Abstract
This article investigates how music-specific communities on Facebook self-organize in and respond to the digital music ecosystem dominated by streaming platforms such as Spotify and their algorithmic restructuring of music. By building on earlier work on digital platforms as archives, we differentiate between the “old” and “new” orders of music cultures. We also utilize Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotics and his concepts of semiosphere and auto-communication to make sense of communicative self-ordering and memory work by music-related communities on Facebook in Estonia. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with local music experts, we demonstrate how communities focused on record collecting, specific music genres or music quizzing work auto-communicatively, build shared memories, identities, and self-organize in order to resist the “new musical order” that has resulted from the datafication and platformization of music markets.
Keywords
Introduction
In the wake of the digitization of media and music markets, the technological and social context of music consumption is transforming rapidly. This context can be understood as the “interaction among musical formats, playback technologies, how listeners use formats and playback technologies together, and the discourses that surround these activities” (Powers, 2014: 245). In 2014, Powers introduced the idea of “musical randomness” in reference to the shuffle mode of listening and discussed how digital technologies had destabilized the “musical order” of previous times that was governed by the LP record format. As of 2021, however, music consumption is additionally shaped by the interactions between music consumers/listeners/fans in mediated networks; interactions between musical pieces and their increasingly datafied contexts (context, not content, is the new “king,” as stated by Bilton, 2017), and the constantly changing nature of these contexts (Ibrus and Ojamaa, 2020). It could be argued that while the last major disruption of the “musical order” occurred when music consumption became a (streaming) service (e.g. Wikström, 2009), the more recent reorganization can be associated with the broader datafication of culture (Van Dijck, 2014) and platformization of the service economies in cultural and media sectors (Bonini and Gandini, 2019; Eriksson et al., 2019; Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Van Dijck et al., 2018). From the perspective of pre-digital music industries that were framed by physical formats, record labels, stores, and the music press, the contemporary dominance of algorithmic streaming services and personalized playlists, indeed, can appear as “musical randomness.”
Accordingly, the broader aim of this article is to interpret the current digital music ecosystem in terms of the relationships among the “old” and the “new” musical orders and associated meaning-making practices. We depart from the understanding that these orders are conflicting on account of the transforming nature of the archives. Firstly, we apply the conceptual tools of Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotics to draw a picture of a “digital music semiosphere,” the “core” of which is dominated by Spotify – the global leader in music streaming. Secondly, we make use of the concept of digital archives as deriving from media archeology; all contemporary music-related digital platforms can be conceived as digital archives. Archives are popping up everywhere; we are all mini-archivists – ours is an “information management society” (Parikka, 2013: 1–2). Digital platforms as archives shape music cultures because they “maintain order through a heavy investment of organizational energy” (Ernst, 2004: 2). At the same time, as Ernst (2013: 98–99) points out elsewhere, archives are no longer about storage and fixed order but rather about permanent reconfigurability and transmission as they are structured by algorithms that have become “creative” in their own right (Ibrus and Ojamaa, 2020). This complicates users’ relationship with cultural memory. It is not perceived as permanent, but ephemeral and dynamically changing; its order is loose (Chun, 2011: 184). In the case of Spotify, for example, there is an expectation that algorithms filter out the supposedly relevant or meaningful bits from the overabundance of musical products (Gillespie, 2014). However, the meaningfulness of these largely opaque computational processes may be difficult to grasp by users whose experiences continue to be shaped by the social context of the “old musical order.” The datafication of music cultures tends to result in the lack of narratives “that can tie it all together” (Manovich, 2001: 217).
The focus of this article, therefore, will be on the “narrative” forms of engagement with music on Facebook that resist the trend of datafication. Our empirical data derives from the Estonian music ecosystem – the “demes” (Hartley and Potts, 2014) of music enthusiasts and communities on Facebook and their discursive response to the interplay among the “old” and the “new” musical order. The findings suggest that Facebook provides a platform to local music communities for meaningful exchange as they self-organize around mutual interest in record collecting, specific musical genres, memory work, and music quizzing. We argue that these auto-communicative practices help these communities to navigate through the “musical randomness” (Powers, 2014) caused by culturally decontextualized, algorithmic, opaque, and automated operations of streaming services. By affording such collective textual sense-making of music cultures, Facebook can be understood as an alternative platform, peripheral to the “core” of the “digital music semiosphere” dominated by streaming platforms. This also underscores the continuing importance of sociality and communication in the age of personalized cultural consumption in general, especially in culturally and socially bound contexts like Estonia.
