Artists As Entrepreneurs, Fans As Workers - Morris

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Artists as Entrepreneurs, Fans as

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Jeremy Wade Morris
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Music and Society, 37:3, 273-290, DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2013.778534
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Vol. 37, No. 3, 273290, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2013.778534
Artists as Entrepreneurs, Fans as

Workers
Jeremy Wade Morris
This paper uses the increasing integration of social media into music making and
marketing to reflect on the work artists and their fans perform. While new technologies
are celebrated for making cultural production more accessible, there is also more pressure
on artists, as cultural entrepreneurs, to produce and distribute their own work. At the
same time, fans are facing greater invocations to participate through overt calls to become
co-creators or through more passive participation like behavior tracking. Fans cannot
really consume without working. Using an analysis of British musician Imogen Heap
including press articles and data scrapes from Heaps social media accountsthis paper
focuses on the changing occupational and creative roles for artists and fans and the
attendant implications for the circulation of cultural goods.
Introduction
In 2009, British ambient pop singer Imogen Heap undertook a massive social media
campaign to produce and promote her new album Ellipse. Using video diaries, blog
posts, and status updates across sites like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, Heap
kept fans apprised of the albums progress, solicited their input on demos, and
included them in other aspects of the production process, such as the design of her
album art and the writing of her press biography (Bascaramurty; Fusilli; West). As the
cultural industries experience ongoing aftershocks in the wake of digitization, the case
of Imogen Heap shows how social media and online distribution have occasioned a
re-thinking of how artists, authors, and musicians go about the business of their art.
Heaps case also highlights the different occupational and creative roles that are
emerging for users and fans and the shifting ways users are engaging with cultural
content and with the creators and producers of that content.
Accordingly, this paper uses the increasing integration of new media into music
making and marketing as an opportunity to reflect on the idea of the artist as
entrepreneur and on the cultural labor of fans. While new technologies have been
routinely celebrated for making the tools of production more accessible (Anderson;
Breen and Forde; Jones; Kot; Kusek and Leonhard), there is also more pressure on
q 2013 Taylor & Francis

274 J.W. Morris
artists, as entrepreneurs; expertise they may neither have nor be interested in attaining
(Theberge, Any Sound). On the other side of the equation, fans are facing far greater
invocations to participate (Burkart; Theberge, Everyday Fandom). Be it through
overt calls to help artists make and market their content, or through more passive
participation such as the ambient tracking of users habits, patterns, and preferences,
fans cannot really consume without working. Using Imogen Heap as a case study of
a cultural entrepreneur, this paper focuses on the changing expectations of artists
and fans in light of the digitization of the music commodity and on the subsequent
implications for the circulation of cultural goods like music. It questions the
applicability of terms like work and labor to user and fan practices and argues
that the artists production practices are increasingly part of the product they are
offering.
Social Media and Cultural Entrepreneurs

The digitization of the music industries is now well into its third decade (Burkart and
McCourt; Garofalo; Tschmuck). While digital formats do not yet dominate all
markets or genres their effect on the music industries is undeniable:
What is clear, however, despite resurgences in vinyl sales and the relative stability of
CD album sales, is that there has been a shift in music consumption toward the
virtual, or at least toward complex imbrications of virtual and physical artefacts in
everyday musical practices. (Beer 223)
The decline in dominance of traditional ways of marketing and selling music (e.g. the
dwindling economic and cultural influence of radio, music video television,
and brick-and-mortar retailers) has sparked an explosion of new business models
(Van Buskirk). Musicians of many stripes and genres are experimenting with new
media/social media to connect with their fans, explore variable pricing models for
their songs, and to find new audiences. While these strategies range from major label
artists to independent musicians and from sincere efforts at connecting with fans to
uninspired marketing spam, it is hard to ignore that the ways of doing business, as a
musician, are changing.
The digitization of the music commodity creates economic and structural
opportunities (Byrne; Krasilovsky and Shemel; Thomson and Zisk). The economics of
digital formats eliminates a number of traditional production costs (e.g. packaging,
physical shipments of products, etc.) and greatly reduces some of the others (e.g. retail,
distribution). There are still studio fees, marketing and advertising campaigns, time
and effort for discovering new talent, and administration fees, but these pale in
comparison to the costs for physical products (Byrne). This has been especially
important for independent artists, who have long been accustomed to handling much
of the administrative aspects of their music themselves (i.e. marketing, promotion,
touring). While the emerging uses of social and other new media are just the latest
iteration of this do-it-yourself ethos, the significant cost savings and proliferation of
Popular Music and Society 275
available platforms through which to communicate with audiences and other artists
has helped make independent production and distribution a less costly model for
artists to experiment with (Anderson).
