An Organizational Structure of Indie Rock Musicians as Displayed by Facebook Usage

Extra-institutional Professional Communicators

Many “extra-institutional” (Kimball, 2006) or “extraorganizational” (Hallenbeck, 2012) professional communicators are currently working outside full-time employment in a hierarchical bureaucracy. Freelancers (Johnson-Eilola, 1996; Pigg, 2014), consultants (Palmer & Killingsworth, 2002), mom bloggers (Petersen, 2014), and automotive mechanics (Cushman, 2015) can be counted among their diverse ranks. Study of extra-institutional ¹ individuals has contributed to the field’s understanding of disparate topics such as narrative (Van Ittersum, 2014), plain language (Ross, 2015), user resistance (Koerber, 2006), product reviews (Mackiewicz & Yeats, 2014), and the nature of the field (Moeller & Frost, 2016). While the study of extra-institutional individuals has enriched knowledge of concepts and genres in technical and professional communication, research including or focusing on the state of extra-institutional individuals often focuses on precarity (Johnson-Eilola, 1996; Loader, Cox, & Hailey, 2010; Wilson, 2001) or includes them as a demographic category in a larger population (Blythe, Lauer, & Curran, 2014; Tomlin, 2008). As a result, little work had been done on extra-institutional individuals’ work practices until recently.

Work looking at the professional needs and practices of extra-institutional individuals has begun. Brady (2011) reported on the relationship of freelance technical communicators to the corporate cultures they work for, while Pigg (2014) described the social-media-rich working practices of a freelance technical communicator. Ferro (2015) related the social media practices of entrepreneurs. Ferro called for “research that examines the activities entrepreneurs are conducting through various social media systems” as they “use publicly available SNSs in unique ways” (pp. 927, 925). Pigg states that “as the technologies and organizational locations that mediate knowledge work shift on a broad scale, we should continually focus our research lenses to trace symbolic practice in detail” (p. 85). Pigg (2014) and Ferro (2015)’s work suggests that the many professional genres and communication expectations developed for use in large, hierarchical organizations (Yates, 1989; Yates & Orlikowski, 2007) may not be appropriate or effective for the millions of extra-institutional professional communicators working outside a bureaucratic structure.

Organizational Structures

The most detailed work thus far on extra-institutional individuals is Spinuzzi’s (2015) book-length study of an organizational structure created by extra-institutional professional communicators. An organizational structure is “an ‘operating system’ or set of rules by which people in those organizational structures communicate, coordinate, and collaborate” (Spinuzzi, 2015, p. 55). Organizational structures begin with constraints that need to be addressed to complete a professional task. The repeated ways that people marshal available human resources, technology, and communicative genres to respond to constraints become the underlying principles that coalesce into an organizational structure (Spinuzzi, 2015, pp. 21–22). For example, bureaucracies emerged in the early 1900s as “institutions developed a way of coordinating and managing themselves” in relation to the problems of technological change, growing organizational size, large geographical distances, and complexity of communication (Spinuzzi, 2015, p. 70; cf. Yates, 1989, pp. 489–490). The strong division of labor, narrow specializations, hierarchies, and “command and control” mentality that became the underlying principles of bureaucracy provided management for single-owner firms that had grown larger than one person could manage alone (Spinuzzi, 2015, pp. 21–22). These principles resulted in a near-ubiquitous organizational structure for a century.

However, the organizational structures that underpin work are currently diversifying due to the wave of information and communication technologies (ICTs). ICTs solve core problems of communication flow over large geographical distances that the institution was designed to address (Spinuzzi, 2015, pp. 2–3; Yates, 1989). Many workers and employers have developed new types of professional activity in response to these technological shifts, and these professional activities have different logics and organizing principles (Pigg, 2014; Spinuzzi, 2012). Spinuzzi’s work on various types of organizational structure (Spinuzzi, 2008, 2015) has led to examinations of how extra-institutional individuals such as users of coworking spaces (Spinuzzi, 2012), nonemployer firms (Spinuzzi, 2015), and entrepreneurs (Spinuzzi et al., 2014, 2015) organize their professional activities.

