Nancy Baym - Playing to the Crowd
Nancy organised and led the first MTF Research Symposium in 2014, and gathered a group of world-leading academics together to co-author the Manifesto for the Future of Music Technology Research at #MTFBoston. She came to MTF Stockholm last year to lead the research symposium again, and to launch her new book, Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences and the Intimate Work of Connecting. She joined MTF Director Andrew Dubber on the interview stage to discuss her book, her career, her life as a seriously dedicated music fan - and a researcher in the study of online communities, social media and communication.
Photo: Kelly Davidson
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, book, music, conversations, tech fest, hear, nancy, kayak, audiences, research, media, mtf, lead, microsoft research, important, musicians, taught, technology, swedish, discourse
SPEAKERS
Nancy Baym, Andrew Dubber
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast. Now, of course, I wasn’t always director of Music Tech Fest. My previous job title was Professor of Music Industry innovation at a university in the UK. And now I guess there are role models and rock stars in pretty much every domain. But when you’re a media and cultural studies academic, especially when the independent music, business and social media are among the things you’ll research and teach about, one of the true rock stars is Nancy Baym, She’s the author of personal connections in the digital age, something that was on all of my compulsory reading lists for students and for friends. And her new book is all about that overlap between musicians, their fans, and the world of social media. It’s called playing to the crowd, musicians, audiences and the intimate work of connection. Nancy is principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, and she’s also affiliated as a professor at MIT. Now, when we first met in person, almost a decade ago, she pretty much immediately went from being someone whose work I admired and recommended to being someone I count as a good friend. It’s an effect that she has on a lot of people. And you’ll hear why, of course, Nancy completely got what Music Tech Fest was about immediately, and she became one of our champions. She was responsible for MTF first going to the US in 2014. She established the first MTF Research Symposium, and she brought together a group of brilliant minds to co authored what became the manifesto for the future of Music Technology Research, or as we like to call it, the Music Tech Fest echo. That manifesto now shapes the whole ethos of everything that MTF does, and it’s definitely worth a read. I’m going to link to it on the page for this show. Nancy joined us again at MTF labs in Stockholm last year to lead the MTF Research Symposium and to tell us all about her new book, it was a complete honour to sit down on the interview stage and talk music fandom, internet research and the blurred lines between personal and professional on social media, with the brilliant Rockstar academic Nancy Baym enjoy. You’ve even got a Book Award named after you, haven’t you? This is a rockstar zero. Yeah, the 99 Award. Yeah, let’s start telling us a little bit about that.
Nancy Baym
Well, in 1998, I guess a group of us in communication departments were getting rather frustrated that people who were studying the internet seemed to be the sort of oddballs who were on the margins, because the departments tended to think Well, that doesn’t really seem like communication. It’s got computers. And so a group of us got together and started our own conference, which is the Association of internet researchers. And I did a lot of work with that organisation over the next decade, a tremendous amount. And so they named the Book Award, the annual Book Award after me, so I am not dead. And yet I have something named after, which is really exciting, much better than dying and getting a posthumous award, but you know, work at a university. I have an affiliation with MIT, but I’m at Microsoft Research. Now. I was a university professor for 18 years. And then Microsoft Research came calling and in contrast to most big tech companies that have research divisions, we do not well, Microsoft Research says focus is not proprietary research, our focus is contributing to the Academy, we actually have an open access publication policy. So it was an opportunity to I think that kind of is like corporate sponsorship, it was a way to come and do any kind of research I want. I still remain totally curiosity driven. Nobody tells me what to study. nobody reads what I’ve written before publication, I publish things like rants against capitalism, and nobody seems to mind. So it was it was just a really exciting opportunity to, as I said, at the time to kind of level up my career and see what would happen if I had that kind of resources and that kind of support and that kind of freedom to just be a scholar. So I love teaching I have taught at MIT. On occasion, I still serve on graduate committees. But mostly I just scholar and kayak.
Andrew Dubber
I’ll get to the kayak and I noticed you dropped that in there. So I will return to it. But But you said you’re curiosity driven Where does your curiosity take you? Where does it come from?
