THERE WEREN’T A lot of people online in the early 1990s. Mark Kelly, keyboard player for the English band Marillion, early internet adopter and self-titled “co-inventor of crowdfunding,” was an exception. One night after a concert someone handed him a stack of papers—printouts from an email list of Marillion fans. Kelly went home, cranked up his modem, and subscribed. What he found surprised him. The list, founded by a Dutch fan, had about a thousand fans. And though the band’s primary market was the United Kingdom, the list was multinational. Most subscribers were in the United States. Marillion had never even toured the United States.

Kelly spent the first couple of years reading without posting, watching the discussion in secret. But the internet is the internet, and finally, someone said something so wrong that Kelly couldn’t stop himself from jumping in to correct him. His cover was blown.

Immediately North Americans asked why they didn’t tour in America.

“We don’t have a record deal in the States,” he told them, “and every time we toured in the past it’s always been with money from the record company.”

“Oh, well,” a Canadian fan wrote,”why don’t we raise the money for you to come and tour?” Others quickly agreed that this was a good plan.

“Well I think you’re a bit crazy,” Kelly told them. This was, after all, nearly two decades before Kickstarter popularized crowdfunding. “But if you want to do it. I mean, obviously we can’t have anything to do with it, but if you guys want to go ahead and organize it. We’re not taking the money.”

Kelly told them they needed about $50,000 to make it happen. Someone set up an escrow account. Within a few weeks they had raised $20,000. Before long it reached $60,000. It seemed so improbable, Kelly hadn’t even told the rest of the band.

Marillion did the tour in 1997. The fans who had fronted the money also bought tickets. Being fan-funded generated publicity. “Each gig that we were playing, there’d be a little local newspaper that would run the story about the tour fund and how the American fans had raised the money for us to tour.” It was exciting, a moment of transition, and a master class in “the power of the internet, and how rabid fans can change things, make things happen.”

In many ways, the industrial production of music worked well for music listeners. They gained more access to high-quality music of different types, in different forms, at the varied and often private times they chose to hear it than at any point in history. At the same time, the shift to industrialized, centralized music production disempowered the people who became audiences, reducing them to “consumers” in which their “only power is that of consumers in general, to buy or not to buy.” “Audience” is itself a “fictional construct” used to abstractly pull together distinct individuals having varied concrete experiences. Audience members speak with many voices, use music and other cultural materials in many ways, and have different levels of attachment to the objects of their attention. Industrial market logic views these people as atomized, perhaps with demographic characteristics by which they can be grouped and counted, but rarely as immersed in relationships with one another. But what really happened when people were carved off from what had historically been social co-participation in musical rituals was not that audiences became isolated. It was that listeners turned—as they always had—to one another.

Where musicologists see mass media as thwarting audiences’ capacity for participation, audience researchers have spent decades documenting and analyzing how productive and creative audiences became in their wake. Just as industrialization and digital media changed the work of being a musician, they changed experiences and opportunities for audiences. While musicians dealt with the challenges of building and maintaining careers in the face of the new realities of their field, audiences developed new histories of participating with one another on their own terms. Now, even as musicians struggle to find their ways in an internet-mediated music world, audiences flourish. The internet has pushed their “hitherto marginal (and marginalized) tendencies into the very mainstream of media use.” No sooner did the first nodes of what became the internet make their first connection than fans began using it to build stable and persistent group infrastructures for their fandom. They wove fan practices into the internet’s core, helping to shape contemporary media and shifting the balance of power between audiences and professionals. Practices hidden in private spaces for decades became visible and accessible, amplifying their impact. What Jay Rosen famously called “the people formerly known as the audience” can no longer be treated only as abstract numbers in a spreadsheet. “We need to radically rethink how media audiences are positioned in our new media ecosystems,” Tim Anderson argues. What used to be an audience is now “an altogether new actor that is explicitly positioned as an essential part of the design and architecture behind the production, distribution, and exhibition of information that circulates throughout new media ecosystems.” Audiences distribute and exhibit others’ works. They also make their own creative works—remixes, stories, covers, art, videos, designs—that can at times become more popular than official works. They create museum-worthy archives of musical information on websites and wikis. They write blogs. They share information (both accurate and wrong), recordings, and photographs. They create spaces and networks where they build and share supportive resources, identities, relationships, and practices. They are the ones who spread the word, who watch the gates of popular culture, and who set the norms for how it will transpire. They are the ones who “make things happen.”