These new work configurations are built on the idea of the network, not the institution. The bureaucracy that provides organization for the institution is being challenged by the all-edge adhocracy that provides management for the network (Spinuzzi, 2015). All-edge adhocracies are characterized by flat structure which allows anyone to talk to anyone at any time, ever-changing composition of team members, adaptivity in responding to issues quickly, and flexibility in work schedules. These principles contrast with the hierarchical, command-and-control elements of a bureaucracy (Spinuzzi, 2015, p. 68). These organizing principles allow an organizational structure that creates opportunities to complete work that bureaucracies cannot.

Other scholars have investigated the underlying principles of organization in modern workplaces. McDaniel and Daer (2016) focused on how a small game development studio implemented the principles of a flat style of communication, maintainability, modular design patterns, flexible negotiating tactics, and specialized tools. The game studio is a “hybrid organization” that employed elements of adhocracy inside a larger institution (Spinuzzi, 2015, p. 16). Edenfield (2016) found the concepts of observation, agency, and empowerment important to the creation and maintenance of “worker cooperatives”, an organizational type distinctly different from bureaucracy. All of these new types of organization feature underlying organizational principles which create the structure that guides how these firms coordinate their work. These extra-institutional organizational structures are developed by workers to meet perceived needs.

Genre Theory

These new organizational structures result in new work practices, changed genre use, and new genres. Spinuzzi (2010, 2015) reported on how search engine optimization workers developed complex, specialized reports in response to the conditions of the work and the nature of the “hybrid structure” that requested it of them (2015, p. 136). Edenfield (2016) explained that “collaboratively produced texts like bylaws and codes of conduct may be imbued with greater social significance” in “worker cooperatives” because “they play a role in structuring the business through group agreements” (p. 2). The unique organizational structure of a “worker cooperatives” gave a genre new meaning.

Whether through creating new genres or giving new meaning to old ones, genres both create and result from the organizational structures that produce them (Bawarshi, 2000). Miller (1984) noted that genres are “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (p. 159), and Bawarshi (2000) expanded that definition by calling a genre “both the situation and the textual instantiation of that situation, the site at which the rhetorical and the social reproduce one another in specific kinds of texts” (p. 357). A recursive method of understanding genres is important for understanding how organizations are formed and held together by genres. Genres create and maintain relationships between people, materials, and time in a given situation (Markel, 2008). The relationships instantiated by the genres of an organization offer clues to what the underlying principles of the organizational structure are.

This research style is not new. Scholars in rhetorical genre studies have routinely studied communication to understand aspects of organizations (Freedman & Smart, 2009; Little, 2007; Orwig, 2014; Schryer, 2000; Spinuzzi, 2003; Yates & Orlikowski, 2002). Understanding the constitutive and maintaining roles that communication plays in an organization allows for exploration of how those genres impact the creation and development of extra-institutional organizational structures.

Indie Rock Musicians’ Business Practices

Modern indie rock began in 1979, when Black Flag decided to become extra-institutional by eschewing a traditional record label and handling promotion, distribution, and tour booking themselves (Azerrad, 2001). What started out as choice has become a necessity for many bands, as mass-marketed, commercially minded major label conglomerates and artistically minded indie rock bands do not have similar interests in mind that would make for a successful professional relationship (Caress, 2015). Despite a lack of organizational help, indie rock musicians form a vital element of a creative economy that can produce real economic benefits for cities (Seman, 2015). Cities such as Austin; Nashville; Omaha; New Orleans; Newport, Rhode Island; and San Francisco have seen economic development around music scenes (Seman, 2010; Wynn, 2015). Music scenes—the informal collection of indie rock bands in an area—“foster existing economic externalities in addition to igniting new economic possibilities” (Seman, 2015, p. 44). Indie rock can help develop economic activity—where economic activity goes, professional communication is sure to follow.

