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."