Aside from economic benefits, the larger hope for digital music lies in the structural
changes it portends. Artists now have greater access to a wide variety of tools that
allow them to produce, distribute, and market their own music and to circumvent the
traditional paths of circulation for the music product. Digital technologies can put
artists directly (or at least more directly) in contact with their fans (FMC, Digital
Infrastructure, Manifesto). Cutting out the intermediaries makes it, in theory,
cheaper to produce and market music and it potentially affords artists more intimate
and meaningful relationships with their fans. In some cases, this seemingly direct
contact with audiences presents opportunities for co-creative relationships to evolve.
Again, it is not that these relationships are entirely new; musicians have previously
relied on the labor of fans and audience members (e.g. fan clubs, word-of-mouth,
tactical promotions, etc.). Rather, the widespread use of new and social media
platforms and relative ease with which they can be put at the service of developing co-
creative relationships makes the practice a more common and viable strategy for
emerging and independent artists.
This seemingly direct connection between artist and fan is perhaps clearest on
social media platforms or technologies that make up what is known, for better or
worse, as Web. 2.0. Proponents praise the democratizing effects of technologies and
services that allow anyone with a creative idea to participate in artistic production
(OReilly; Shirky; Tapscott and Williams). Others are more critical (Allen; Fuchs;
Jarrett; Kawashima; Zimmer) and contend that social media and similar collaborative,
productive software and services create a cult of amateurs that has negative
consequences for art (Keen), for political participation (Morozov), and for the
integration of capitalism and consumption into free time and leisure activities (Dean;
Scholz; Terranova). Still, it is hard to deny that social media have become primary
tools for artists (amateurs and professionals alike) to gain exposure and connect with
users. Social networks like Facebook or MySpace and other technologies associated
with Web 2.0 seem to mash up so many previous forms of publicityconcert posters,
videos, interviews, demos, radio, etc.that they are hard for emerging artists to
ignore. Artists across the various levels of the music industries are turning towards
new media as an alternative way to market and distribute their music, connect with
fans, or re-evaluate their troubled relationships with the traditional music industries.
The flipside to this integration of new and social media into the production process is
a greater burden on artists to take control of aspects of their career that they previously
delegated to labels, managers, or other ancillary staff. Artists are increasingly becoming
cultural entrepreneurs or taking part in what might be called cultural entrepreneur-
ship (Scott). Michael Scott defines cultural entrepreneurship as marked by a lack of
economic success, at least initially. Michael Scott defines cultural entrepreneurs as
independent and emerging artists who undertake cultural production primarily for
exposures sake and for purposes of networking. Their artwork functions to increase
276 J.W. Morris
their visibility and cultural capital among cultural intermediaries that may one day
provide them with steadier economic return. Cultural entrepreneurship, at least
initially, is marked by a lack of economic success. Cultural entrepreneurship becomes
the process of trying to convert a lack of financial resources into economic success
through cultural capital and artistic influence (Scott 246 47). Importantly, the idea
that artists are also entrepreneurs is not an attempt to undermine any sort of
authenticity typically associated with the artistic process, but rather to acknowledge
that the artistic process often involves entrepreneurial responsibilities and acumen.
While art and commerce are frequently presented in opposition to one another, artists
have long had to navigate the line between the two. Even studies of musicians in
the eighteenth and nineteenth century (see, for example, Swedberg; Weber) suggest
that, in addition to making art, musicians are business people and social forces,
entrepreneurs who take advantage of the opportunities before them (Weber 3).
Scotts research usefully illuminates the ways in which independent cultural

producers navigate their first encounters with the broader cultural industries.
However, by limiting the definition of cultural entrepreneurs to that of young,
independent and economically struggling artists (Scott), the new kinds of work many
cultural artists are now undertaking as a result ofor in conjunction withthe
development of new technologies go unaddressed. Newer media and social platforms
open up additional spaces for all levels of artists to share, present and distribute their
work as well as supplementary means for interacting with fans (Baym, Seeing Social
Media Audiences). This affects younger, independent musicians as much as it does
more established and famous ones as both fans and artists begin reinterpreting
traditional notions of celebrity. Given the possibilities for connecting with artists on
these platforms, as Alice Marwick and danah boyd note, celebrity is moving from a
highly controlled and regulated institutional model to one in which performers and
personalities actively address and interact with fans (139 40). Since these media
platforms are available to both emerging and established artists alike, they create a
complicated social environment where fans, famous people, and intermediaries such
as gossip columnists co-exist (Marwick and boyd 143). These kinds of settings exert
new entrepreneurial pressures in terms of consistency of content production and
strategies of representation and performance (Baym, Fans or Friends 299 305).
The tools and platforms for sharing music and connecting with fans are by no
means compulsory, but because almost anyone can have a Bandcamp page or Twitter
account, many artists in popular music genres almost need to have one by necessity.