The professional communication activity of independent musicians has proven difficult to study. Even though the field of arts entrepreneurship is developing to study the independent artist (Beckman, 2007, 2014), Gartner, Roberts, and Rabideau (2015) noted that “various forms of artistic practice … are organized in different ways” (p. 5). The diversity of organization types makes transferring insights from a practice like artisan crafts (Griffey, 2014) or classical music (Nytch, 2012) to indie rock difficult. Caves (2000) outlined underlying principles guiding the economics of the musician-record label relationship but did not discuss underlying economic principles for independent musicians. Ferro (2015) included an independent musician (“Patsy”) in her study of entrepreneurs’ social network site usage, noting: “Patsy is frustrated by Facebook’s policy that does not allow multiple personal profiles and does not allow profiles to be under performer names” (pp. 924–925). The specific communication needs Patsy expressed draw attention to the relationships between the unique business situation of the extra-institutional indie rock musician and the professional communication that creates and maintains an organizational structure in response to those constraints.

Extra-institutional individuals are a diverse collection of professionals that exist outside a full-time position in a hierarchical bureaucracy. Study of these individuals has enriched concepts in technical and professional education, but less work has been done on their specific work practices. Repeated professional communication use that addresses constraints in a business situation coalesces into organizational structures for institutional and extra-institutional individuals. Institutional bureaucracy has been the dominant organizational structure for a decade, but changes in technology and infrastructure have allowed new types of extra-institutional organizational structure to exist. Genre theory allows scholars to investigate what the principles of organizational structure are by discerning the relationships that professional genres develop and maintain. Indie rock musicians are a specific example of an extra-institutional group that is a vital part of economies but has been little studied in professional communication. The specific professional needs of musicians suggest that their as-yet-unexplored organizational structure may be different than bureaucracies and all-edge adhocracies.

Choice of Research Methodology

Due to the limited research on indie rock musicians, I chose to develop an exploratory, qualitative study focused on in-depth, semistructured interviews (McCracken, 1988, pp. 34–37). Semistructured interviews rely on open-ended, nondirective questions intended to solicit information that the researcher may not have known about in advance (Steiner, 2011, p. 37). I did not start out with existing data or theories to expand on, because the professional communication practices of indie rock musicians have been little studied and may be different those of other extra-institutional groups. In the absence of guiding theories, I made my questions as wide as possible about the nature of their professional communication, allowing for unexpected data that more tightly circumscribed questions may have missed. The open-ended questions also allowed musicians to guide the interview to topics of interest or relevance to them, instead of those deemed interesting to the researcher.

Respondent Selection

I sought indie rock respondents through a purposive network sample. My population consisted of a list of approximately 700 musicians that I covered over 12 years of a career in arts journalism. I contacted everyone on the list to find seed respondents who were available, interested, and met the selection criteria listed later. At the end of interviews with these seed respondents, I asked each to recommend further individuals that would be a good fit for the study (Allen et al., 2014; Reid, Snead, Pettiway, & Simoneaux, 2016). I then e-mailed these recommended respondents and requested interviews. Using the purposive network sampling method, I accessed a larger pool of contacts from within the desired population than I would otherwise have reached with my prior cultural knowledge alone (McCracken, 1988, p. 32). Respondent selection resulted in 18 respondents, more than McCracken’s suggestion of “eight” as an appropriate number for this type of study (p. 37).

The criteria for respondent selection were as follows: self-identifying as being part of indie rock, self-employed or multiply-employed, actively generating or aspiring to generate some or all income from music on a monthly or yearly basis, working outside a large organizational context like a national record label, 18 years or older, and based in the United States. I opened the study to musicians of any ethnicity, gender, age, and experience level. These criteria allowed me to find adult career musicians working without large-scale assistance. The geographical criterion limited the diversity of economic situations, as musicians in other countries may experience different economic conditions surrounding their career. I chose a national scale instead of a local, state, or regional scale due to the nationwide nature of respondents in the readily available seed sample. My institution’s institutional review board approved the above sampling strategy and research protocol as exempt (#5778).

Ultimately, I achieved a diverse respondent pool from within the selected population of indie rock musicians that yet still had enough in common to discover meaningful comparisons. The ages of respondents ranged from 18 to 43, with a mean age of 30.4 and a median age of 32. Thirteen respondents reported their gender as male, three reported as female, and two declined to answer. Eight respondents responded to an open-ended question of ethnicity with Caucasian, four with White, one with Hispanic, one with Latin, one with Nigerian, one with “Other (Middle Eastern descent),” and two with no response. Respondents reported experience with recording and performing in the range of 3 to 31 years, with a mean of 13.75 years and a median of 14 years.