Outline of Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotics
To discern and interpret the processes of discursive/communicative self-creation by communities, their reorganization and adjustment to one another, we propose that the most pertinent analytic framework is the cultural semiotics, originally developed by Lotman (1990, 2009 [1992], 2013); see also Hartley et al., 2020). Cultural semiotics is distinct from cultural studies and other semiotic approaches for its organicism (Mandelker, 1994). It sets whole cultures, broad cultural systems and their evolutionary dynamics as its seminal objects of study. It sees culture as coming together from heterogeneously intertwined subsystems that are created by communication. Lotman’s theory of communication is unique in several ways (see Nöth, forthcoming). First, it maintains that communication is always about translation – since the addresser and the addressee are using different cultural codes, translation is needed between these codes. The fact that translation is necessary means that the message always changes as translation between different modalities is never trivial, it produces new information. This matters as the second specialty of Lotman’s theory refers to the importance of “auto-communication” in culture. Differently from communication scholars who typically argue that communication takes place between two different people/agents, Lotman (1990: 20–22) emphasized the function of auto-communication, understood as the transmission of a message from a present self to a future self that reinterprets the same message in a new context. Auto-communication involves converting a text into a new message and “restructuring the current” self into a new one. All culture’s subsystems auto-communicate as this is the precondition of their existence. They do this by producing self-descriptions and models of the self. This works on all levels – from the smallest groups to the level of planetary culture. On all levels, the function of auto-communication is to reduce the inherent heterogeneity of the system, to create unity, and to establish distinctions from the external environment. Broms and Gahmberg (1983) suggest that this is how the communicating community invokes and enhances its values, and the repeated use of the same textual material creates its own mythologies.
Yet, the paradox of auto-communication is that it does not only lead to unity and coherence, but also to change. It is because the codes used for translating (interpreting) the messages change over time (due to the dynamics in the rest of the culture) and the texts used for auto-communication can acquire new meanings. So that the reinterpretations of the texts may also create motivations for change. In this context, Lotman’s (2000) definition of culture is telling: “The sum of all non-hereditary information and the means of its organization and preservation” (p. 395). From this perspective, the function of information preservation is as important in a culture as is its transmission and organization (Tamm, 2019). To emphasize the paradox, these functions are closely intertwined, mutually conditioning. More specifically, auto-communication often uses texts from the past, so that “an entire cluster of texts turns out to be potentially active” (Lotman, 2000: 673). In the process, certain texts are actualized and others are not, the selection is not motivated by the newness of the texts. From the perspective of memory creation, the past is never gone (Lotman, 2000: 674–675). The aspect that memory is about actualizing certain texts, motivated by the need to adjust to the cultural milieux of the present, refers to another Lotman (2000) proposition: “Memory is not a storehouse of information, but a mechanism of generating it” (p. 618). Further: “Culture, united with the past through memory, generates not only its future, but also its past, presenting, in this sense, a mechanism that works against natural time” (Lotman and Uspenskij, 2002 [1977]: 116). Altogether, auto-communication is a creative function aimed at sustaining a cultural community by creating its past and via this a direction to its future. This activity is creative as it interacts selectively with the texts from the past, translates and reinterprets them in the context of the present, creating new information, new cultural constellations thereat. In this article we aim to investigate how such communicative “memory innovations” and cultural adjustments happen in musical cultures, as music-related demes carry out their communicative activities on digital platforms or in relation to them.
When it comes to such relationships – for instance, local music scenes/demes versus global platforms – a useful complementary concept in the cultural semiotics’ arsenal is the dichotomy of centers and peripheries. This opposition is a way to describe power asymmetries and their change in inherently heterogeneous and dynamically changing cultural entireties. Lotman’s term for these entireties is “semiosphere” – an aggregate system of intertwined and auto-communicating subsystems. As an analytical device, semiosphere can refer to the heterogeneity of all intertwined cultural subsystems (all of the planetary culture), but it can also refer to more bounded and specific meta-systems – say the global system of music-related cultures and communities. In this context, the distinction between the core and periphery is constituted by the relative ability of different subsystems to produce descriptive metalanguages for the whole system – themselves and others. A subsystem with this capacity is understood as the core of the semiosphere. Subsystems without similar capacity form the periphery. What is important is that such capacities are established by the means of auto-communication – the cores auto-communicate effectively, they produce self-descriptions, models, codifications, norms, rulebooks. They do that because they have the freedom and power to do it. And, shaped by this power, other subsystems that operate in the same cultural domain need to adopt these regulations. But Lotman’s theory points to another paradox: the more the core auto-communicates, the more it self-regulates and becomes rigidly organized while losing its dynamism. Having exhausted its reserve of indeterminacy, it becomes inflexible and incapable of further development. Yet, in the relatively powerless periphery the less regulated subsystems are more open to absorb new information from the dynamically changing environment and to come up with new combinatory solutions responsive to the changes in cultural milieux. Eventually, this capability can enable them to become the new dominant cores of a particular cultural domain. This explains the change in power asymmetries in culture. But there is one more paradox in Lotman’s theory – if power is constituted in (auto-)communication then we also need to realize that every cultural subsystem participates in multiple broader systems engaging in a variety of power relations that are, to some extent, independent of each other. In some of these relationships a particular subsystem can be active and in others passive, in one system governing and setting the rules and in another being governed by others – that is, receiving the rules (see Hartley et al., 2020; Ibrus, 2015).