Just as the availability of low-cost, easy-to-use home studio hardware and software in
the late 1990s put higher expectations on artists to have high-quality demo CDs ready
before approaching record labels (Theberge, Any Sound), artists today face similar
pressure to prove an extensive online presence with a valuable market of followers
in order to convince labels or other financers to sign them or keep promoting
their work. Social media become training grounds for artists considering a role in the
music industries and empirical proof for labels gauging the continued viability of a
particular artist or trend.
In the process of trying to build these networks and markets, as Nancy Bayms
recent research suggests, artists are experiencing different encounters with, and
expectations from, their fans (Engaging Fans, Fans or Friends, Seeing Social
Media Audiences). She notes that artists often feel compelled to engage in direct,
proactive and increasingly interpersonal modes of interaction with their fans and
that what used to be clearly performer-audience relations increasingly resemble
ordinary friendship (Fans or Friends 1). Part of the reason for this blurring of roles
is technological. The technology underpinning the micro-blogging network Twitter,
for example, makes celebrities and micro-celebrities seemingly more accessible
than they are in other forms of mediated representation (Marwick and boyd). Twitter
followers can subscribe to anyone elses account as long as the feed is public; unlike
some other social network sites, no reciprocation from the person being followed is
required. Moreover, by using hash tags and @reply functions, even users not
subscribed to a particular account can potentially be in communication with an artist

they admire. These connections let artists and other famous people perform
celebrity in a way that seems more authentic and intimate than in other media
(Marwick and boyd).
Although the 140-character limit on Twitter updates may not offer an in-depth
venue for confessional revelations of an artists inner personality, the intimacy that
results from tracking a celebritys tweets on a regular basis may create an equally valid
feeling of knowing them (Marwick and boyd 148). There is also a wide range of
content that can extend beyond mundane updates of an artists daily life; artists like
Radiohead, U2 and a myriad of independent artists (for example, Ani Difranco) use
their social media feeds for making political and ethical statements that both further
their connections with audiences and build their artist image. In this respect, these
new media platforms for engagement extend previous modes of artist-fan connection.
Artists with a following have long cultivated fan clubs that they foster and maintain by
providing exclusive access to b-sides and rarities, somewhat personalized letters or
written material through the mail, or special shows and concerts. Similarly, many fans
have typically relied on fan letters as a way to communicate directly with artists
(Baym, Seeing Social Media Audiences 292). As Baym notes though, the difference
with these new platforms is how quickly and how frequently audiences can now be in
touch (Seeing Social Media Audiences 293). Moreover, fans have higher
expectations about receiving a response from those they are in contact with (Seeing
Social Media Audiences 293). The norms of sites like MySpace or Twitter for the
broader population apply even for relationships that are defined by a fan/celebrity
divide.
Different types of social media platforms, then, offer different spaces and
conventions for fan-artist interaction. Each of the sites where artists and their fans
interact has its own expected pace and rhythm in terms of updating and posting
content. As a result, artists find themselves with a variety of profiles across various
networks that require careful and constant curating. Even if the artists themselves
are not maintaining their own profileschoosing instead to employ record labels,
278 J.W. Morris
PR firms, or consultants to manage their social media profiles for themactive social
media profiles are crucial for developing strong connections with fans and for
fostering productive fan communities (Beer; Marwick and boyd). As David Beer
argues, The profiles of popular music performers are crucial in making the flickering
connections central to the collaborative functioning of Web 2.0 by introducing
like-minded people who have never actually met (Beer 224). Ultimately, as artists
negotiate new modes of interacting with their fans and audience, they must also
negotiate their own relationships with the different technologies, media, and
platforms on which these encounters take place.
Ellipse
The release of Heaps Ellipse offers a glimpse at what a reconfigured creative process
looks like. Heap has released several solo albums and one as part of an electronic duo
formerly known as Frou Frou. Her songs have been featured in multiple television and
film soundtracks, and she has even received a Grammy award for her production
work. Despite these achievements, her records have never achieved massive
commercial success. She was formerly signed to independent record label Almo
Sounds, but, when Universal Records acquired Almo towards the end of the 1990s,
they dropped Heap from their roster. Instead of pursuing another contract,
Heap started her own record company and began using the web as a key means of
promotion (though she still licenses her work for distribution and some promotion to
Sony and RCA). To that end, she is an avid user of new and social media platforms,
with hundreds of thousands of followers on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter
(Bascaramurty). While Heap is an accomplished musician and producer, this paper
focuses more on her marketing skills than her musical ones. I treat Heap much the
way Beer researches Jarvis Cocker: as both a product of, and participant in, global
cultural production who can be analyzed via the traces from her (social) media
imprint (Beer). The analysis below draws from a sample of dozens of press articles
profiling the singer as well as a qualitative analysis of some of her online efforts. This
includes imogenheap.com (Heaps website which launched in 1999 and has been
frequently updated and maintained since 2005) and the video blogs she posted on
YouTube as well as her profiles/accounts on MySpace (since early 2005), Flickr (2004),
Twitter (since April 2008), Ustream (2009), and, more recently, Facebook and
SoundCloud. Using text collection software, I compiled the historical contents of the
various sites and analyzed them in conjunction with the period leading up to and
directly after the launch of Ellipse.