Data Collection

I interviewed participants via Skype in hour-long conferences during Spring–Fall of 2015, as I was not colocated with any of the participants. I recorded the interviews on my computer with open source software Audacity, then later had the data transcribed for further analysis. The interview focused on respondents’ description of the genres and activities involved in their routine professional communication. I began each interview with the open-ended request “tell me the history of how you became an independent musician, starting with when you began to play music.” The answer to that question often segued directly into a description of the musician’s ongoing work. If the response to the first question ended without a description of current activities, I asked what projects or positions the musician was currently involved in to continue the conversation. I asked respondents to explain when a genre name came up in responses to either question (McCracken, 1988, p. 35).

As I conducted the 18 interviews, I identified themes that often led to explanations of genre use. These themes helped me guide later interviews more effectively to discover more genre use (Frith, 2014). During the data collection process, I coded data, consulted literature in relation to the emerging codes, and wrote memos to develop the insights emerging from the data (Frith, 2014). These interviews were the first interviews of a larger study.

Data Analysis

I conducted thematic analysis that developed through several rounds of coding (Saldaña, 2009). Employing the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software MAXQDA to organize the coding data (Silver & Lewins, 2014), I did an initial round of “simultaneous coding” (Saldana, 2009, p. 62). This coding pass included in vivo coding to identify genre and platform names that musicians mentioned, as well as “provisional coding” of the professional activities of musicians (Saldaña, 2009, pp. 74, 120). The in vivo terms identified consisted of proper nouns (like Facebook or Google Docs) and common nouns (like e-mail or grants). I included platforms because respondents referred to “using” Facebook without expressly stating the genre name used on the platform, such as promotional post or pitch. Analyzing user conflation of platform and genre from a genre theory perspective is outside the scope of this study.

The provisional coding, which used categories determined before data collection, included looking for distinct professional activities in the data (Saldaña, 2009, p. 120). I chose activity beforehand because these data are part of a larger study that uses activity theory as an analytical tool. While I predetermined the idea of activity, I did not use a predetermined list of activities. The activity codes emerged from my interpretation of the transcripts. I chose to code complete thoughts surrounding an in vivo genre name or provisionally coded activity, so segment size varied from half a sentence to several paragraphs. I coded 2,195 segments.

I reduced the data as I coded. Several genres, platforms, and activities began to appear consistently during the first round of coding. To reduce the data, I selected one of the most common in vivo codes (Facebook) for specific inquiry. At the end of the coding, 94 segments referenced Facebook, and Facebook use appeared in 17 of 18 interviews. I then used MAXQDA to visualize overlapping codes in the Code Relations Browser to help me analyze which activities co-occurred with the Facebook code (Silver & Lewins, 2014, pp. 270–271). I found 14 activities co-occurring with the Facebook code. I then conducted a third round of analysis. I studied the 94 segments and 14 themes to find underlying principles of organization by comparing, contrasting, and combining themes in the segments until three underlying principles emerged that could compare with the findings of Spinuzzi (2015). These three themes are reported in the results section. All names are reported pseudonymously. Representative quotes have been chosen to report themes.

Reliability

I gave an early draft of my findings to participants as a member check to ensure that my report of respondent comments matched their understanding and experiences (Gibbs, 2007). Several respondents offered corrective comments that I included in subsequent drafts. This inductive, thematic study does not support quantitative measures of intercoder reliability, such as Cohen’s Kappa. In efforts to show agreement between coders, a second coder read the list of activities that co-occurred with the Facebook code and coded 14 segments (more than 10% of the data) to find agreement. The second coder’s assignation of codes agreed 86% (12 of 14) with the researcher’s coding on the first pass. The second coder and researcher reached full agreement after negotiation of codes and meanings.

Limitations

This research has several limitations. The exploratory nature of this qualitative research makes it nongeneralizable to indie rock musicians as a whole. Further research could build on the findings here with larger numbers of respondents and different methodologies to seek generalizability.