With few exceptions, it took musicians years to realize that networked media could be used to communicate with fans. When musicians now come to the internet to “connect,” as they are often told to do, they find people who are already immersed in communities of their own around popular culture and, for many like those with whom I spoke, around them. The last pair of chapters looked at music, tracing musicians’ paths as music became a commercial product while still serving its timeless social functions of managing feelings and relationships. This chapter turns to fans, asking how they spent the twentieth century, and how it is that they find themselves now in such an unprecedented position to set the terms for interactions around music, including those between themselves and musicians. I focus on fans, especially fans who are active and vocal online, because they are the most visible and influential of audiences, but they are by no means the only audiences musicians encounter online. Most listeners are not “fans,” and most fans are pretty low-key in their fandom, more apt to lurk than perform. Those that do perform may not be fans. In the chapters to come, we see musicians deal with “anti-fans” actively invested in disliking them, casual fans, and entirely different sorts of audiences such as family, friends, potential collaborators, business people, and random antagonists.

Understanding Fandom

The kind of fandom musicians encounter online developed over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning even before mass communication technologies. When opera companies and other performers began doing national tours in the 1850s, they created a novel opportunity for young people to center their musical experiences around public, commercial events such as concerts and theatrical performances. Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt are said to have had early fandoms (as did poets such as Lord Byron), but certainly the most spectacular early music fandom formed around the “Swedish songbird” Jenny Lind. P. T. Barnum, the man who set the standard for marketers everywhere, gave her that descriptor and then brought her to the United States for a legendary mid-nineteenth-century tour. Barnum was masterful at creating “a sense of anticipation and desire through his use of publicity.” Adoring throngs waited outside theater doors, went to the wharf to watch her boat arrive, stood outside her hotel room, and lined the streets hoping to catch a glimpse of her carriage. Lind’s tour dominated everyday conversations, much to the consternation of nonfans. A Boston satirist complained in the weeks leading up to her 1850 appearance that wherever he went, “all the cry was, Jenny Lind and Barnum, Barnum and Jenny Lind!” Even his friend, a seemingly responsible adult, was “so full of madness and music that he rushed through the streets with the fearful velocity of an escaped locomotive,” he too calling out their names.

The definition of “fan” remains unsettled, but fan scholars and fans alike generally agree that what differentiates “fans” from other listeners is the level of feeling invested in the object of their fandom and the kinds of practices in which they engage. Fans feel for feeling’s own sake. They make meanings beyond what seems to be on offer. They build identities and experiences, and make artistic creations of their own to share with others. A person can be an individual fan, feeling an “idealized connection with a star, strong feelings of memory and nostalgia,” and engaging in activities like “collecting to develop a sense of self.” But, more often, individual experiences are embedded in social contexts where other people with shared attachments socialize around the object of their affections. Much of the pleasure of fandom comes from being connected to other fans. In their diaries, Bostonians of the 1800s described being part of the crowds at concerts as part of the pleasure of attendance. A compelling argument can be made that what fans love is less the object of their fandom than the attachments to (and differentiations from) one another that those affections afford. Carrie Brownstein of legendary Riot Grrrl band Sleater-Kinney (and later cult television show Portlandia), begins her autobiography, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, like this: “My story starts with me as a fan. And to be a fan is to know that loving trumps being beloved. All the affection I poured into bands, into films, into actors and musicians, was about me and my friends.”