Nancy Baym
Well, I mean, it comes from, I’m raised by academics, you know, we had dinner table, we had the Oxford English Dictionary at the dinner table at the shelf right there. And I swear to God, at least once a week during dinner, we had to say, what’s the origin of that word and go run and look it up before we could continue eating. So I’m, my mother’s was a university professor, my stepfather was my father is so I come from a long line of people who have made our livings asking questions and wondering what’s going on? And where does it take me? Lately, it’s taken me to usually it takes me two questions of how has technology reshaped or affected the ways that people interact with each other and with what consequences. So I’m always curious about the role of technology in people’s everyday lives. And both how people are interpreting them and media’s discussing them and the discourse about technologies that’s always circulating, but also, empirically, I really like going out and talking to people and really trying to understand from their perspectives, how they’re understanding new technologies, which is usually quite different from how the public discourse would have you believe. But you come at this quite often through the medium of pop music. I have I my dissertation was about a discussion forum on the internet, where they were talking about soap operas. This was in the early 1990s, I believe it was the first dissertation about online community. And so I have a long standing interest in audiences. And I had really avoided dealing with music for a very long time, because I love it so much that I didn’t want it to be work you were just talking about, I don’t want my hobby to be my work. I don’t know if it becomes my work, I’m doomed. I’ll never have pleasure again. But I kind of found myself in a situation where it just kept coming up. And so it actually started with an interest in Swedish independent pop music, because I had in 2005, I guess I had sort of fallen in love with all these Swedish indie pop bands. And I was living in Kansas, and I sort of said, How is it even possible that I am sitting in Kansas, and I know more about Swedish indie pop than most Swedes. So I wrote a series of papers about the fans of this music and the ways that they independent labels and artists at that time here, we’re really supporting peer to peer formats. And we’re really supporting mp3 blogs, and really supporting the circulation of their materials outside of the market. And so I wrote a series of articles about what was going on there from the point of view of, first of all, what was happening? And then what was the fans point of view and sort of tried to enter into that discussion of is this exploited labour? Are these people really? Is it a labour of love that they’re happy about? And the answer is yes. And about the musicians and the labels and what their ideal was in, in supporting this kind of view, that led to my being invited to music industry events, which I think is how I actually finally met you in person at all together now in Berlin, I think is where we met. So then I started going to these events where I would hear musicians like Zoe Keating, who were amazing. Or Steve Lawson, or another mutual friend of ours, who’s also really good at the media. Talking about all these great ways you could use social media to connect with your audiences. And I would hear people from labels and management and things like that getting up on stage saying, you know, well, if you want to make money after the global decline, and the collapse of recorded music, sales, connect with your audience online and engage them, and then you can monetize them. And it all sounded so simple. And I’ve got a PhD in communication. And if I know anything, it’s that connecting and engaging does not lead directly to monetizing, and it’s anything but simple. So I sort of, and I’d hear these musicians kind of go, do I have to use flicker is flicker important. And I sort of thought, wow, there’s a huge disconnect between what these people are being told to do and the lived reality of actually doing it. And I thought, somebody’s got to write about this. And after a few more conferences, I looked around and said, Oh, I’m the only academic in the room, I guess I met somebody. So that led to what became a book that’s just come out, I have stickers down if you want a little souvenir called playing to the crowd, musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection, which is about what I call the relational labour of maintaining these relationships over time and the many conflicting desires that play out as you try to manage. Is my music a commodity? Or is it a social thing in which I want people to participate? Do I want to be intimate with my audience? Or do I want to preserve distance? Do I want to treat them as as a participatory community? Or do I want to treat them as a market that I’m seeking to control and these kinds of tensions that play out? So that’s where it’s taken me most recently, and I eagerly await finding out where it takes me next.
Andrew Dubber
One of the things I really like about your work is that it not only admits complexity, it kind of goes out and finds it. And anything that is this kind of should I be this or should I be that or is this a good thing, or is it a bad thing? You’re always there going on? It’s not as simple as that. It’s always more complicated than we think it is. And I guess it’s one of the things almost, I guess, as a result of that and personal connections in the digital age. Which was your earlier book, which I used a lot in classes, it basically brought me to a couple of things with my students is one, whatever they say, no, it’s more complicated than that. And the other one is, and it’s discursive. It’s basically this is how we talk about these things. This isn’t actually the the, you know, the manifest reality of these things. And that kind of distinction I find really, really interesting of when you read the newspaper and say the music industry is x, y, and z or these technologies cause x, y, and z. There are debates about whether it does or does not, you know, peanut butter gives you cancer or doesn’t give you cancer. But what your your work seems to be, it’s like, those aren’t even the right discussions. Those aren’t even the right. They’re the kind of the complexity under that layer. Is that the interesting bit? Would that be a fair characterization?
