Competitive Labour Practices in Socially Networked Electronic Dance Music Economies
•
2 gostaram•412 visualizações
DJ and Producer contest websites have reoriented certain practices into networks of competition, where DJs and their audiences are asked to engage with these platforms and their partners for a chance to sign away their work if they happen to be “lucky” or “talented” enough to win a remix contest. Winning distinction in these contests is often only part of a larger process of further enmeshing DJs and their networks of supporters in the social media-fueled ecosystems that these websites have created. Having rationalized competition as a largely positive phenomenon the contemporary DJ and her web of connections is ready and available to serve remix contest after remix contest as required, as competition is the fuel that sustains it. Extrapolating these remix competition processes across the enormous and expanding numbers of talent contests available points to a vast exploitation of creative labour. There has been little investigation into how competition is reconfiguring labour between creative workers and creative industries.
Recomendados
Recomendados
Mais conteúdo relacionado
Destaque
Destaque (15)
Último
Último (20)
Competitive Labour Practices in Socially Networked Electronic Dance Music Economies
- 1. Competitive Labour Practices in Socially Networked Electronic Dance Music Economies Jonathan Karpetz
- 7. DJ Promoter Networks of Competition Club Platform Marketer Facebook Twitter Supporters
- 10. DJ is both Entertainer and Artist Language of Deflection Language of Charity and Support
- 11. #support
- 14. Talenthouse Sponsored Engagement Engine
- 17. Jodi Dean Social Networks operate under the value of abundance where messages are “simply part of a circulating data stream”
Notas do Editor
- The rapid development and dissemination of the local DJ competitions and social media fueled contest platforms has led to immediate shifts in creative practices of those involved in fields related to these sites and their offerings. For DJs in EDM networks these competitions and contest websites have had a significant impact on how they practice their craft.
- Websites including Indaba Music, Wavo.me, Genero.tv, along with Beatport Play all aime to engage “creative communities” in competition for opportunities to “collaborate” with major artists and brands and win prizes or employment. These platforms were fueled by the connections enabled through the highly developed social media APIs and protocols provided by Facebook, amongst others. Competitions appearing on these sites ranges from opportunities to make “official” videos for major artists, including Moby, Afrojack and the Flaming Lips, to an opportunity to photograph for the Thomson Reuters Foundation and Nokia, or remix a track for Tegan & Sara to be released by Warner music.
- Websites including Indaba Music, Wavo.me, Genero.tv, along with Beatport Play all aime to engage “creative communities” in competition for opportunities to “collaborate” with major artists and brands and win prizes or employment. These platforms were fueled by the connections enabled through the highly developed social media APIs and protocols provided by Facebook, amongst others. Competitions appearing on these sites ranges from opportunities to make “official” videos for major artists, including Moby, Afrojack and the Flaming Lips, to an opportunity to photograph for the Thomson Reuters Foundation and Nokia, or remix a track for Tegan & Sara to be released by Warner music.
- Websites including Indaba Music, Wavo.me, Genero.tv, along with Beatport Play all aime to engage “creative communities” in competition for opportunities to “collaborate” with major artists and brands and win prizes or employment. These platforms were fueled by the connections enabled through the highly developed social media APIs and protocols provided by Facebook, amongst others. Competitions appearing on these sites ranges from opportunities to make “official” videos for major artists, including Moby, Afrojack and the Flaming Lips, to an opportunity to photograph for the Thomson Reuters Foundation and Nokia, or remix a track for Tegan & Sara to be released by Warner music.
- While these sites continue to invite a wide range of creative workers to submit to various contests, my focus here is on the remix competitions offered by these sites. These contests are aimed at DJs and producers and engage their personal and professional networks in regular competitions to rework provided audio samples or stems with the promise that the winning DJ or producer will be able gain a release of their remix on the contest provider’s label and/or a chance to open for an established DJ at a live EDM event.
- While performance-based competitions, such as Battle of the Bands, Star Search and American Idol, are not new the contemporary mode of DJ contests, which include local performance contests and web based remix contests, have produced and reflected a new form of work that asks DJs to continually ‘labour to compete.’ The effect is a turning inwards of DJ rhetoric and practice where DJs continually compete with each other over what precious little work is available, while also providing libraries of free music remix content and networks of engaged fans to crowdsourced contest platforms instead of contesting the overriding labour practices maintained by club, music distribution and remix platforms that have challenged traditional practice.
- Contest websites have reoriented certain practices into networks of competition, where DJs and their audiences are asked to engage with these platforms and their partners for a chance to sign away their work if they happen to be “lucky” or “talented” enough to win a remix contest. Winning distinction in these contests is often only part of a larger process of further enmeshing DJs and their networks of supporters in the social media-fueled ecosystems that these websites have created. Having rationalized competition as a largely positive phenomenon the contemporary DJ and her web of connections is ready and available to serve remix contest after remix contest as required, as competition is the fuel that sustains it. Extrapolating these remix competition processes across the enormous and expanding numbers of talent contests available points to a vast exploitation of creative labour. There has been little investigation into how competition is reconfiguring labour between creative workers and creative industries.