Perhaps the most striking outreach effort in Heaps Ellipse project was the
forty video blogs (vBlogs) she created throughout the two-year recording process
(200709). The videos generally lasted between five and twelve minutes, and attracted
anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000 views and hundreds of ensuing comments.
The videos show Heap transforming her family home into a useable sound recording
studio and feature the singer reflecting on the process of recording. The videos play
a key role in cementing the relationship between Heap, her fans/followers, and her
music. Commenters, for example, remark at how the videos offer insight into a
process many of them had found mysterious:
This was an amazing idea. It really lets your fans feel a closer connection to you. Well
at least for me! ^ _ ^ We get to see the Immi behind the scenes. These vBlogs
almost top the time i met you, almost.:P Keep up the great work and your lovely
spirit!! (painted0green)
The connection described by this user is partly the result of the form: hosted on
YouTube, the videos partake of a certain amateur aesthetic, even though they are
clearly filmed and edited by a trained videographer. Heap also consistently presents a
quirky, creative personality and maintains a tone that is informal, approachable, and
accessible. The impression of seeing Immi behind the scenes is also a result of the
content. Many of the early videos are about relatively mundane activities (e.g. getting
a drivers license, spending time with her cat, moving furniture) rather than any kind
of insight into her musical life or other traditional markers of celebrity lifestyle. The
sharing of these seemingly trivial details is part of what makes social media so effective
in creating intimate bonds between celebrities and users. The successful performance
of intimacy depends on providing the illusion of backstage, giving the impression of
uncensored glimpses into the lives of the very famous (Marwick and boyd 140).
While the details of some of Heaps video updates may seem inconsequential at
first, the result is a strong connection with the artist that goes beyond fandom and
prepares users to serve integral roles in the production process. As is obvious from
some of the comments to the video blogs, Heaps decision to share the process behind
the albums creation becomes part of how fans hear and interpret her music:
I would just like to say that I personally really appreciate you letting us all be a part
of your life, your music. The songs feel that much more personal. For instance,
when you mentioned the neighbors and the tree, it felt nostalgic because i remember
you reporting it on your vlog months ago. Your music is truly inspiring, cheeky or
not. (doctor2nsh)
Heaps videos, then, are not just a platform for extending or building her celebrity
status by acquiring more devoted fans. Entrepreneurially, she is making a concerted
effort to create a relationship with fans and followers that will serve as a starting point
for further involvement in the production process or a deeper connection during
consumption.
As the videos continue, fans are brought more directly into the production process.
Once Heap has her home renovated and her studio fully functioning (around video
blog #12), viewers are witness to recording sessions and to some of the dilemmas
Heap faces during the production process. The first song Heap shares through the
video blog, for example, is for the soundtrack of the TV show Heroes (Heap Video
Blog #14). Heap describes how such side projects help support her work but they
also unfortunately keep her away from finishing Ellipse. She apologizes to fans,
acknowledging their eagerness to hear the album, and asks for their patience.
280 J.W. Morris
As Heap shares new material, she uses the opportunity to reward viewers for tuning
in and to solicit feedback from fans. Typically, Heap will play a section of a new song
she is working on and ask fans to respond. Although many fans chime in with undying
praise such as u r like the best, I love you (ASIthLordsPoet19) and next to Bjork
you are my second number one favorite artist, if that makes any sence???
(shirochachadorian), many also offer more specific constructive feedback. On one
occasion, after a video blog in which Heap played the chorus of her new single First
Train Home, several YouTube users remarked on its similarity to another pop song.
One indicative comment, for example, read: For some reason when you played First
Train Home I was hearing I Love You Always Forever that song by Donna Lewis
(jancipants). The following day, Heap sent a message out to fans signaling she had
listened to the reference song and she agreed with the remarks: Had a listen to
that . . . song some of you said first train home chorus sounded like and youre so
right! (Heap, Had a Listen to That). In a more elaborate response, Heap used her
next video blog to play fans a revised version of the chorus, and she demonstrated to
viewers the specific changes she had made to the melody (Heap, Video Blog #26).
Aside from the video blogs, Heap held contests through photo-sharing site Flickr
where users submitted photos based on song lyrics for a chance to win copies of her
CDs and she offered various other promotions through MySpace and her mailing list.
Heap used a contest with her network of followers to find a graphic designer to come
and live in her house for a week to help design the albums cover art. She also
outsourced the writing of her press biography to her followers. Using Twitter, Heap
asked fans to submit 140-character-long tweets about her life and music, which she
then compiled into a three-page document. The resulting biography reads more like
an academic journal than a press bio, with each sentence being credited to one of
over fifty Twitter users/fans/friends who submitted the sentence (Heap, Tweet Biog
Story).