This study identified several underlying characteristics of the respondents’ organizational structure, but these are not comprehensive or exclusive of other trends that could have appeared through different reduction strategies and more gathered data. More research should be done to confirm and extend these findings. This study focuses in on the underlying activities of musicians through the lens of one heavily used communication platform; despite its common use throughout the sample, the findings may not be fully representative of those who do not use Facebook as often as others in the respondent pool. A cross-platform or multiplatform study could be conducted to expand the findings and include the most-used platforms for each respondent.

The wide scope of characteristics allowed in the research population does not allow for any relevant distinctions related to demographics. However, it does allow for development of future research related to demographic groups within indie rock musicians. Finally, the open-ended protocol minimized researcher guidance of the conversation and allowed the respondents to make their own statements about what seemed important to them. I ignored some follow-up questions that may have clarified or probed deeper into issues respondents brought up in favor of the respondent directing the flow of the conversation. Future research could create more guided interview protocols to dig deeper on some of these issues.

Audience Development

Musicians reported that building and maintaining an audience was of paramount importance. This principle of audience development was a response to the constraint of the aesthetically focused products of recorded music and live concerts. Aesthetic products do not solve a problem or fill a market need for a pre-existing group of consumers. Instead, aesthetic products operate under the logic of supplier-induced demand (Nytch, 2012), where the artist must introduce the product and create demand for it. Musicians attempt to adapt a section of the market to the product instead of adapting the product to the needs of the market, as might happen in other industries. Once the audience had been built, keeping the audience interested in the artist’s work was the next task. These two goals required constant promotion of the musicians’ products and activities. Musicians addressed the constraint of no pre-existing audience for an aesthetic product through the principle of audience development.

Musicians used Facebook to gain new audience members in direct and indirect ways. One direct method of audience building came through Facebook ads. Allen noted that his band targeted people outside their immediate fan base with ads that were tailored to consumers with specific interests:

For us it is really important to target people who have live music as an interest, because ultimately … our return really comes when somebody shows up to one of our shows in, say, Atlanta or somewhere else where we don’t have as many contacts and aren’t bringing people to the show.

Musicians used Facebook to build audience in indirect ways as well. Jim noted that his band used Facebook as part of the process of getting new audiences to come to shows in cities his band had never played in before:

If nobody got back to us from people that we looked up on Bandcamp, we would go to their Facebook and see bands that they had played with and then contact those bands. And so that’s the way that we got people out to the shows in places that we never played before.

In addition to directly and indirectly developing an audience, musicians used Facebook to maintain their audiences. Motivating pre-existing audiences to come to shows and buy new music is a critical part of career development, according to respondents. Maria noted that she uses multiple outlets to promote shows: “I did a good bit of promoting, especially on Facebook, also on Twitter and also on Instagram. And also on our band, we have a band Tumblr.” These promotional efforts were important to motivate her already-existing audience to come to a live show. Jeff explained his process of promoting shows:

I’m actually really tactical about it. So it’s a mix of Facebook invites, like creating an event on Facebook. I’ll always get … a poster made or a flyer made, and I’ll make sure it’s good. And I’ll say like, “I’m printing these and if you come to the show, like, you can have one,” and it’s usually like a nice piece of artwork. … I’ll text people and I’m like, “Hey, I’m playing in your neighborhood. Like, it’s a Tuesday night, but what else are you doing?”

Nick pointed out that Facebook ads made it possible to target specific geographical regions of his band’s fan base with advertisements:

I do really like that I can segment posts to certain states. Like in terms of people who like our page, I can do things that are just going to be focused on people who like our page in Colorado.

These many efforts to promote were necessary because the aesthetic focus of the work made it not very adaptable to an audience. The musician had to cultivate and then consistently motivate an audience surrounding the aesthetic object or experience, which took place through online and offline promotion.

Slow Growth

The cultivation of this audience took a long time, according to the respondents. Due to changes in technology that allowed many people to cheaply record and distribute high-quality music, the market for new music was saturated. This constraint made it even more difficult to build an audience, as the potential audience members had an almost infinite supply of music to choose from (Caves, 2000). This constraint was addressed through the principle of slow growth. Respondents noted that their efforts at developing a career took a long time and that being a musician required a long game plan. The constraint of a saturated market resulted in infinite supply, which musicians responded to with an expectation of slow growth.