The term “fan” wasn’t used until the late 1800s, when a journalist abbreviated “fanatic” to describe baseball spectators. By the 1930s, it was a “widely accepted American colloquialism, used in reference to sports, film, theater, and even politics.” In the intervening years, many fans had organized themselves into clubs. From the start, these groups were both productive and self-reflexive. They created their own media, exchanging letters and publishing and circulating newsletters. They also built archives to document and preserve their communities. Among the most well known were the elite male-dominated science fiction and Sherlock Holmes literary fandoms. Others focused on dance, sports, and, of course, music.

Throughout the 20th century, as mass media developed, fan groups grew increasingly common and complex. As travel got cheaper and communication technologies tightened connections between nations, fans began making pilgrimages to significant sites and to meet one another, particularly after World War II. Fans appropriated new technologies as they developed to make their own creative works, often before other groups. Among the new media these “audiences” used in their productions were “photographic setups, telephones, film cameras, tape recorders, mimeograph machines, home movie cameras, industrial staplers, and other innovations.”

Television fandoms that developed in the second half of the 20th century took fan creativity to new heights. They also had different gender dynamics. Women, “excluded from the male-only club science fiction fandom had largely become,” found in television fandom a way to “develop their skills and hone their talents.” By the time distant computers made their first connections in 1969, fans, especially women, were “remixing television footage to create their own fanvids, writing and editing their own zines, creating elaborate costumes, singing original folk songs, and painting images, all inspired by their favorite television series.”

Just as musicians have tried hard to be good capitalists (as we saw in the second chapter), while not wanting their work reduced to capitalist values (as we saw in the first), fans too are caught in the tensions between the social values music offers and the capitalist environment in which it is produced and circulates. In many ways, fans operate and are defined by their unwillingness to adhere to the norms of capitalism. Not content to merely purchase and use, fans insist on feeling and relationship. Where commercial markets call for anonymity and limited, ephemeral involvement, fans form deep attachments. Fans “creatively imbue their participation in musical life with a lasting personal connection and depth of culture.” They “organize themselves and make and distribute their own creative transformations of the media they love.” They act more like communities or publics than like audiences, focused on their connections to one another and the group rather than to what is so blandly called “content.”

Yet even as they push back against it, fans embrace their consumerism. This began in many ways with Barnum, who gave “a commodity focus to the artist/fan relationship, allowing the experience of fandom to be prolonged and intensified through personal investment in a set of fetishized objects” peripheral to the music. Lind fans could buy Jenny Lind dolls, gloves, scarves, and handkerchiefs. I sleep in a “Jenny Lind” bed, a 19th-century American furniture style so popular it was the cheapest decent antique bedframe I could afford on a graduate student stipend. From early on, fandom has thus fostered collecting. Many become completists, buying every version of every release they can. Fans also create new economic value; the feeling and meaning they invest can make even items with no inherent value, like an autograph, expensive. Fans in contemporary capitalism deploy “both media texts and brand messages as carriers of cultural meaning and as resources for everyday life” even as companies profit from their practices. “Economic imperatives and ‘authenticity’ are thus expressed and experienced simultaneously.”

Fans are often aware of the tensions their dialectical status as (anti)capitalists creates between themselves and media producers. They see how “industry attempts to incorporate the tastes of the fans, and the fans to ‘excorporate’ the products of the industry.” They know that corporate interests are always essential to, yet working against, their own. Their modes of participation “may benefit, run counter to, or be entirely irrelevant to the interests of producers and marketers, whether such activities are authorized or not.” Bound together in fandoms, audience members engage in “a collective strategy, a communal effort to form interpretive communities” that challenges the power of popular media. As we will return to in the next chapter, for artists and others in the music industries, the ability of fans to interpret, create, and distribute media among themselves is a mixed blessing, depending on what they are doing and on each artist’s individual willingness to cede control. The inevitable friction between those who create mass media and the fans who remake it becomes increasingly palpable when those who own intellectual property routinely co-opt fans and their practices for the added value they bring to their products, while simultaneously demanding that fans should “not divert from principles of capitalist exchange and recognize industries’ legal ownership of the object of fandom.”

