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Mobilising specialist music fans online

The research on which this chapter was based, like the whole book in which it appears, emerged from a BBC-AHRC jointly-funded knowledge exchange project. The primary research itself was conducted in conjunction with Prof Andrew Dubber as part of a wider team of academics working with what was then called BBC Music & Audio Interactive, and was published in a BBC report and an article for a special issue of The Radio Journal. In this book chapter I reframed our findings within a much broader context of what the BBC calls user-generated content. Radio, and especially specialist music radio, is often neglected within the corporation’s institutionalised idea of new media forms, and the chapter explores both the ways in which a range of specialist music fans build communities around their interests, and the way that BBC staff conceive of this activity relative to their own professional practices. As such it draws together often-separate themes that have been prominent in my earlier work. These would include examinations of the professional practices and discourses of radio workers, the role of new digital and online technologies within media institutions like the BBC, and the communities which people build online. As in much of my work, I aimed at a methodological approach which synthesises political economy with cultural studies of professional and consumption cultures, and applies them to emerging areas of media practice and form.