The saturated market for new music created problems for continuous audience development. As Cameron noted:

If a band is coming through [hometown] and I am here, and they do, like, a Facebook ad … it’s very hard, even if you are a musician who wants to go out and support music, to see something like that—like a cold call, you know? Like just a band you’ve never heard of, there is no recommendation for it—when … there is lots of good music all the time that you are going to see. And so to be pulled from never heard of a band to going to see some how is hard when there is just so much out there and so much going on.

However, musicians did report that growth did arrive. One way that musicians saw this audience size grow was through their number of Facebook likes. Jim reported:

We’ve found that the number of Facebook likes that a band has is a pretty good measure of where they are in their careers. Like, we’re sitting at 912 right now. [Previous band] ended at like 2000. I guess we found that a band really starts to gain some sort of prestige at around between like three and five thousand Facebook likes.

The slow but hopefully steady growth of an audience had effects on the size of a musician’s professional network. Once the number of likes reached certain levels, industry professionals such as managers, bookers, and record labels could become interested. Ted said, “If you have, you know, 100,000 Facebook likes, a management company will take you on, or a venue will book you, hands down.” These professionals used likes as a shorthand for audience size, then interpreted that audience size as a proxy for financial viability. Respondents did note that Facebook likes were an imperfect measure: They said that Facebook likes could be “bought” illegally to make a band look more successful than they were, while some bands that were very successful at garnering likes and online success were not successful at actually getting people to come to shows.

Facebook likes were not the only way of assessing growth. As Brad noted of his promotional efforts in terms of getting press coverage for his record:

After you’ve done [promotion] for one album release, like, the battlefield is totally changed. Because then you have friends, and you’re starting to develop a network. And you’re starting to like see how like, “Oh, this blog I heard of is actually, like, run by this guy who’s … Facebook friends with this person that friended me because they wrote [about me].” You know, you start to see … who knows who. Like you just start feel like you’re part of this … online community.

Unevenness

This professional support, however, was subject to the constraint of power imbalances and a resulting unevenness of work conditions. Indie rock musicians encountered a hierarchical field where they often did not control who they could work with. Instead of a flat structure that allowed for contractors to be employers and employees flexibly (Spinuzzi, 2015), musicians reported that indie rock had an uneven structure where institutions and other professionals often held more power than the musician in determining the direction of her career.

Professionals had choices where individual musicians did not. Venues chose whether they wanted to work with the musician by booking them (or not), while record labels chose whether they wanted to sign an artist based on whether the signing would be financially viable for the record label. As Ted noted, “You know, for them to invest in you, they need to know that it’s like a sure thing that you are going to make them money. There’s no risk anymore.” The professionals surrounding musicians had just as many options in the saturated market as audiences did, leading to an imbalance of power in their favor when artists were looking for professional connections.

Part of the reason that unevenness existed was because many artists did not have the financial resources to contract out promotion or the audience size to contract out booking. (Bookers who book shows for bands often get paid a percentage of the profits. A musician must have a large audience in many cities for the booker to get paid consistently.) Musicians instead relied on tools like Facebook, which are free or inexpensive, to do the work of promotion and booking. Nick said, “At the end of the day [Facebook is] not the free that it was, but … it’s still worth it. For, you know, for bands that don’t have a marketing budget.” Not having the finances on hand to hire help or the audience size to attract partners to join the work and share the profits left the independent musicians with little to leverage in getting professionals to work with them.

However, the power imbalance could be mitigated through the fruits of slow growth. Once musicians had developed a marketing budget through album sales, show earnings, or outside work, they could use those funds to hire help. Maria, who had reached this point, noted of a PR company that she worked with:

I’ve seen them on Facebook promoting different bands that they were working with and that sort of thing. I knew that they were getting some good placements for the acts that they were working with. … So I just hit them up. I was like, “Hey, I want someone to do publicity for our tour, would you be interested?” and they said yes.

The unevenness did not only relate to people. The technologies that the musicians had to use presented an unbalanced power structure. The respondents singled out Facebook’s process of limiting the number of Facebook fans that a musician could reach with a post as a significant power imbalance in the musician’s life. Jim noted, “We try to space out [our posts] because we found that Facebook … is really screwy with how many people it lets see your posts.” This often drove them to other tools, as Eddie said:

About the time I started really diving into, you know, controlling my website was about the time all the story started coming out about Facebook, like, limiting how many people see, or if you really want exposure, you’ve got to pay for it.