An Exemplary Fandom

The Norwegian death-punk band Turbonegro has a fandom that demonstrates both how bands provide grounds for participatory communal experiences that transcend them and how inseparable those communal experiences are from commercial markets. Cocky and ironic, Turbonegro are aggressively not radio friendly. Their look suggests flamboyant sailors. Their album and single titles are often raunchy or absurd (“Ass Cobra,” “I Got Erection,” “Fuck the World (F.T.W.),” “Hot for Nietzsche”). Without radio to promote them, they need their fans. Just as KISS had their army, Turbonegro relies on their “navy,” Turbojugend (German for “Turboyouth,” a name riffing on Hitler Youth, reflecting the same dubiously appropriate jokes of the band’s song titles).

Clad in matching denim jackets embroidered with a sailor hat, and often sporting white sailor hats like the band’s, these fans provide both word of mouth and an instantly recognizable visual brand. Their denim jacket, lovingly called the Kutte, is a symbol of the fans’ transnational unity and local identity. Made by Levis, then outfitted with specialized embroidering, the jacket is sold through a central hub in New Jersey via the fan club’s website. “Noncommittal” fans can pay $100 for a version with an embroidered Turbonegro logo and cap. Serious fans join one of the 2,300 worldwide chapters (or start their own) and pay $135 for their local chapter’s version, available only by application. This Kutte say “Turbojugend” instead of “Turbonegro” and identify the local chapter to which its wearer belongs. Turbonegro’s bass player, Happy Tom, describes the Kutte’s significance like this: “You see another person wearing the jacket and basically it’s like meeting somebody you’ve known for a while. All these people it’s like they’re made out of the same ilk. I think a lot of the guys in the band are from that same ilk.”

As “ilks,” fan communities have strong ideas about what constitutes appropriate fan behavior and are not shy about policing one another for adherence online or off. There are power struggles. Groups of fans oust one another. Turbojugend, for example, have rules, many rules, most of which are tongue in cheek, and many of which concern the Kutte. Having, let alone wearing, a jacket from a chapter that isn’t yours is a borderline criminal offense. Local identity is to be respected. But adorning your Kutte with patches and pins from other chapters represents a willingness to travel to meet with distant brethren and thus appropriately displays a commitment to the community of the whole. Wearing the Kutte is required on certain holidays. July 27, Happy Tom’s birthday, is compulsory. The Kutte is expected attire at concerts, wherever you may be publicly recognized, and at fan club meetings, whether local, regional, or the annual international Turbojugend convention at a beer hall in Hamburg. Through the music, the Kutte, the chapter structure, the gatherings, and the internet, Turbojugend foster an opposition to mainstream music consumption, much like the Jimmy Buffet fans John Mihelich and John Papineau describe as “oppositional in a broader cultural sense, keeping alive a particular version of an alternative world.” In the case of the “Margaritaville” ideal of Buffet fans, their alternative vision fosters “a more general cultural premise, a traditional sense, of leisure, rest, and celebration.” Turbojugend celebrate beer rather than margaritas, but they too use the fandom to establish “an alternative basis for obtaining meaning, in contrast to the basis offered through market capitalism or materialism.”

For all the humor, Turbojugend, a fan club whose very name references fascism, leads the “rules” section of its site with a “manifesto” that’s quite serious: “By joining our association we expect that you do not tolerate fascist or racist behavior in your Turbojugend chapter and you won’t tolerate members with such tendencies. Our utmost concern is to have fun together. But it is also evident for us that everyone wearing a Turbojugend jacket is aware of this serious topic. You represent a community and should not ruin our image by thinking a jacket gives you a free ride to act stupid or run amok.” Wearing a jacket is a moral commitment to the kinds of relationships true fans are expected to build with one another. They expand on this in the “Turbojugend values” that follow: “Turbojugend has always been and will always be something like a family. It’s got to do with family values, with friendship, with loyalty, with respect. Treat your brothers and sisters like brothers and sisters. And keep an eye on each other—it’s the old thing: United we stand, divided we fall.”