The semiosphere of digital music
How do these power dynamics manifest in contemporary music markets? The increased connectivity of the new (digital) music industry, especially due to decreased distribution and production costs, has resulted in numerous smaller media companies and music entrepreneurs entering the market. This could be understood as the intensification of peripheral dynamics. Still, commentators have highlighted the continuation of power inequalities due to the increasing marketing costs and access to finance that only a few major companies can muster (e.g. Hesmondhalgh and Meier, 2015: 103–106). Also, the platformization process can be seen as a sign that the cores of the digital music semiosphere are extending their normative power – this time with the help of algorithmic calculations. As already suggested above, in the semiosphere of digital music, Spotify represents the core.
However, within the broader system of music cultures and markets Spotify has only recently emerged from the periphery and is still in the process of organizing itself in relation to legacy players and their orders. On the one hand, Spotify astutely simulates, remediates, and transforms the media forms of the old music industry (Åker, 2018) and is in direct partnership with the major record labels through licensing deals (Eriksson et al., 2019). On the other hand, it is already working toward the formation of a new musical order. Most importantly, Spotify and other streaming services have transformed the logic of music consumption: renting access to music now dominates over owning music. The central format of the new musical order has come to be the playlist that “rewraps individual commodities into a bundle under the assumption that the new whole is greater than the sum of its old parts” – playlists are, therefore, “metacommodities” (Morris, 2015: 162). Thereby, playlists continue the job of early digital playback programs such as Winamp in “unbundling” the album (Morris, 2015) to align music with moods and activities as background for any moment of everyday life. As Åker (2018: 86) implies, semiotically speaking, Spotify reinforces the dominance of paradigm (the unlimited choice of consumption contexts) over syntagm (a finalized product and fixed context), which illustrates the superiority of database logic over narrative logic (Manovich, 2001). Music industry analyst Mark Mulligan (2019) has found that “59% of consumers say they are listening to albums less because of streaming playlists” and called for a post-format era in the music industries. Similarly, Negus (2019) has written about a “post-record” music industry.
Besides heralding a post-format era, arguments can be made for a post-genre era in the music industries. Although genre-specific playlists are an integral aspect of Spotify’s functioning, its personalized and algorithmic mechanisms apply a much broader set of behavioral and lifestyle markers to classify music and users’ taste profiles that are used as targets provided to advertisers (Eriksson et al., 2019; Prey, 2016, 2017). Prey (2017) has referred to this process as “algorithmic individuation” that captures Spotify’s force in perpetually constructing fluid consumer identities and tastes of users rather than allowing them to evolve as individuals attuned to the “old musical order.” This illustrates how the “algorithmic episteme” has come to dominate digital media’s understanding of their audiences more broadly (Fisher and Mehozay, 2019). As a result, musical genres – detached from their earlier socio-cultural context – work alongside many other tools applied to classify users. Their socially binding force is undermined because their significance has been “black-boxed” (Eriksson et al., 2019). By the end of 2020, the interactive Spotify genre space Every Noise at Once 1 had identified 5071 distinct musical genres. As Prior (2018: 51) says, Spotify’s genre treatment represents “cultural differentiation at its most extreme, a world where hierarchies of tastes are flattened and categorical distinctions perpetually dissolve under the weight of superabundance.” Hartley et al. (2020: 88) have shown how such excess results from complex translatory activities between different modalities (from continuous wholes to numerical indices that are then recombined and translated back to continuous wholes). That is, the multilevel data-analytical and translatory work combined with the computational affordances of Spotify’s algorithms have enforced an “explosion” of new syntagmatic orders, playlists, or genres. Yet, for users whose experiences are mostly shaped by the “genre cultures” (Negus, 1999) of the “old musical order” the dynamic creation of such syntagmatic orders can come across as meaningless and disorderly.