While minimizing these power imbalances was difficult without commanding a large audience to give the band leverage, musicians were at least able to connect with these gatekeepers via social media. Sometimes this resulted in an aesthetic connection that bridged the power imbalance. Adam reported getting an internship at a recording studio this way:

I bothered the guy on Facebook for about six months. I saw some sort of opportunity in meeting him and I saw like a similarity in the music we liked and what we were trying to do. And so I bothered him a lot, and then eventually one day he just like asked me if I wanted to come over and check [the studio] out and I basically didn’t leave after that.

Unevenness in the form of power imbalances existed in the life of the indie rock musician. Young musicians, new projects, or musicians breaking into new markets often had little to offer in the way of audience (to venues), sales (to record labels), and funds (to contractors) due to the slow growth of audience for an aesthetic product in a saturated market.

Aesthetics Versus Adaptivity

The all-edge adhocracy is “highly adaptive. If one team member can’t complete a task, that member can be replaced with another specialist” (Spinuzzi, 2015, p. 59). The inputs are as variable as the outputs, as no member has an idiosyncratic role that cannot be played by anyone else. In an indie rock environment, the input to the product is a distinct aesthetic vision that is intended to differ from everyone else. Caves (2000) calls musicians’ work to create aesthetically unique music “creative inputs” and distinguishes it from “humdrum inputs” that “demand a wage at least equal to what they earn in the outside market for inputs of their type” (pp. 4–5). The artist’s goal of unique creative work that fulfills a distinctive aesthetic vision requires that it not be adaptive to market needs, but that it fulfill an inchoate, ill-formed need in its audience (Nytch, 2012).

Promoting the nonadaptive musical product to currently existing and potential audiences took up a disproportionate amount of the indie rock musicians’ time. Since the music is not intended to be adapted to fit the audience, an audience must be developed around the music through promotion. Respondents in this study noted that this promotional activity was carried out in multiple ways on Facebook: marketing to new fans via Facebook ads, promoting to existing fans that had liked the musician’s Facebook page, and gathering information on indirect ways of developing audience. The adaptive elements of an all-edge adhocracy provide one of the benefits that make the structure more appealing than bureaucracy: Where bureaucracies stumble due to the inability to get a large number of people to adapt to changed situations quickly, all-edge adhocracies can pivot rapidly. But respondents noted that indie rock musicians do not have the ability to adapt their products quickly, because their products are of a very different type than those of an all-edge adhocracy. The professional situation that they are in does not call for pivots to a product but continued promotion of the same product to new audiences for a long time.

Slow Growth Versus Rapid Change

Adaptivity aligns with rapid change in all-edge adhocracies: “people circulate in and out of these networks, changing their composition and dynamic” (Spinuzzi, 2015, p. 59). This contrasts with the slow growth of musicians’ audiences and professional networks. Musicians often did not have the ability to hire people to expand their professional networks, and their audiences grew slowly due to a saturated market. Thus, the composition of the audience and the professional network of an indie rock musician grew rather slowly; the size was dependent on the length of time that musicians had been consistently promoting, directly and indirectly.

An all-edge adhocracy benefits from a rapid turnover in personnel that allows the organization to be prepared for whatever need arises. This allows a speed of reconfiguration that bureaucracies, with institutional hiring practices, can not match. Musicians’ audiences and networks grew slowly, and thus reconfiguration of personnel was not a particularly large concern as a result. Many musicians were aspiring to be successful enough, either by amount of funds or size of audience, to have professional personnel at all. Their rapid reconfigurations consisted more of having to play many roles themselves, rapidly changing from musician to promoter to booker to musician again. This made their work practices differ dramatically from those in all-edge adhocracies who were able to subcontract work that they did not have expertise at, did not want to get done, or did not have time to do. Musicians had to learn things they were not experts at, worked hard at things they did not particularly like doing in the service of playing music as a career, and left undone things that they personally did not have time to do—at least until they were able to garner some more members of a professional network.