- The rise of competitive labour in creative industries is a result of developments in technological and work related practices that have resulted in new sorts of creative subservience. Free agency and individuation has rolled into notions of “Me Inc.” or what Alison Hearn describes as the branded self: “a distinct kind of labour; involving an outer-directed process of highly stylized self-construction”. The introduction of crowdsourced platforms for contestation is a further development of the externalization of labour costs by requiring participants to fund their creative projects in the hopes that they will win the contest and the attached prizes, which are often lump sum honorariums or vague promises of exposure. Since DJs are representative of the new class of creative entrepreneurs operating in social media as spaces of both work and play, they arguably benefit a great deal from the exchanges of messages and affect in their communications. As I will trace further, rather than seeing and implicating themselves in these capital exchanges DJs and their networked communications are exploited through remix competitions with the masking of market forces at work in their interactions.
- The contemporary DJ is asked to be at once both an entertainer and artist. These dual demands of their practice confuse and conflate traditional entertainer/artist distinctions. In practically and rhetorically merging these practices DJs have privileged their roles as artists over their function as entertainers first. More, they have defined their new relation to practice with terminologies that enforce and perpetuate their precarious position in the creative economy, while at the same time giving away the value of their personal and professional networks, fueled through crowdsourced remix competition platforms, to companies and their marketers in the pursuit of both tangible and emotional responses from their audience and peers. The language deflects away from the economic realities of EDM economies, instead communication surrounding these contests has become about supporting or saving the DJ/producer.
- Frequent and widespread competitions are supplied by large reservoirs of free labour. Music download sites then sell these remixed products back to the DJs and their networks, expecting that their connections will buy into a product that includes their DJ friends. While a DJ may benefit in some ways from the chance to perform or have their remix released commercially, the costs and expectations of these contests, especially when multiplied by the thousands of contestants involved, often far exceed the value gained by DJs as individuals or as a whole. With relatively little to gain by individual DJs competition to competition, event to event, platform to platform, it ensures that a stable supply of regenerating contesting labour will be available for subsequent remix contest, which often ask the same workers to compete once more for a chance to show their ‘unique’ talent.
- New social media platforms have begun to mediate these networks by offering platforms for the dissemination and tracking of DJ competitions that translate the strength of various contest networks into marketing value and other shared benefits through social media based hosting and voting tools they provide. These tools allow competitors to invite their networks into these social media fueled web portals to increase their standing within the remix competitions. While many contests qualify that artistic merit is their primary decision point in the network of possibilities for judging talent in these competitions, it is often the DJ who has mobilized enough of their network to engage with the social media marketers, through clicking like or voting, that win the contest.
- These websites and participating marketers have curated systems of competition that are transparent popularity contests in the hopes that those engaged in contest networks, will bring to the websites and venues, their DJ practice but their entire network as well. These platforms are an evolution of crowdsourcing platforms that do not directly invest in the Crowdsourced products on their page rather they provide a middle service between creative and companies. On these platforms the remixing doesn’t matter. What matters is that DJs and their networks of supporters have participated. These websites enroll and mobilize an interaction between creative and the marketers that host these contests. The platforms are engaged only as far as they can quantify the ‘social or total reach’ of a particular contest.
- While that would not necessarily be harmful if smaller practitioners were partners in these exchanges, the entire practice of DJing and remixing has shifted toward free competition and labour as a way of producing marketable exchange rather than through investment and development that factor in the basic rights and necessities of creative workers. Rather than make demands of these contest websites, or turning away from these large marketers and labels, local DJs are producing more and more work for those powerful actors in the hopes of making it big.
- To be clear, for many, if not a majority of performers working in contemporary club networks making it big is analogous to being rich and famous as a music producer and DJ, though this is rarely expressed in terms beyond those of reaching a certain creative potential as an individual artist. The drive to make it big through remix competitions is aided by established EDM celebrities who often partner with labels and marketers on various competition platforms to encourage the continued competing of local DJs and producers with the promise that they too could be the next superstar DJ.
- Multiplied by the thousands of notable DJs currently competing through remix and their expansive personal and professional networks, that includes their audiences, labels, marketers and countless websites, it adds up to a striking separation from the reality of economy and creative labour that are at the heart of their day to day practice.
- Remix contests have simply become part of what Jodi Dean calls the data stream, with contest entries being another addition to the pool. Tracing contemporary remix contests shows how notions of unique creative talent that should be supported masks and mystifies the economic reality of a large industry that relies heavily on precarious creative labour to fuel its operation. Actors at the top develop remix competition platforms for engaging with broader networks in the gathering of creativity for exploitation. Star DJs and label owners continue to transmit and enforce the language of humility and creative potential that trickles down and impacts local EDM discourse. Local creative labour continues to provide for these companies remix after remix in serving the demands of local clubs and their promoter, while also furnishing their brands and striving to be the next Afrojack or Tiesto.
- Nothing in EDM practice, including remix production, deserves charity; rather it deserves compensation. As entertainers first, DJs should be paid fair wages for all areas of their work and it is the responsibility of EDM platforms as well as local clubs and promoters to compensate them fairly. It is the responsibility of large corporations to be stewards of these networks and provide appropriate opportunities and compensation as recognition of the immense amount of labour input by DJs and their audiences across the globe. Unless the language and actions of DJs, promoters, club owners, marketers, and social media platforms begin to shift these notions seem further than the chances of one remix contestant becoming the next superstar DJ.