The emergence of social media in the early 21st century promised to facilitate new ‘DIY’ cultural approaches, emphasizing participation and democratization. However, in recent years these platforms have been criticized as domineering and exploitative. For DIY musicians in scenes with lengthy histories of cultural resistance, is social media a powerful emancipatory and democratizing tool, or a new corporate antagonist to be resisted? DIY Music explores the significant challenges faced by artists navigating this fraught cultural landscape. How do anti-commercial musicians operate in the competitive, attention-seeking world of social media? How do they deal with a new abundance of data and metrics? How do they present their activity as ‘cultural resistance’? This book shows that a platform-enabled DIY approach is now the norm for a wide array of cultural practitioners; this ‘DIY-as-default’ landscape threatens to depoliticize the call to ‘do-it-yourself.’