Much like Billy Bragg’s fan who no longer liked his music but still went to his concerts because that’s what she and her friends do, the camaraderie among Turbojugend is more important than their appreciation of the band. Happy Tom is flattered to have such a loyal following, but he knows that nearly everyone voted against the band when Turbojugend did a survey asking whether, if forced, members would choose them or the fan club. “So it’s just bigger than the band is. It’s like the German guy said”—he fakes a German accent—”You have created the Frankenstein monster, and now it’s out of your control.”

Commercial markets are integral to Turbojugend’s participatory community. Fans buy Turbonegro music, tickets, hats, and jackets. They buy Kuttes, which don’t make much money for Turbonegro directly but helped associate them with denim to the point where Levis launched a Nordic advertising campaign featuring the band. In a nod to their anti-establishment stance, the website rules command them never to wash the Kutte (“Kuttenwaschverbot” it yells in bold font), yet they endorse Proctor and Gamble’s Febreeze air freshener as an acceptable alternative and provide a link to the brand’s website in case their other suggestion, going for a swim while wearing the Kutte, doesn’t solve the problem.

The Author as Young Fangirl

Turbojugend exemplify the idea of music fandoms as organized groups that cohere around a particular band or artist. We can also understand fandom as a context for and means of self-discovery, affirmation, and friendship that moves from object to object as identities and circumstances change across the lifespan. I was no Turbojugend, but my own youth as a music fan illustrates some of these other key dynamics of fandom and some of the significant differences between fandom before and after the internet, which we’ll return to at the chapter’s end. I grew up in an American college town, firmly positioned in the middle class, with spare money, time, and the freedom to indulge in fandom that brought. One of the most significant gifts of my childhood was a small white AM transistor radio my best friend bought for my birthday in 1974. I lay awake nights listening to WLS, Chicago’s Top 40 radio station. My friend and I discussed the songs endlessly. We knew nothing about who made the music, but knew they must be alluring. And probably sexy. Whatever that meant. Soon we were caught up in preteen girl culture, subscribing to Tiger Beat magazine and projecting our emerging sexual and romantic identities onto the heartthrobs seductively pictured in the magazines’ centerfolds. We never questioned that our bedrooms should be covered with pictures of Shaun Cassidy and Andy Gibb (she preferred Leif Garrett). Nor did it occur to us that, like the girls before us who turned the Beatles into sex objects, we were upsetting gender rules about who was supposed to pursue whom. I started hanging out at the local independent record store in Campustown, a neighborhood in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where I lived, talking to the guys behind the counter. I wanted to know everything I could about the music I liked, and I didn’t want to miss any music I thought I should know.

I lacked the language to call it “sexism” or “ageism” at the time, but the more I read music criticism and interviews with musicians, the more it stung to hear how blithely they used the trope of “13-year-old girls” as prima facie evidence that whatever music we liked was bad. They still do and it still stings, though at last, 13-year-old girls have an idol willing to sing their praises in Harry Styles. “Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music—short for popular, right?—have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy?” Styles told a Rolling Stone reporter who asked if he worried about proving his credibility to older audiences. “That’s not up to you to say. Music is something that’s always changing. There are no goal posts. Young girls like the Beatles. Are you gonna tell me they’re not serious? How can you say young girls don’t get it? They’re our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going.”

The age stigma disappeared, at least until it returned in my 40s. The gender stigma remains, although for a time working in a record store brought me some measure of legitimacy as a person who may actually know something about music. Never mind that the music industry has marketed musicians as sex symbols for years, that they so often perform songs about being desperately in love with “you,” or that some musicians are, in fact, pretty hot, women who notice that a serious musician like “David Byrne is an anatomically correct male are misguided at best.” I learned quickly that “to admit, in mixed company, to having a crush on a rock star is to overstep the bounds of proper feminine behavior.” By the end of my teen years, I understood the difference between having a crush on the musician I imagined versus the real human being, but I’ve never stopped having occasional crashes. How could I—why would I—when a musician’s songs are designed to evoke such strong feelings of love and longing?

Originally posted by WIRED