriching the connections people form may be, as we'll see, the daily practices of relating can also be boring, confusing, unsettling, and a source of stress, anxiety, and fear. Relational labor often demands skills and practices different from the job you want to be paid to do, and it can take time away from that work and from leisure.

Intimacy has been mobilized to serve capitalism for generations, but the internet, particularly the loose collection of platforms known as “social media,” brings a new twist. The “commodification of intimate life” that sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls the “the great unnoticed trend of our time”’* increasingly includes an expectation that people use always-on media to turn their selves into products and personal relationships into career opportunities. The internet’s networking, data-sharing, and platforms have been used simultaneously in ways that undermine the labor structures that once shaped careers and push people toward making and maintaining professional connections that resemble intimate relationships in their frequency, ordinariness, and how personal they are.

The relationships people form through relational labor can be rewarding and pleasurable in ways that transcend the utilitarian frames that surround them. Aside from the practical benefits of being able to broadcast information, being in touch with the people who appreciate your work brings validation, interesting conversation, and genuine friendship. As Andrea Muehlebach wrote of Italians doing volunteer work for the Italian state, “the economy of good feeling is more than an ideological smoke screen or a psychological palliative. Rather, it is a profoundly indeterminate space of both love and loss, pleasure and pain, compassion and exclusion.” She warns us not to underestimate the potency of the emotional ties this work generates: “The fact that the public produced through these acts is partial does not make the acts themselves so.”

In many ways, the relationship between musicians and audiences has always been intimate. Musicians often compose and perform from a very personal place. When that music affects audiences, it can feel like a direct line of heart-to-heart communication has opened. Nacho Vegas is a Spanish alternative folk singer-songwriter, known in Spain as a literary figure akin to Bob Dylan. Sometimes, he told me, music can “create in some people who like your songs the sense that you have important things in common, like feelings or experiences in life. Which is not always true. But it can be beautiful as well. Relationships with the audience can be beautiful and strange at the same time. And that’s great, I think”

Once commodified, music was marketed in part by strategically crafting and selling artists’ images so that audiences might feel a sense of identification, admiration, or awe (e.g., Richard A. Peterson on the fabrication of authenticity in country music). Technologies such as microphones that can capture a voice no louder than a whisper and relay it directly into our bodies put us into close sensory contact with musicians even if they were worlds away. But until recently, these experiences of intimacy were ephemeral and largely imagined by listeners as they engaged with musicians’ recordings. On the rare occasions musicians and fans were in the same place, their encounters were usually highly ritualized. Unless they were in the same social circles in the same towns, musicians and audiences couldn't have the kind of ordinary, friendlike interaction so common today.

That changed in 2002 with the launch of MySpace. It may be a punchline now, but MySpace was the first social network site to explode globally. Created and based in Los Angeles, MySpace seeded its network with people in the LA music scene, betting that musicians’ need to build and reach audiences could serve the company’s need to convert people, be they musician, fan, or anyone else, into users. For musicians, the po-

INTRODUCTION | u tential seemed clear: make a profile, upload your songs so people can hear them, start collecting friends. Other musicians can also be used as friends. Get enough friends to up your friend count to where it demonstrates marketability and you can parlay that into gigs, recording contracts, and—if you are as lucky as Arctic Monkeys, early on described as “the first MySpace band” (a description they rightly rejected)— worldwide success. Getting and keeping friends on social network sites could be fun and really did create new opportunities, but rather than replacing what musicians had long done, these new media platforms “set up new (often completely unforeseen) musical relationships and activities.”””

What musicians sought with MySpace after 2002, gig workers around the world seek today on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn where, with the right contacts and a well-maintained, engaging presence, you might find your next career opportunity. People who never thought of themselves as having “audiences” now find themselves trying to “connect” and “self-brand” in the hopes of following their dreams, living their passions, or, more likely, getting a paying gig that covers rent. Online and off, freelancers and entrepreneurs court social bonds in what used to be free time, blurring the boundaries between social life and work life, colleagues and audiences, friends and fans. Relational labor is now normal, yet we have barely begun to understand it.

Music

Musicians are exemplary workers, yet music work has distinct qualities. It is widely agreed that music fulfills “different needs and ways of being human” than language does.”” Cultures vary in how they express and limit music, but there are no cultures now or known to history without it. Music allows us to communicate, process, and structure feeling, relationship, and social order in ways that language cannot. It is a highly structured, abstract, and complex information system, organizing parts into hierarchical containers and drawing extended contours that we recognize as melody.”* It raises and subverts expectations in ways that arouse feelings. Yet even when it incorporates lyrics, it does not—indeed, cannot—impose meaning. It has unique power to mean precisely because it evokes without explicit reference.’

