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Experimenting with fandom, live music, and the internet: applying insights from music fan culture to new media production

Research for this piece derives from an ongoing project that draws on intellectual ideas about online music culture and mediation that have formed a central thread of our work in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. It builds on some of the findings of our BBC research and endeavours to reproduce and mediate something that exists in the real world - in this case, a live music festival. It was a collaborative venture between four researchers from the centre. We were invited to attend the Scarborough Jazz festival because of our reputation of applying theoretical ideas about fandom and making that knowledge useful within the industries that we study, building on knowledge transfer principles. The central thread of music as a social object around which narratives are formed has been developed and explored in different ways through projects in the research centre - as has our interest in jazz subcultures and specialist music fandom. My work in this area later led to my invitation to present a keynote about online mediation at the Europe Jazz Network General Assembly in Trondheim in September 2013, and the publication and circulation of a policy document about online mediation for European national jazz agencies as part of my research in the HERA-funded Rhythm Changes research project.