Nancy Baym
There are a lot of characterizations there. I just wanted to say on the complexity, I work with a mathematician and he says to me, you say complex? If you think it’s complicated, like that’s a good thing. It’s the opposite of what mathematicians are after? I would say, I absolutely, it’s always about nuance, it’s always about complexity. It’s always more complicated. I strongly believe in unpacking the discourse. And separating the discourse from the empirical reality, I wouldn’t say questions of, is this good or bad? Or the wrong questions, but I would say they always need to be qualified by is this particular practice using this particular thing good or bad for this kind of person? And if so, under what circumstances? Because it’s never cell phones are bad for teenagers. Take away the phones, and they’ll have no more mental illness. It doesn’t work like that. And it never has worked like that. So yeah, so it’s always about and often I’m driven. You asked where my curiosity comes from. Often my curiosity comes from those kinds of claims that are out there in the in the world, often in the media that tend to make me angry, like, connect with your audience and monetize them connection and is a route to monetization, which makes me very angry because I tend to think interpersonal communication is much more valuable than money, and that we mustn’t just reduce it to a mechanism to get more money that that’s inherently dehumanising. I often say audiences are not ATM machines. So when I hear those claims in the media to me it rather than ever taking them at face value, I always want to say, well, what’s actually really happening there? And and and what can account for that? So for example, some early work I did you hear the claim all the time that online conversations are not as good as face to face conversations. So I did a study where we had people recall the last significant voluntary social interaction they had had. And we looked at what kind of relationship was it and what medium was it we controlled for those variables. And what we found was that if you really want to have high quality conversations, the important thing is to avoid talking to acquaintances, because those are much lower quality than when you talk to people you love. Duh, right? medium is irrelevant. relationship is everything. So that’s kind of the way that I like to go at it and say, Oh, you say so? I’m really discouraged a lot of the time that the way that people will, they not just believe the discourse, they believe it about themselves. So I taught for more than 20 years. And if you think about that, that means that at the end, I was teaching students whose parents were the age of students I had taught back at the beginning. And every single year students told me that because of contemporary technology, they were not as good as having conversations as the generations before them had been. And so I keep thinking, where is this generation that doesn’t know how to have conversations? I haven’t seen them yet. I mean, my, my kids seem to do, okay, they look at their phones all the time. And then they put them down and they talk to each other. They don’t know how to do it, you know, so
Andrew Dubber
not only that, but the things that they’re doing only if they’re just using their phone, they’re having conversations, they just thought yeah, that’s
Nancy Baym
I mean, that’s the other thing, of course, is you know, when we say the phone or the computer, we’re I mean, can you even imagine having the kinds of conversations about the conversation, right? Is the conversation good for people or bad for people? Does conversation make people ill? Are you addicted to conversation? Do you need to step away from conversation?
Andrew Dubber
Well, I tell telephones making people bad at talking to people.
Nancy Baym
Well, and there was a lot of research arguing that right about getting well not not research, but there was a lot of panic about that. Right telephones. Um, there was there were early concerns that telephones in rural households would lead to women spending all of their time on the phone, talking babbling And then they wouldn’t vote and it would be the deterioration of civil society. So you know, these these things are very cyclical every new technology, robot robotics is a great example. You can look at what people say about robots. And well, it looks a lot like what people said about the alphabet. You know, it just doesn’t change that much. Over time. We’ve got some really consistent tropes that we pull out over and over and over and, and people don’t realise that so they, they not only believe those groups or tropes are true, but they feel bad about themselves, because they’ve bought into it. And that’s what really upsets me is when people think that I’m not good at this, and they then romanticise this previous time where everybody got along, and all conversations lead to mutual understanding. And there was no mental illness and no sadness. And our parents never got divorced because they knew how to have relationships because they didn’t have the computer or cell phones. Yeah,
Andrew Dubber
yeah. Fantasyland. The flip side of that, of course, is when I was talking to independent musicians, which I did a lot. They would come to me and say, what should my internet strategy be watching my Facebook strategy be? And because I take all of these things as conversations, my answer would always be what’s your telephone strategy? What’s your you know? What’s your what’s your sending letters strategy, or what’s your having a conversation, and Steve Lawson’s line which I always loved that I keep bringing up again, and again, as Hayward always said, having friends is a fantastic marketing strategy until they find out their marketing strategy, and then they are not your friends anymore. And so there is that kind of conversational context, realisation of this as well. But I’m really interested in that there’s a couple of directions I want to take why one is the popular music anchoring and your life because you’ve got some really great pop fandom stories in your arsenal that you can bring up because you’re a serious pop music fan, you’re not just a kind of a Oh, I like pop music, or I heard some Swedish bands. And I like them. You take your fandom quite seriously. Yes, perhaps too seriously. Somebody
Nancy Baym
once told me when I was a teenager, it was a phase I was going to outgrow and I was so offended, I became deeply, deeply committed.
Andrew Dubber
Can you give us an example of the deep commitment of that fandom? I would.
