DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media

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

Ellis Jones is a researcher at the University of Oslo, Norway, whose work investigates the impact of digitization on popular music cultures. A long-time devotee of "DIY" music, his work as a songwriter has been acclaimed by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and NPR.

1. The problem
2. The past: a history of DIY music in three case studies
3. The personal: intimacy and identity work on social media
4. The players: gatekeeping, authority, and ownership within the scene
5. The public: elucidating difference and performing politics
6. The popular: metrics, measurements, and the DIY imagination
7. The platform: self-sufficiency and the political economy of social media
8. The plan: envisioning alternative platforms