Pop music fans: pleasure in text or context? The case of Madonna fans

Fandom, after being negatively depicted as pathology, has been widely analyzed and emerged as a complex emotional, participative and productive experience. However, relevant spaces for analyses still remain in this area of study: even though what fans do has been investigated in-depth, still it is not very clear which role these practices have in relation to fans' pleasure. If a limited view of fandom as an excessive consumption of popular texts has been challenged, even a limited idea of fans' pleasure as mainly aroused by the core consumption of a text, must be challenged. This paper aims at investigating this aspect, specifically referring to pop music fans: does the source of pleasure lie in text, that is in music, or in context, that is in the practices of fandom? The field research conducted on a Madonna fans virtual community and on a sample of non-fans revealed notable differences between the two groups, regarding their mechanisms of pleasure and motivations, with important implications for the management of the two segments of consumers.

Anna D'Augusta nació en Rimini (Italia) en 1986. En 2008 se licenció en Economía de las Artes, la Cultura y la Comunicación por la Universidad Bocconi (Milán), donde obtuvo su Maestría en el mismo campo de estudio en 2011. A través de diferentes experiencias laborales en el negocio de la música, está convirtiendo su pasión por la música en un objetivo profesional.