It is, therefore, perhaps no surprise that in what may appear the peripheries of the digital music semiosphere, stronger links to the fixed categories of the “old musical order” can be found. For example, Soundcloud and Bandcamp can be understood as alternative “producer-oriented” platforms, as opposed to the mainstream “consumer-oriented platforms” such as Spotify (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2019: 2). The notion of “alternative” platforms hereby captures their capacity to challenge the norms imposed by Spotify and other major streaming services. For instance, affording performer’s anonymity and depicting music in waveforms makes Soundcloud’s interface especially appealing for EDM (electronic dance music) and hip-hop taste cultures by creating “genre-specific interactivity” and “reflecting commonplace practices and values in these genres” (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2019: 4, 2). During the last few years, “Soundcloud-rap,” for example, has become a standard genre tag for various new-school amateur hip-hop music in Estonia (discussed in-depth in the findings section).
Bandcamp, offering independent artists a digital storefront to sell their music and merchandise either in a physical or digital form, seems “deliberately counter to the approach of dominant music streaming services” (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2019: 7). Contrary to Spotify and Soundcloud, it barely engages with user data analysis, API offerings, and algorithmic recommendations commonly associated with multi-sided markets and platformization (Nieborg and Poell, 2018). The releases on Bandcamp retain their original cultural context and conceptual completeness and its interface is open for the artists to design it themselves. This maintains a close connection between the digital appearance of an LP or EP and provides a sense of permanence in the incessant flow of decontextualized sets of songs on other music streaming services. For these reasons, Hesmondhalgh et al. (2019) associate Bandcamp with the genre logic of “indie music” and its local scenes. In 2016 Bandcamp launched an online music publication, Bandcamp Daily, which offers music features and reviews by notable authors from Pitchfork, Vice, Wired, or NPR Music – an uncommon step that highlights editorial authority and narrativization in the age of algorithmic culture.
This section has discussed how the dominant players at the core of the digital music semiosphere, such as Spotify, have imposed the “new musical order” in the digital music ecosystem, challenging traditional categories like format, genre, and the musical authority of the “old musical order.” In the periphery, however, these categories have retained a stronger link to their traditional form enabled by alternative platforms such as Bandcamp and Soundcloud. In the findings section, we will turn to Facebook – a relatively understudied platform in relation to the music industries – to identify how it, too, provides a lively platform for the previous era musical order cultivating local music scenes of fixed genres, discussions around physical formats, collective memory work. Arguably, given the decline of traditional music journalism as an important provider of cultural context (Järvekülg, 2021; Järvekülg and Wikström, 2021), and despite Facebook’s tendency to “annihilate narrative forms” (Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014: 1162), this is as “narrative” and social that music culture gets in the age of databases and platformization. In that sense, from the perspective of music-related meaning-making, Facebook can be seen as an alternative platform, peripheral to the core of the digital music semiosphere.
Research questions and methods
The central research questions of this study are the following: What are the forms of auto-communication in the Estonian music-specific communities on Facebook? How do these forms relate to and shape the organization of music culture in the digital era?
Based on ethnographic observations in 2019 and 2020, we identified around 100 music-specific groups on Facebook. Most of these groups revolved around a shared understanding of a musical genre or a shared practice and can be conceived as communities. Without delving into the debate on the nature of online or virtual communities, we are attentive of Baym’s (2010) dimensions integral to understanding communities in an online context: sense of space, shared practice, shared resources and support, shared identities, and interpersonal relationships. In the context of Lotmanian semiotics, all these dimensions contribute to the processes of auto-communication that exist in every semiotic system. Discourse analysis was applied to the fieldwork materials (e.g. observational notes, memos, images). Conceptually, the analysis was grounded in analytical tools provided by cultural semiotics, for example, auto-communication, core versus periphery, memory, etc., and categories such as musical formats or genres. These dimensions became the central codes around which data was organized and systematized. Practically, we were guided by Gee’s (2011) toolkit for discourse analysis, especially “the seven building tasks of language” (p. 88). This approach is compatible with the analysis of multimodal data (Gee, 2011: 187) and, as we largely focus on the semiotic meaning created through the interactions of various parties, we could term our approach multimodal discourse analysis (Kress, 2011). We have obtained informed consent from the people whose posts or comments are reproduced in the findings section (who have read the early manuscript) and anonymized the names of the people whose reactions feature on the screenshots (whom we have not personally contacted).