This is but a hint of the activities Heap and her team carried out for Ellipse.1 Heaps
committed use of social media, while not the norm among artists, is becoming less
rare. As such, it opens up larger questions for artistic production and consumption in
the culture industries. For the rest of the article, I will focus specifically on two of these
key issues: work and cultural entrepreneurship.
Work
How do we classify the work Imogen Heap and her fans and followers are doing
here? Certainly fans are taking on duties that publicists, graphic designers, and
producers are trained and paid to do (e.g. write biographies, design cover art, and give
musical feedback). But, in the case of Ellipse, followers complement rather than
replace the work done by these traditional figures. For example, instead of physically
writing the biography themselves, Heap and her teams role changed to collecting all
the submissions from Twitter and crafting them into a finished bio. For Heap, the
exercise becomes one of managing the complementary contributions of users. This is,
in other words, a version of what John Banks and Mark Deuze call co-creative labor,
or labor between audiences and professionals. They argue that the success of media
production may increasingly rely on effectively combining and coordinating the
various forms of expertise possessed by both professional media workers and creative
citizen-consumers, not displacing one with the other (Banks and Deuze 422). Media
production, in other words, is increasingly dependent on the complementary efforts
of traditional media professionals and the eventual consumers of the content in
question. Heaps work, in addition to creating music, becomes the coordination of
user production and attention through social media. Her skills involve both the
production of music and the production of an environment in which fans feel they
can contribute to the project.
This kind of co-creative labor calls into question terms like work, but also terms
like amateurs and professionals. It reveals that expertise can take multiple forms:
the formal expertise that a professional gains through practice and credentials as
well as less codified tacit expertise gained through the amateurs experience and
perspective (Ross). This is why Philippe Rosss case study of new media producers in
the UK starts with such a deceptively straightforward question: What do new media
producers know? (912 13). He responds by arguing that each form of expertise must
be taken in context, but each has something to contribute to the process. We can put
Rosss question to musicians, artists, and other cultural content creators as well. What,
after all, does a musician know that the rest of us do not? The skills to play an
instrument or perform are indeed learned and perfected over time, but they are not
the province of artists alone. This is even truer across the various managerial roles in
the cultural industries where the skillset is fuzzier (e.g. marketing, networking, trend-
spotting, buzz-building, etc.). Research on Swedish indie music bloggers suggests that
many so-called amateurs have greater expertise than the musicians (and many of the
executives at record labels) at tracking, promoting, and spreading news about the
Swedish music scene (Baym and Burnett). These expert amateurs develop their own
credentials and skills through different channels than traditional music industry
executives, but their place in the circulation and success of certain artists in the scene
is just as influential. Screeds against amateurs, like Andrew Keens, hold little weight
when we realize that the act of creating and distributing cultural goods is such a highly
complex task that all experts are amateurs at some part of the process.
Perhaps the terms work or labor here are misleading then. They reduce the
complex meanings behind why people contribute, participate, and expend time and
effort in projects that are not entirely rewarding in the classical economic sense
(i.e. profit, compensation, etc.). This is precisely the issue in the recent debates on
labor and cultural production between critics like Christian Fuchs who employ
Marxist critiques to suggest that producers of user-generated content comprise a new
class of exploited laborers under informational capitalism and those like Adam
Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni who argue that labor theories of value do not
adequately account for the value generated through artist-fan relations and user-based
production practices (Fuchs, Arvidsson and Colleoni). We do know that Imogen
282 J.W. Morris
Heaps fans and followers received various forms of compensation, depending on the
project. Contest winners received merchandise while bio contributors received
recognition/credit, a free CD, and a special invitation to a party with Imogen Heap.
Other projects, like the graphic design work, were paid contract work. Considering the
amount of labor fans do on behalf of Facebook, MySpace, Last.FM, and other such
sites through ambient tracking of tastes and preferences which are then sold back to
advertisers (Cote and Pybus), the work they do for Heap seems much more
transparent: users are more aware of the conditions of their labor/compensation and
are in greater agreement with the overall purpose of the project. While it might be
tempting to criticize the incorporation of user-given labor and content into the
musical production process and dismiss it as another instance of the exploitation of
free labor (Fuchs; Terranova), it is not clear that the users who have taken part in the
co-production process view their contributions as work or labor, and framing it on
those terms may lead us further from understanding the reasons for, and meanings of,
user contributions to the production process (Baym and Burnett 445).
Instead, fans and followers seem to be undertaking a form of what Postigo calls
passionate labor. Although the economic profit from the labor of co-creative fans
and users flows mostly to Heap, there are a range of other rewards in terms of meaning
and experience that govern their contributions. Importantly, the drive to share this
passionate labor with the Ellipse project was fostered and instilled by the kinds of
interactions Heap provided for her fans. Her labor was as much social as musical.
