Swimming Upstream? Independent Musicians and Music Platform Imaginaries

Abstract

This article investigates independent musicians’ engagement with music streaming services, social media, and other algorithmic technologies in a music industry increasingly structured around digital media platforms. Based on nine interviews with experimental musicians from the UK, Portugal, and Sweden, the article introduces “music platform imaginary” as a term for analyzing how independent artists position their working practices and artistic values in relation to digital music and media platforms. It critically examines the assumption that the platform age stifles alternative modes of production by forcing independent artists to adapt to the sociotechnical logics of algorithmic systems. The findings show that these independent creators strategically engage with platforms including Bandcamp, Spotify, and Instagram in the distribution and promotion of their work. At the same time, artists frequently regard the technological and economic logics of platforms—and the literacies they draw on in navigating these logics—critically, and as conflicting with their professional values. Artists’ experiences of change within a volatile digital media landscape further highlight this ambivalence. Nostalgic depictions of early twenty-first-century online music cultures and technologies are used to convey criticisms of the centralized corporate logics associated with the platform age. Theorizing artists’ experiences of different platforms, the article discusses democratization, visibility, algorithms, and fatigue as four music platform imaginaries that underpin their navigation of the platform system. The ambivalence towards platformed music culture that frames these imaginaries highlights a need for further research on artistic practices and value systems that exist alongside, and at times fully disconnected from, the platform economy.

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