Simultaneously with ethnographic observations, 32 semi-structured interviews with Estonian music experts and entrepreneurs were carried out. Although the sample of the interviewees is not representative of the entire musical ecosystem of Estonia, our choice of participants provides insights into a broad range of musical activities that represent various funding streams (profit, non-profit), genres and styles of music (from classical music to noise), as well as subindustries (e.g. live music or the recording industry). Given the focus of this article, it is important because the interviews, among other topics, focused on the ways social media is used for promotional work and the role of Facebook’s “group” feature in it. Also, the fact that many of the interviewees were active members of several Facebook groups gave us first-hand insights into the functioning of Facebook communities. Therefore, the interviews should be treated as an important source of contextual data complementing the non-participatory ethnographic work. We have obtained formal informed consent from all interviewees to refer to them by their name and use chosen interview excerpts as illustrating material.
Findings: auto-communicating communities on Facebook
Record collecting
Discogs Eesti (Discogs Estonia) is a public Facebook group established in January 2014, moderated by Ahto-Lembit Lehtmets, the curator of the local metal scene and frontman of a black metal band Loits. As Lehtmets described in the interview, the group was first established as a forum to discuss the practical issues related to the international Discogs platform – the crowdsourced music database and a marketplace – which was becoming increasingly popular among Estonian music enthusiasts. Yet, it quickly evolved into one of the main spaces for discussing popular music in the Estonian language – at the time of writing this article it has more than 2300 members. Further, as indicated by a continuously updated post since 2015 (Figure 1), the group is also used for archiving and keeping track of all music released by Estonian artists on physical formats.
The original post, saying: “This group could serve as a space to let others know when you add an Estonian release on Discogs. I added these two recently myself.”
Recurring topics in the group include the specifics of musical formats, record buying, selling, and collecting. For instance, long threads about best shipping practices or debates over the quality of MP3s and CDs versus vinyl records, the status of LP records in the global marketplace, or systems of organizing personal records collection (e.g. chronologically, alphabetically, genre- or color-specifically, etc.). Broadly, then, Discogs Eesti can be conceived as a community primarily organized around a shared practice of record collecting and values invested in music in physical, especially vinyl and cassette, formats. A small number of the members are frequent visitors of a monthly record fair also organized by Lehtmets, meaning that the most devoted in the community have established offline relationships and a shared sense of a physical community space. As there is a direct connection to the global Discogs platform whose Facebook posts are frequently shared in Discogs Eesti by its moderator, communicative unity is created with all record collectors and traders internationally (Figures 2 and 3).
The post says: “I wouldn’t have even thought about opening a disingenuous account. I don’t go there to browse others’ collections. Does anyone engage in something like this?.”
The post says: “What’s more to add! :).”
On the one hand, the texts on old records and their organization as they are written or shared in Discogs Eesti can be read as a means by which the members try to collectively “understand the past and via this also” themselves, establishing a sense of “us-ness” through cultural auto-communication (Hartley et al., 2020: 174, 79). On the other hand, a vinyl record not only acts “as a physical emblem of and a portal to the past” (Hogarty, 2017: 47) in terms of shared cultural histories, but record collecting can be seen as an attempt to conserve one’s individual self through material artifacts (p. 124). This frequently manifested in the “show-off” posts underscored by descriptions of personal experiences by members who had recently received a long-anticipated or rare record or came across a surprising find (Figure 4).
The post says: “How did your Record Store Day (RSD) go? Share photos of what you harvested. I’ll start myself then. I managed to get half of the records in RSD wantlist in addition to some other gems from Berlin.”
The knowledge of rare records and the shared understanding of the achievement of acquiring them become important distinguishers for the group – thus, regularly used in the group’s auto-communications. The images on Figures 5 and 6. could be argued to have the same function.
A cartoon by Alex Gregory for The New Yorker first shared on Facebook by The New Yorker Cartoons page on May 22, 2015.
Meme characterizing record collecting.
These memes do not provide new information; rather, they can be read as confirmations of the shared identities of the group members. Further, numerous messages in the community emphasized distinguishing boundaries with regard to the constitutive issue for the group – those between owning music and renting access to music. As Lotman (1990: 142) notes, “culture creates not only its own type of internal organization but also its own type of external ‘disorganization.’” This is exhibited by the irony or even contempt for the music streaming industries and the consumption practices of the “new musical order” that represents a chaotic space set outside of the community’s inner cosmos (Lotman, 1990: 140).