Passionate labor (from both Heap and her fans) helped Heap receive a significant
response to her call for submissions for help with her bio or artwork for her album.
It also extended beyond Heaps own solicitations. Some of the passionate labor fans
carry out is taken up on their own initiative. In an interesting example, one of Heaps
fans tipped her off to a leak of a promotional copy of her album on the auction site
eBay, where someone was trying to sell Ellipse several weeks before its official launch
date (Fusilli). A swarm of followers quickly investigated who was behind the leak and
traded strategies on how to stop the auction. In response, Heap and her fans put in
massive bids on eBay, ratcheting the albums cost up to 10 million pounds (Fusilli).
The suspicious behavior alerted eBay that something was amiss and the company took
the auction down. This all took place within twenty-four hours. In an era where
record labels and music industry groups bemoan users who clamor to download early
releases from unsanctioned file-sharing sites, here was a group of users, passionately
invested in Ellipse as a project, acting as lawyers and managers to make sure the album
did not get out before its official release date.
For the artist as entrepreneur, their role is as much about making connections as it is
about making sales. This is certainly not unique to the era of social media marketing;
musicians have long had to work at building and maintaining audiences through
touring, newsletters, and other forms of social outreach. However, the avenues for
enacting these kinds of relationship are proliferating and the ability to feed these
interactions into the production process is much more direct and integral (as I discuss
further in the following section). Just as Scott argues for the importance of using free
labor to build convertible social and cultural capital, Heap carries out a series of
relationship-building initiatives in order to embed fans into the production process.
However, the case of Heap shows that Scotts conclusions apply beyond independent
and emerging artists and affect many artists who enter into the blurred relationships
presented by social media and other technologies.
Heaps highly social and technologized marketing strategies say as much about her
music as does the music itself. Although the sample-based electronic music she creates
(along with found sounds) lends itself to certain modes of fan involvement
(i.e. submitting samples, sound snippets, etc.), Heap is using fan contributions as
another instrument in her music making and another component of the production
and distribution process. Through her production and marketing techniques, Heap is
trying to present a particular mode and method of being a musician and of forming
relationships with her fans. As Swedberg notes about cultural entrepreneurs in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century, One can, for example, conceptualize the artist
as someone who combines different items into the piece of art, and an economic
featuresay a way of marketingmay be one of these items that are combined
(259). Heaps work as an artist is as much about the music she creates as it is about the
way she creates and markets it. Her process is part of her product, and she is
recognized as a pioneer in this realm in music and technology circles.2
Cultural Entrepreneurship
There is no question that Imogen Heaps project is savvy marketing. She incorporated
fans into the project or, to take a more cynical stance, she provided the illusion of
inclusion. This made fans feel as if they were taking part in the albums realization.
It also created a level of passionate investment in the project that paid back on many
levels, from fans looking out for album leaks to pre-orders and sales of the finished
CD. The strategy also laid the groundwork for a series of spin-off commodities and
revenue streams: advertising sold off Imogen Heaps video blogs, a user-generated
remix album inspired by one of Ellipses throwaway songs, a DVD documentary about
the making of Ellipse and more. At a time when artists are struggling to sell CDs,
Heap is simultaneously trying to make the CD more meaningful as an object while
also downplaying its importance by introducing other consumption options.
But it is hard to dismiss Ellipse as a mere publicity stunt. An odd conflation of user
labor, targeted freelance work, and collaborative crowd-sourcing, it represents a model
of cultural entrepreneurship that puts a new spin on do-it-yourself (DIY) culture. Call
it do-it-ourselves instead, since the doing typically involves a substantial sea of fans,
friends, and followers who have taken an interest in the project. Without a record label
behind her, Heap took on many of the roles typically fulfilled by a label (promotion,
publicity, production, scheduling, etc.), but to call it DIY is disingenuous. In fact, given
the complexity of the process of producing and distributing cultural goods in the
increasingly digitized cultural industries, the idea of the lone artist with the ability to do
it all seems not only quaint but seriously misguided. While independent artists have
284 J.W. Morris
long had to resort to DIY strategies for production, marketing, and distributionand
recognizing that they likely were not doing it entirely themselvesDIO strategies
extend the network of supporters beyond the support of a small group of friends or fans
to a much wider network of possible contributors.
The persistence and participation of fans in propagating the popularity of cultural
products is hardly new (Jenkins). The difference here is the point at which fans
are being incorporated into the creative and production process. It is one thing to
have fans as active consumers. It is a wholly other undertaking to involve them as
producers, as funders, as backers. This is the crucial difference between crowd-
sourcing and crowd-funding (Bannerman). While there are plenty of opportunities
for fans to give advice and input on media content, sites like Kapipal and Kickstarter
rely on fans to fund the very production of the various projects. Artists (established
and emerging) can create project pages and put out a call for funding and fans
participate in the production process to varying degrees depending on their

investment (economic and other) in the project. Far from mere workers, crowd-
funding positions fans increasingly as patrons, investors, and collaborators. There are
more avenues for followers to participate directly and integrally in the projects of their
choosing. On these sites, the artist is responsible toand their success determined
bythe quality of the network they build and that networks level of participation.