Unevenness Versus Flatness

The absence of hierarchies is a fundamental feature of the all-edge adhocracy and a critical difference in the lives of musicians. “In an organizational network or a cross-organizational network, [team members] are connected nonhierarchically,” which allows the rapid changes and adaptivity of the all-edge adhocracy (Spinuzzi, 2015, p. 58). Indie rock musicians still have hierarchies in their field; they have to deal with structural power differences when attempting to secure new professional help (in the form of booking shows or hiring contractors). Due to the saturated field, venue owners and record labels can pick and choose who they want to work with based on who they think will be most financially viable for them, as judged partly by the amount of Facebook likes a musician has. To develop a larger number of likes, indie rock musicians must engage in more promotion, more releases of music, and more playing of shows to increase the size of their audience and thus make the cut to then partner with industry professionals, or have enough money to hire them. This fundamental hierarchy creates difficulties for the independent musician.

The all-edge adhocracy’s absence of hierarchies creates business opportunities for organizations that employ the structure, as they can move faster than bureaucracies. The indie rock musician is not in an organization but still encounters hierarchies that limit the progress of the musician’s career. Musicians are thus subject to the worst of both types of organizational structure on this front: they do not have the built-in support of a bureaucracy, nor do they have the ability to form rapid connections to replace the built-in support. Instead, musicians must do much of the work themselves until their slow growth takes them to a place where they can hire contractors or partner with professionals.

Overall Function

All-edge adhocracy and the build structure operate differently. Spinuzzi (2015) suggests that “all-edge adhocracies represent a structural shift in organizations—and society in general—from hierarchies to networks” (p. 16). Musicians in this sample suggested that hierarchies were still firmly in place for their work, even as they were able to use Facebook to connect with many individuals in their field. This points to a tension in independent musicians’ efforts: Fundamental hierarchies remained in place, but some elements of networking were able to help get musicians around some problems they encountered. Some elements of the build structure, particularly the slow growth, were not mitigated by networking—even though the promotion that led to the slow growth often took place on networked technologies.

Nonemployer firms developing organizational networks are “well suited to unique projects that require innovation, flexibility, and creativity, particularly if these projects involve the inexpensive, rapid communication that is necessary for supporting constant mutual adjustment” (Spinuzzi, 2015, pp. 68–69). Indie rock musicians developing a music career leverage available tools to develop a slowly increasing audience before reaching a tipping point where they can expand their network of industry professionals and off-load some of the communication work. In other words, a build structure is well suited to rewarding hard work with slow growth—potentially, as the aesthetic and entertainment-based nature of the end product means that some people just won’t like it (Caves, 2000). The build structure does not sound like the most desirable possible organizational structure, as it promises slow growth even for the hardest of workers. However, the relationship between the industry constraints and professional responses to those constraints has developed to make the structure that artists reported.

Benefits

The build structure is unique to organizational structures studied thus far in the respect that the structure is not immediately beneficial to workers (Edenfield, 2016; Spinuzzi, 2015). The build structure can be used to succeed in indie rock, as some of these individuals reported making their full income from independent music. However, the economic and technological constraints of indie rock musicians’ professional situation make the organizational structure not particularly desirable: Pre-existing audiences, speedier growth, and a flatter power structure would all be more desirable to the indie rock musician. The constraints of the situation (aesthetic product, a saturated market, and power imbalances) made it so that musicians entered this potential career with significant hurdles to overcome. This organizational structure results from dealing with the constraints of the professional situation, but the currently used methods to manage them do not produce immediate results. Not all organizational structures are chosen.

Nor do all organizational structures immediately deliver benefits above and beyond the bureaucracy structure. The desire of musicians to offload some of their work onto contractors and partners attests to the need of professional help in progressing a career. In some ways, musicians would benefit from a bureaucracy that could give them specialized, built-in support; however, the decreased interest of large record labels to give this support is one of the reasons so many artists are independent. The organizational structure that currently exists for independent musicians allows for that support but at a later stage in the development of a career than the musicians would like.

New methods may be adopted to address some of the constraints in a more desirable way, especially as technologies rapidly change. However, for now it is apparent that not all extra-institutional organizational structures are chosen; not all organizational structures offer immediate benefits over bureaucracies.