Therefore, opposing the dominance of Spotify, specifically, has become an integral part of the new model of a record collectors’ community and their auto-communicative metalanguage (Figures 7–9). This is how their shared identities relate to the “new musical order,” how they manage to retain their unity in new contexts. In Estonia, Facebook is among the few digital spaces that facilitate such music-related textual sense-making and peripheral community work and make it visible.
Meme expressing the community’s relationship with Spotify.
Meme expressing the community’s relationship with Spotify.
Meme expressing the community’s relationship with Spotify.
Genre-specific groups
Besides organizing around physical music formats, Facebook communities can be used to auto-communicate the unity in relation to particular music genres. These groups can primarily serve as spaces of feedback to emerging local artists. While many of the members of these communities are musicians themselves, shared values and identities get communicated in the process of giving feedback. Relatedly, several interviewees referred to the rise of groups devoted to micro-genres, which illustrate the fragmentation of the international popular music landscape.
Let’s say there is a ‘new death metal’ channel and one for ‘old-school death metal’, ok; and you also have some ‘brutal slam death’ channel. [. . .] I am sure that channels like these can diffuse into even smaller niches where new micro-styles start to develop. (Gert Moser, the owner of a local niche cassette label Trash Can Dance)
2
I think this is because of the technological infrastructure – even metal has become very fragmented, very detached. A unified metal scene ceased being long ago. Only very narrow and fragmented musical styles exist and often you only see an even more narrow picture of it. (Ahto-Lembit Lehtmets)
Therefore, it could be suggested that both platform logics, the playlist-centered Spotify as well as the community-oriented Facebook, are contributing to the transformation of traditional genre categories by fragmenting them. However, while in the case of streaming the algorithmic underpinnings of genre formations remain largely opaque, Facebook provides insights into how genres are conditioned by human agency. As Avdeeff (2012: 266) argues: “without the creation and distribution of music, there can be no consumption, it also follows that without consumption, there can be no meaning.” While Spotify draws its genre categories through a largely top-down process, Facebook uncovers how users identify with and co-produce genres discursively bottom-up through communicative practices. Therefore, while it has been argued that digital playback technologies have led to more eclectic tastes in music and promote “a singles-based culture, whereby allegiance is increasingly to the song, not the genre” (Avdeeff, 2012: 268), strong alignments with musical genres (be they grand or micro) become manifest on Facebook.
Among the best-organized genre communities were Facebook groups formed around specific understandings of punk and hip-hop culture. As an interviewee, a local punk specialist Mart Niineste, proposed, punk groups on Facebook can be differentiated based on their political leanings (e.g. liberal vs conservative, left vs right), privacy settings (public, private, hidden), or belonging to specific regions of Estonia: I belong to various Facebook groups that unite Estonian punk enthusiasts. I would say that the scene that appears uniform from the outside is actually internally multicolored. [. . .] Values in this scene can be contradictory, although, of course, there are overlaps.
Therefore, unlike Discogs Eesti, which expresses a relatively unanimous relationship to physical formats and record collecting, some genre-specific groups can be viewed as subsystems that compete in defining the qualities of the “true nature” of a particular musical genre in the local context. This is illustrated by the clearly articulated norms that community members must adhere to, either presented in the group’s “about” section or laid out on the cover photo of the group.
The auto-communicatively created, but mutually conflicting, “we”- and “they”-groups – understood by Hartley and Potts (2014) as “demes” – were especially distinguished and salient in the case of Facebook groups associated with hip-hop. Namely, strong ideological boundaries occurred between the “old-school” hip-hop and “new-school” mumble- or Soundcloud-rap communities. The main Facebook hub for the “new-school” hip-hop movement named Soundcloudi generatsioon (Soundcloud’s generation), for example, appeared to be weakly conditioned by the historical coherence and order of hip-hop culture. Rather, the broader Soundcloud-rap movement can be understood as a micro-explosion, in Lotman’s (1990) terms, producing a “new form of existence” (p. 15) of hip-hop. This is represented by the emergence of a myriad of young amateur rappers from the periphery over the recent years.
The scene, characterized by trap music, DIY ethos, and mumbling vocal delivery, has been extensively promoted on Facebook by renowned Estonian music critic Siim Nestor. He also hosts a show about Soundcloud-rap (Lil Saade) on a public service radio station, Radio 2, and organizes live events for this movement (Lil Pidu). In some other hip-hop-specific Facebook groups, the scene was frequently criticized for its lack of poetics, rapping, and production skills, also for performative amateurism, and ignorance of the roots of “true hip-hop.” The conflict between the two opposing genre-specific subsystems was best expressed by the description of how Siim Nestor, promoting his radio show in one of the biggest hip-hop groups, failed to meet the norms and expectations of a particular community: One of the administrators of this group said: ‘Please don’t post your Lil-themed stuff on our wall, because I think it’s trash.’ He claimed that he is tired of deleting my posts because group members keep on reporting them as inappropriate. [. . .] Basically, I had gone against their taste standard. The music that Lil Saade, and Lil Pidu represents was understood as ‘shit’ in this group. Also, I was directed to other Facebook groups that were assumed to be more relevant for my ‘shit’. In a word, I did not meet their quality.