This, however, is where the demands of being an artist bump up against the
demands of being an entrepreneur. Exciting as some of these new models may be for
disintermediation or for re-arranging the economics of production and circulation,
these new opportunities for making, distributing, and selling cultural goods throw
artists and creators into environments for which they may be inadequately suited.
Take Imogen Heaps own comments about how demanding her DIY schedule is:
About 5% of my time goes to actually making music sadly. . . . The rest is promo,
technical, planning, running around, schedules . . . blah (Heap, About 5% of My
Time). Heap also had to re-think her touring plans after realizing how much of her
time it would require to organize shows in the kinds of venues she wanted based on
her budget (Arthur). In a particularly telling Twitter exchange, Heap laments the
amount of extra work cultural entrepreneurship takes:
I really need to work on my delegation skills! Life is full of things to do and I need to
stop trying to do it all myself. . . . I need a full time PA. im so dog tired trying
to do everything. This isnt anywhere near as busy as its going to get either. long
siiiiigh. . . . funny thing is, I dont have time to FIND/ Interview a PA! (Heap,
I Really Need to Work, I Need a Full Time PA, Funny Thing Is)
Even though fans responded to her pleas for help with great enthusiasm, Heap admits
that her kind of cultural entrepreneurship imposes many extra demands on the
production process that she must address on her own or is simply unable to accomplish.
While journalists and marketing types praised Heaps model of cultural
entrepreneurship (Bascaramurty; Fusilli; Weintraub), music industry insider and
provocateur Bob Lefsetz puts the project into stark reality: Theres nothing wrong
with what Imogen has done here. But if this is truly the future, were fucked. Theres
got to be a better way to reach fans. . . . Do people have to give up music because
theyre so busy marketing themselves? Bayms research on practicing musicians
suggests that the answer to this question depends highly on the personal views, values,
and skills of each individual musician. Some musicians are more proficient with social
media than others. Some are more comfortable maintaining friendships with fans.
And others still suggest feeling overwhelmed or at least overburdened by building and
maintaining productive networks while others seem to have integrated these practices
more directly into their process (Baym, Seeing Social Media Audiences). While
artists relationships with social media and the connections they entail may vary
widely, it is clear that the demands of co-creative labor, of maintaining active social
media profiles, and of coordinating the resulting user communities that emerge out of
these networks and interactions are becoming an increasingly important node
of tension for artists trying to both fulfill their musical goals and maintain their
engagement with their audience. They are part of what it means to take on the work of
a cultural entrepreneur.
Conclusion
Heaps near obsessive use of new media joins that of other high-profile artists trying to
incorporate their audiences expertise into the making, distributing, and selling of
music. Other often cited examples include industrial rocker Trent Reznor (from Nine
Inch Nails), who created a secret website, coded messages, and an immersive
video/role-playing game to promote his recent album, Year Zero, and rock group
Radiohead, who spliced up one of the singles from In Rainbows into its component
pieces (i.e. bass track, vocals, drumbeat) for a global remix contest (Kreps; Rose).
Arguably, the success of these initiatives owes a large debt to the pre-existing
popularity of the acts in questionpopularity that comes from years of marketing
and promotion provided by the industrial system that some of these artists are now
trying to circumvent. Outside these high-profile experiments. though, there are
countless independent and emerging artists all trying different models of making and
circulating the digital music commodity. Bands are asking users to pay what they want
on sites like Bandcamp or KickStarter. Artists are giving away digital songs with the
purchase of an accompanying physical artifact. Websites like Sell-A-Band encourage
users to invest in bands, like stocks, and the funding helps seed the production of new
music. Other music retail sites, like Amie Street, employed variable pricing based on
the popularity of songs on the site: as a song gets more popular, its price increases,
adding monetary value to the skills and process of discovery.3 These types of
innovation are rife in all registers of the music industries, prompting one journalist to
note that business models are the new punk (Van Buskirk).
Of course, not all of these models will be successful. In fact, some of them have
already failed due to poor economic performance or lack of users (e.g. Amie Street).