Nancy Baym
Okay, well, so if anybody know the Norwegian band Madrugada, from they put out an album in 1999. And then they broke up in 2008, when their guitarist passed away, and then last month, they announced that they’re reuniting, to play their first album in its entirety, two nights in Oslo, and I immediately bought tickets, and I’m gonna fly from Boston to Oslo for two nights. So does
Andrew Dubber
that count that counts, and, and the other thing that I want to get
Nancy Baym
to tell my arms, not let you can, oh, by the book, it’s in there. But
Andrew Dubber
by the book, there’s a really good REM story in there, I’m going to spare you that I was actually going to say the kayaking thing I wanted to pick you up on because, because you one of the things that you do online, in terms of whether it’s a persona that you portray online, or whether you think about it in terms of just speaking to your friends or so on your personal life is to a certain extent, available online. And so I know you live in this incredible house by a lake and you get kayak and all the rest of it. And and Okay, so there’s the work life balance thing that you can address if you want to, but just that how do you define what is non what is not non? And are there any lessons that should be drawn from that, given that you’ve studied this properly?
Nancy Baym
I actually have a really thought through reason that I communicate that way. I mean, I have always communicated that way. That’s always been by when I taught I always use personal examples to illustrate concepts. The book you’re talking about is full of a lot of personal anecdotes, the book I’ve just written has got a whole chapter where I talk about the posters I had on my wall when I was 13, and those kinds of things. So I’ve always found autobiography and personal example, a really effective way to communicate other concepts to people. But one thing that became really apparent to me very, very, very early in my career is that we have very few role models of women who have lives as well as careers, and that most of the women who we see who have pretty successful careers on social media, all they talk about is their work. And I felt like it was really important that younger women be have an example of a woman who has been extremely successful in the academy, and who has a life and I really wanted them to see, you know, what, I’m a mom and my things like, well, like we went through applying for college this year, which was kind of like hell. And I, I wanted people to see that this actually is an incredibly difficult process. And I’m really kind of freaked out about it and upset about it. And I have had so many people in different professions say offline, I’m so glad you posted that it was so good for me to hear that. And that happens all the time that men and women alike but especially younger women, say you know, oh my gosh, you know, you give me hope that I can kayak and get tenure. So it’s a really explicit Well, not explicit, but implicit, conscious feminist attempt to provide a model of a successful professional who cares about work life balance and who
Andrew Dubber
has interests in things besides scholarship, but also cares about people. I mean, the one thing that you do that, that even people who put their personal lives online don’t often is you express love, like, your son, the way you talk about your your kids online, it’s like, apropos of nothing. Oh my god, I love this kid. And I think that’s, that’s really, that’s really quite remarkable. I mean, it’s really special. It’s really beautiful. But it’s quite remarkable. And it’s quite different. So what you tend to say, Is that part of the plan?
Nancy Baym
No, that’s just me. I’m a loving person, I can’t help but I hug people. I just, I, I mean, I do feel like in this moment, where especially on Twitter, which has just become such a total outrage machine, it is important to express positivity and to, which is not to say we don’t also need to challenge and resist and be negative when necessary. But But I, you know, nobody wants to hang out and complain fast. And I think it’s really important to celebrate the things we love. And I do love my children and I love a lot of things. So I if I’m in love with music, I post about that incessantly, you know? So I’m sure that people you’re saying these things, like they’re really good. But it’s there’s also always these things where I’m thinking, Oh my gosh, nobody wants to hear about my kids anymore. Nobody wants to hear about how I can’t stop listening to Nacho Vegas’s album and nobody wants to hear about this or that. But but then things like this happen. I go, Oh, actually, maybe they do.
Andrew Dubber
You’re wrong. Sorry. But that’d be you’re just wrong.
Nancy Baym
I will say though, you know, if you compare, and I think about this, my colleagues, who are women who do do the straight I’m only going to talk about my work thing. And I’m not going to talk very often. And it’s always going to be an announcement about what I’m up to. I’ve got a new release a new paper that’s just come out, or this is a brilliant book, you must read it or whatnot. I find those accounts kind of boring, but they have so many more followers. So
Andrew Dubber
well. Let’s give you an opportunity here to say the name of your new book again.
Nancy Baym
The book is called playing to the crowd, musicians, audiences and the intimate work of connection. Owners. You have
Andrew Dubber
stickers. All right, Nancy Baym, thanks so much for joining us for Music Tech Fest. The brilliant Nancy Baym and that’s the MTF podcast. Hope you enjoyed and if you did that you tell someone else about it so they can to. We’re going to be on the road pretty soon. The MTF podcast is coming to Manchester, Frankfurt and South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. I’m going to tell you more about that next time. But in the meantime, have a fantastic week and we’ll talk soon Cheers.