Besides this case, similar kinds of heated debates were carried out on Siim Nestor’s public wall through which the conflict reached a much wider audience. We suggest that hip-hop communities on Facebook illustrate the co-dependence of continuity and discontinuity in cultural evolution (Lotman, 2009 [1992]: 14). On the one hand, as a result of its expanding meanings, hip-hop has become linked to a broad variety of musical endeavors ranging from micro-niche amateur rappers to mainstream pop acts who have gradually started to assimilate the norms introduced by the so-called Soundcloud-rap movement. Generally, hip-hop, therefore, flourishes. On the other hand, as the elements of Soundcloud-rap move from the periphery to the core of hip-hop and “old-school” appears to have exhausted much of its reserve of indeterminancy, the previous hierarchies of this grand genre have been disrupted. From the perspective of a “truehead” of the old core, therefore, hip-hop is dying.
Despite that the rise of “new-school” hip-hop is mostly associated with Soundcloud, YouTube, and Twitter, the instances above testify that, besides being used for preserving the “old musical order,” Facebook can also provide a meaningful space for novel genre formations and related communities in an early stage of their auto-communicative creation. However, what all the communities, in majority, seemed to be sharing, was their skepticism toward, or even distrust of, the algorithmic functioning of the streaming industries representing the “new musical order” (see Figure 10).
A post by the administrator of Soundcloudi Generatsioon referring to a new rap artist, Fenkii, as an “industry plant.” The bottom comment reads: “His single sounds like it had been invented by data analysts in some lab after having identified the taste of the most average person.”
Memory work and music quizzing
We have shown how Facebook has empowered the formation of communities of shared interests. Much of this is organized around the categories of the “old musical order” such as musical genres or formats. It is evident that some of these activities bear the sense of nostalgia, memories, and “retro culture” (Hogarty, 2017). Indeed, Facebook as a digital archive is more about “a performative form of memory as communication” (Ernst, 2013: 99) rather than a static cultural record of memory. Previously, it has been indicated that, despite structuring time as a continuous flow of newness, memory has been made an integral part of the Facebook Timeline experience (Van Dijck, 2013: 205) and activities on Facebook can contribute to the production of cultural histories (Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014: 1159). Especially in the field of popular music, as shown by the analysis of the collective mourning of David Bowie following his death, social media “invites collective and distributed practices of nostalgia” (Burgess et al., 2019: 235). As many iconic superstars, unfortunately, passed away during the fieldwork for this study, public obituaries appeared as a recurring theme. For example, the deaths of international artists such as Keith Flint from Prodigy, Mark Hollis from Talk Talk, or Scott Walker, received widespread attention among Estonian music enthusiasts. As one of the interviewees said, in the context of the increasingly fragmented and ephemeral musical landscape, this shows the shared respect for strong musical figures as unifying symbols (Tamm, 2019: 13) whose influence is capable of crossing the boundaries of various genre communities, be they local or international. At the same time, the fact that it has become meaningful on social media testifies to the importance of the more or less fixed genre boundaries of the “old musical order.”
Look how many mournful posts emerged when Keith Flint died. [. . .] The fact that they found time to make these posts shows that he was sufficiently important to all of these different people. (Mart Niineste)
Another participant emphasized that these kinds of momentous events are worth highlighting in the fleeting social media environment because they give a chance to stop for a moment and excavate the lesser-known aspects of these musical figures (from the digital archives) that can spur novel perceptions: This means something to me and this means something to culture. [. . .] Inevitably, it creates a possibility to rediscover one artist or another, start listening to their music again. Often, the links posted have nothing to do with the most famous period of the artist. Rather, people start looking for obscurities or curiosities and this is very interesting. (Berk Vaher, a music critic)
Both of these quotes illustrate how the relationship between popular music and memory is personal and collective at the same time and how difficult it is to draw the line between the private and the public on social media. Numerous longer posts on Facebook featured autobiographical commentaries about the anniversary of a legendary album release, or a birthday of one’s favorite singer, or a meaningful music event algorithmically resurfaced by Facebook’s “On This Day” feature. As Van Dijck (2006) argues, in the context of recorded popular music, memory is simultaneously embodied (in individual body and mind), enabled (by technologies), and embedded (in a larger social context). Revisiting particular artists, songs, or events – understood as semiotic symbols or condensers (Tamm, 2019: 13) – can combine these dimensions as they are capable of integrating multiple semiotic layers. To summarize the words of an interviewee: a link to an old techno song with a verbal portrayal of the event where one first heard it can quickly lead to a collective trip down memory lane as the past “organically redevelops” in a long and engaging discussion thread.
