Title

Dreams to be dreamed together: the value of popular music and crowdfunding experiences
Name and contact details
Gustavo Luiz Ferreira Santos
Lecturer in Cultural Studies, Radio Production and Copywriting at United Metropolitan
Colleges of Maring
Maring Paran Brazil
guzferreira@gmail.com
+55 44 9116-6982
Objectives
The general objective of this project is to understand what implications the process of
producing music financed through crowdfunding projects have to the perception and
attribution of value to popular music in an age when music is freely shared online or listened
through streaming websites or yet, bought track by track on iTunes and other sites, and
technology companies like Google and Apple have a direct influence on setting prices for
recorded music. It seeks to answer the research question: what is the meaning and the role of
crowdfunding experiences, for artists and producers, in the creative process and strategies of
music production?
For this, as direct objectives, the research intends to: (1) identify and describe the strategies
and actions producers and artists engage in, during the period of the funding campaign and
when they deliver the final product; (2) understand how those integrate with other actions in
their career and how these contribute to a perception of value for them and for their fans about
their art.
Scope

The scope of the Project involves the tasks of

-

a deep theoretical research about the philosophical and sociological factors of

attribution of value to art, music and popular music; and the relationship between the

business of popular music and the creative process;

categorizing the formats of crowdfunding music projects and associate these
categories to the strategies and actions of the artists. This task will help to define what

artists, producers and projects will be framed as empirical object;

categorizing the strategies and actions of artists and projects to get to fans and to be

financed by them;
understanding, through cultural analysis, the view of artists and producers about the
value of music in the digital age and about how initiatives like crowdfunding are
connected to this value by interviewing artists and producers who participated in such
initiative.

Background
The research proposed involves a political economy and cultural analysis approach to study
the reconfigurations of the music industry in the digital age and the consequences that social
practices in the web bring to this industry, represented primarily by the new forms of access to
the artist and their product through social network websites, sharing platforms like bit torrent,
direct download websites and streaming services. These practices influence the power of the
industry to control the distribution of music, through high connectivity between people who
are involved and interested in music and artists (Wikstrm, 2012) and require an
understanding that as we use digital media as a mean to get information (music) we change
the way in which we experience the world (Dubber, 2013, p. 29).
Taking as a starting point, the analysis of the industry made by Frith (1998) and Negus
(2004), using the political economy and cultural analysis approach (Kellner, 2009, Barber and
Wall, 2011), the project understands that the business strategies and artistic struggle for what
is viewed as artistic integrity work together to build the recognition and value attributed to the
popular music product and sees the transformations set by the fast decay in value of the
recorded music and the new forms of communication between fans and artists through social
network websites (Herschmann, 2010) as new elements to this, as they shift the perception of
the product from a physical object towards a more social and aesthetic experience (Debord,
1997, Herschmann, 2010).

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The crowdfunding system has been growing substantially since the second half of the last
decade (Belleflamme et al., 2011) and it raises questions from a financial market perspective:
the legal implications (Bradford, 2012) and the creative economy approach (Kuppuswamy
and Bayus, 2014, Frana, 2012) and from sociological investigation about motivations and
relationships that are involved in the participation/consumption through the exchanges that
take place in the process (Agrawal et al., 2011, Agrawal et al., 2013).
A way to look in to these consumption is through the perspective of participatory culture
(Jenkins, 2006) which places in the process of media convergence, thus in communication, a
central role in this kind of initiative, since, for Jenkins (2006), the access to media products
through a wide range of possible devices or mediums facilitates a participatory culture that
makes fans value their role as part of the product itself.
I combine this view with an economic perspective of a culture driven by the paradox of a
symbiotic relationship between an exchange economy and a gift economy (Bergquist and
Ljungberg, 2001), and the idea of engagement and fan culture being an important aspect to
create and share music in this social context (Baym, 2010, Baym, 2011, Dubber, 2013) to
propose a research that makes a specific discussion about music value as perceived from
producers and artists who engage in the crowdfunding system, approaching it not as a
definitive business model, but as a reasonable response to the challenges and possibilities of
popular music production in the 21st century. What is expected as a result is that a best
understanding on how theses strategies are relevant to the people who are directly involved in
music production can be used as source to innovate and create business models and policies
that can help musicians make their living and help the public to have access to more music
while contributing with the artist, now that recorded music does not have the same potential
for generating revenue as before.
Methodology
Since the research seeks a philosophical background, in terms of how value is attributed and
what is the value of art, the methods will be mainly bibliographical at a first stage, when a
deep understanding of the theme should be acquired. In this sense, it intends to study and to
discuss how aspects, from mechanical reproduction and industrialization (Adorno, 2002,
Benjamin, 2000), business strategies and genre definitions (Frith, 1998, Negus, 2004, Negus
and Pickering, 2004, Regev, 1992), class and cultural distinction (Bourdieu, 2006) and new

4
ways of accessing, producing and listening (Dubber, 2013, Wikstrm, 2009) to music through
digital technology, affect this perception of value .
Then, a political economy analysis will be used to understand what is the structure of the
system (the websites, the forms of exchange, the money and the people involved) while a
cultural analysis will seek the meaning that will answer the research question. Qualitative
interviews will be the primary source of the research combined with observation of
crowdfunding sites and fans in social networking sites. Projects and artists will be selected to
this on the basis of the format of crowdfunding they used, success of the project and
accessibility to the research. Since a qualitative approach is being adopted is not possible to
predict how many projects and artists will be analysed. The idea is to cover the repetition of
themes from the interviews until the research question can be fully answered.
No special conditions will be necessary to complete the tasks of the research, which will need
Internet access, travelling, to conduct interviews that cannot be conducted online, and library
access. To fund the researcher living arrangements and tuition fees, the project will be
submitted to CAPES and CNPQ, Brazilian institutions in charge of funding scientific research
developed in the country and overseas. The fund can be obtained through the Brazilian
program Science without borders if it can be defended as a creative industry research,
which it is, since intends to give a better understanding of a cultural economic activity that
happens through technology and innovation, while escapes the concentration and traditional
control of the major music industry.
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