The musicologist Christopher Small argues that the interplay of notes and passages in music—raising, dashing, and fulfilling expectations— allows us to experience and reconcile the contradictions of relationships between people and metaphysical deities, one another, and the social institutions that bind and separate.’ Musicking, he writes, using the Old English word to remind us that music is an activity, not an object, is “a tool by means of which our real concepts of ideal relationships can be articulated, those contradictions can be reconciled, and the integrity of the person affirmed, explored and celebrated”? Simultaneously personal, intimate, and collective, music has unusual power “in forging, fostering, solidifying and challenging values and attachments”? Music produces and inflects social relations “from the most concrete and intimate to the most abstract of collectivities?”** It embodies nations, social hierarchy, and “structures of class, race, gender and sexuality” while supporting institutional forces like “elite or religious patronage, market exchange, the arena of public and subsidized cultural institutions, or late capitalism's multi-polar cultural economy.”

Musical instruments were among the first technologies our species created. In what is now Europe, and perhaps other places not yet discovered, approximately forty thousand years ago, early people carefully carved mammoth tusks and bones of swans and griffin vultures into sophisticated flutes. Designed to serve metaphysical functions, these ancient people carved holes and beveled them to best fit their fingers. They strategically placed the holes to separate continuous sonic ranges into a discrete, fixed pitch. Parts were carved separately and fitted together with adhesives. Although we can’t know just how these flutes were used, in the surviving anthropological record of humanity, music always appears to be tied to religion, ritual, and their institutions. In his groundbreaking history, Gary Tomlinson argues that music was essential for the very creation of social institutions among early humans.*°

Against the epic backdrop of history, the period in which “musicians” have performed for and been paid by “audiences” is a tiny blip in the recent past. Until recently, and still today in large swaths of the globe and pockets of gatherings in Westernized societies, music making has been a ritual communal event in which all those present take part. The ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino calls this “participatory music”?! In participatory musical events, “there are no artist-audience distinctions.

Participatory events are founded on an ethos that holds that everyone present can, and in fact should, participate in the sound and motion of the performance.”** Over the course of history, particularly in the last thousand years, participatory music, while never disappearing, has had to make room for (and sometimes has found itself replaced by) what Turino calls “performative music,’ something made by a special expert category of paid “musicians” for paying “audiences” whose role is to listen.

Since the European Middle Ages, music has been increasingly objectified, commodified, and industrialized, to the point where, even as it retains all of its personal, cultural, and human value, it has become entrenched in commerce.** As global cultural investment has shifted ever more toward market logics, especially since the 1970s, the communityenhancing values of music have been increasingly obscured by a focus on financial values. Governments and industrial actors have acted on the presumption that “the life enhancing properties of art and culture were less important than the goal of economic prosperity.’** In mass music industries, for at least the last hundred years, value has been “gauged according to financial, not cultural or aesthetic, criteria”? Music workers thus find themselves between worlds that can have competing ideas about what constitutes appropriate relationships between those who make music and those who appreciate it.

Musicians

Music is an activity in which anyone can participate, making “musician” a fuzzy category. There is “no definition for ‘musician” or any “one organization that represents the majority of musicians,’ as the nonprofit musician advocacy organization the Future of Music Coalition notes.*° In this book, I focus on career (or would-be career) music workers who, even when they find success within the industry, work in what Jennifer Lena describes as “scene-based genres.” They perform in a variety of specific genres, including indie, singer-songwriter, jazz, Desi, afropunk, heavy metal, Electronic Dance Music (EDM), and others. Leno identifies four categories of music genre, distinguished in part by their economic positioning. “Industry based” genres seek to sell “musical products to as many consumers as possible”? Industrial musicians are supported and paid for by industry organizations. “Avant-garde” and “traditionalist”

genres operate outside commercial markets. Musicians in these genres neither expect nor make money. Scene-based genres sit in between. Musicians may earn livings from music, but they usually draw financial and practical support from diverse sources, including “family members, friends, and nonmusical employment to support their creative labor?** In scene-based genres, musicians and audiences tend to prize “authenticity” over artifice, and audiences’ sense of connection to the performers personalities is essential to the music’s appeal and marketing.