A practice that could be labeled as “music quizzing” presented another continuous and engaging example of past-oriented social practices. Since 2012 music quiz communities have gathered once a week in Estonia’s second biggest city Tartu and its capital Tallinn (and, more recently but less frequently, in the smaller towns of Viljandi and Pärnu). In an annual main event the best teams compete in the national championships. In recent years, this practice has become increasingly widespread. For example, Radio 2 has a music quiz show called Meloturniir (Melotournament) in their schedules. At the same time, novel multimodal forms of music quizzing have appeared on social media. For instance, one of the groups on Facebook (Chelsea piltmõistatus [Chelsea picture puzzle]) combines people making creative collages of photos for others to guess the song and artist that are being referred to (Figure 11). In another group (Nagu kaks tilka albumit [Like two drops of an album]) the “game” is about finding curious similarities between two album covers and posting them side by side (Figure 12).
Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan + moccasin + four photos of a young Ita Ever (a legendary Estonian actress) + Dolph Lundgren + love sign = ?.
Similarities found between the album covers of an Estonian electronic artist Galaktlan and a punk band Kurjam.
Yet another specialized group (Originaal ja Koopia [Origin and Copy]) combines users who participate by posting a link of the original version of a particular song as a response to the link of one of its cover versions. Or vice versa. Setting up such puzzles, however, is not exclusive to these particular groups that are only focused on it. For example, one post in Discogs Eesti asked the community members to name the 15 albums featured in Figure 13.
A screenshot from a music video – Bajofondo “Pide piso” – that was posted in Discogs Eesti on March 27, 2019.
All of these practices related to “music quizzing” can be seen as attempts to build, share, and test specialized knowledge and produce contextualized musical authority to meaningfully navigate through the musical randomness characteristic of the digital era. In line with Hogarty (2017: 2), they can be viewed as part of a “retro culture that is occupied by the ghosts of popular music’s past.” However, while Hogarty makes retro culture seem like a pervasive – not to say mainstream – phenomenon, in the context of this study, these practices are better understood as peripheral creative “acts of resistance” (Fleischer, 2015: 267) that refuse the governance of the “new musical order.”
Conclusion
This study explored how music-specific communities on Facebook in Estonia adapt and respond to the changing digital music ecosystem by auto-communicating around mutual interests and practices such as record collecting, genre-specific community building, and music quizzing. We have shown that these social practices produce knowledge and meaningfulness, evolve, reproduce, and transform the elements of the “old musical order” in the context of rising digital economies that are largely driven by culturally decontextualized, algorithmic, opaque, and automated operations perceived as “musical randomness” (Powers, 2014). We suggest that the cultural semiotics of Juri Lotman and his theory of a semiosphere is a useful approach for explaining the self-organizing processes of local music ecosystems as part of global digital economies. All digital platforms that make up these economies can be conceived as digital archives. This study has demonstrated that the logic of operation, systems of ordering, and technological designs of these archives create different approaches to and perceptions of memory and time in music culture. Even though the “constant change and flow of newness” (Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014: 1160) is inscribed in the Facebook Timeline, its “group” feature, specifically, encourages active participatory engagement for auto-communicative activities that create shared memories by selectively recycling the texts from the past. More specifically, we argue that, unlike the largely inaccessible computational logic of Spotify that tends to eradicate traditional categories like broader musical genres and formats, and linear histories of music, the community initiatives on Facebook appear to hold on to these conventional genres, formats, and histories. This is because they provide a familiar frame to organize the shared identities and experiences. And even if these communities can contradict each other on various grounds, they all strive to counteract the norms imposed by the algorithmic “new musical order.” In that sense, Facebook communities and their auto-communicative processes could be seen to re-enforce contextualized music cultures and underscore the social and communicative shaping of music in general. As such, in terms of the relative powerlessness, but also the creativity and milieux-sensitivity, these communities belong to the periphery of the current digital music semiosphere.