Nor am I suggesting that every artist could or should follow the lead set by Heap or the
286 J.W. Morris
examples above. Many of Heaps successes stem from years of experience of building a
relationship with her audiences: a hurdle new and emerging artists will all likely need to
negotiate in their own ways over time. Finally, the tools and strategies discussed above
are also not, of course, available only to independent and emerging artists. Marketers
for more established record label artists are quite handily finding ways to incorporate
fan and user labor into their campaigns and album production process, ranging across
the spectrum from honest and transparent co-creation to more opaque forms of co-
optation of user labor and sentiment. DIO strategies differ in the levels at which artists
integrate them into their creative practices and the commitment artists exhibit towards
transparency of the production process. Part of the reason Heap makes such a fruitful
and complicated example is precisely that liminal status she has as both a product of the
traditional music industries and yet also as an artist working through the incorporation
and management of co-creative user relationships.
Ultimately, I outline Heaps practices here not because they should serve as a
template for all artists to follow, but because they are a signal for a much larger set of
musical experiments in cultural entrepreneurship that are taking place at many levels
of the music industries. Regardless of these various strategies and their varying
successes, what is important to recognize is a burgeoning investment in models of
cultural entrepreneurship that seek to combine new technologies for producing,
distributing, and connecting with the passionate labor and creativity of both artists
and fans. Heaps mode of practice, along with other, similar initiatives taking place,
demonstrates the flexibility and multiplicity of the digital music commodity when
combined with the creativity and skills of individual artists and users.
In the first instance, then, this research has been an attempt to think through how
co-creative labor can be understood parallel to (or beyond) categories such as work
and labor (Banks and Deuze 426). Although the research conducted here is by
necessity relatively silent on the many reasons why users get involved in do-it-
ourselves co-creative projects, it is clear from the user comments and commitments
to Heaps various initiatives that simply dismissing user involvement as work or
exploited labor is an insufficient theoretical lens. Rather, considering how DIO
strategies complement and coexist with traditional artist production processes will
offer a more nuanced picture of the production and circulation of cultural content in
light of digital goods and new and social media.
Second, this case study of Imogen Heap shows how new and emerging media help
artists present their creative process as part of the product. Beyond her music, Heaps
stance towards her audienceher willingness to open up various aspects of creation,
marketing, and distribution to usersis as much a part of the significance of Ellipse as
any of the individual songs it contains. We can argue over how honest or sincere she
was in her efforts of inclusionWas it merely a marketing stunt? Was it a genuine
desire to work with a larger community of fans and artists?but these debates may
not ultimately matter given the perception of transparency and inclusion Heap was
able to achieve. Heap offers not only her music to fans, but also the experience of
feeling part of the creation of that music.
Finally, I would like to suggest that what is truly interesting about this kind of
passionate, co-creative labor, particularly in the realm of digital goods and social
media, is that it fosters a re-evaluation of the relationship artists and users have with
the music commodity. Digitization has revealed what has long been a central truth of
cultural commodities: people are not paying solely for the objects; they are also paying
for the meanings they associate with the object. Co-creative labor now offers users
multiple options for experiencing art in different forms and formats, through
different media and modes of engagement. Fans now have multiple registers in which
they can get involved or participate with cultural content. The result is a critical
re-evaluation of artistic experiences and products and the role they play in our lives.
For Heap, the benefits of cultural entrepreneurship seem to outweigh the demands.
She has recently begun the recording of her newest album, her fourth, and she is
developing each song over a three-month period over the next three years. Each song
involves fans who are submitting snippets of sounds, or seeds, that Heap is sifting
through, selecting, effecting, and collating as part of the bed tracks for the albums
songs. Fans and their creative work are literally embedded in the album. This project
will undoubtedly require a significant amount of Heaps time and effort to keep fans
involved, just as it will take much of their time and effort to contribute. Whether the
resulting project will be of mutual benefit remains to be seen. But, across the music
industries, there are enough similar experiments taking place to force a re-evaluation
of the relationships both artists and fans have with art, and that is certainly a positive
development for listeners, musicians, and, ultimately, for music itself.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Derek Johnson as well as audiences at the IASPM conference and at the UW
Madison Media and Cultural Studies colloquium for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of
this article. Thanks also to the reviewers and editors of Popular Music and Society for their time and
comments. This research was funded in part by a grant from the Quebec provincial government
(Fonds quebecois de la recherche sur la societe).
Notes
[1] She even created a twitdress for her appearance at the 2010 Grammy Awards that tweeted
messages and pictures from fans so they could accompany [her] on the red carpet (Dybwad).
[2] As a quick example, Heap has been invited to give TED lectures about her recording process;
her technological abilities and co-creative stance are always mentioned in her print and
television interviews.
[3] In September of 2010, Amie Street closed down and began directing all its customers to
Amazon.coms new music service. Although files were still available at Amazon, the demand-
based pricing structure was no longer supported.
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Notes on Contributor
Jeremy Wade Morris holds a PhD from McGill University and is an Assistant
Professor in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madisons

Communication Arts department. His research interests include the state of the
popular music industry, the digitization of cultural goods and commodities,
podcasting and other music and sound technologies. His work has appeared in New
Media and Society, First Monday, and in collected editions on music and technology.

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