Playing to the Crowd

In Playing to the Crowd, Nancy K. Baym examines the shift toward more personal connections with audiences, offering an entirely new approach to media cultures and industries as she does. The book argues that workers in many fields are under increased pressure get online and connect with others to further their careers, a trend that musicians have long led. Using a dialectical framework, the book draws on in depth-interviews with a range of professional musicians and other qualitative methods to show how the rise of digital communication platforms transformed artist-fan relationships into something that can feel personal. Part I explores music as a means of communication and as a commodity, drawing out the tension between its social and commercial values. Part II looks at audiences, showing how they developed fandoms in the 20th century, how those fandoms came online, and the tension between participation and control musicians experience when they encounter online audiences. Part III looks at relationships, examining how, in contrast to the concert hall environment in which musicians and audiences may one have met, social media create a new potential and pressure for everyday, intimate relating and how musicians manage the tensions between closeness and distance this creates. Ultimately, the book argues that the relational labor musicians do is a significant mode of work, one which requires resources, skills, and strategies we must all understand.