Covid-19 och de restriktioner som följde i pandemins spår förändrade musikbranschens förutsättningar över en natt. Scener och klubbar tvingades stänga när det infördes förbud mot allmänna sammankomster och alla uppmanades att hålla avstånd. Festivaler, turnéer och konserter ställdes in. Men hur påverkades och förhöll sig den svenska musikbranschen till restriktionerna under pandemin? Detta kapitel ger en bild av tiden under pandemin utifrån små och medelstora svenska musikaktörer. Aktörer som står utanför de stora major-bolagen och som är aktiva utanför Sveriges storstadsregioner. Utgångspunkten är enstudie som initierades när Sverige införde begränsningar av allmännasammankomster 2020 och som pågick fram till sommaren 2022. Kapitlet redogör för musikaktörers reaktioner, ageranden och de olika faser branschens aktörer genomgick under denna märkliga tid – från desperation till innovativt samarbete.

PurposeIn this study, we applied the strategy-as-practice (SAP) framework to analyse strategic communication practices. SAP implies approaching strategy as something that organisational members do and is useful for understanding the tensions between emergence and formalisation and between planning and improvisation that characterise the everyday communication work of communication practitioners.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on an ethnographic study of a record company and on qualitative interviews with various actors from the music industry.FindingsTensions exist between the emergence of inputs from active consumers that require flexibility and attempts to strategically formalise and continuously adapt plans and encourage consumers to act in anticipated ways. The findings revealed five strategic communication practices-meetings, working in the office, gathering and analysing consumer engagement and related data, collaboration and storytelling-that practitioners used to conduct strategic communication and navigate the tensions.Originality/valueThe study contributes to understanding the role of strategic communication practices in contemporary organisations and how practitioners manage the tensions within them. The study shows that an SAP approach can account for improvisation and emergence, as well as planning and formalisation. It also shows how SAP resonates with emergent and agile strategic communication frameworks.

Purpose– This article examines the ways in which the popular music industry markets artists through integrated transmedia marketing campaigns. These campaigns unfold across multiple media and create multiple pathways for audience engagement, particularly fan engagement, across social media platforms. The purpose is to further theorise the relationship between artists, the music industry and audiences.

Design/methodology/approach– The study used digital ethnography to scrutinise the activities within a contemporary music transmedia marketing campaign, focusing on the release of Taylor Swift’s album Reputation as an illustrative case.

Findings– The study demonstrates how strategically curated activities encompass platforms’ affordances and industry events by making use of fan engagement across social media platforms and streaming services. Fans shift through platforms, as well as across digital and physical spaces, through defined marketing activities at specific times. This article proposes the concept of choreographed engagement to specifically address the ways in which the temporal and spatial aspects of social media marketing are used at the intersection of platform logic, algorithm economy and fan engagement to reach wider audiences.

Originality/value– By proposing the concept of choreographed engagement, the authors bridge the gap between fan practices and marketing practices, providing insight into how commodification of fan engagement is utilised spatially and temporally within the contemporary platform economy. Choreographed engagement constitutes a significant aspect of strategic communication and marketing. The term expands the vocabulary used in the debate on the commodification of artistic work, and audience engagement in the platform era

This thesis studies how the music industry’s strategic communication practices interplay with and steer audience and fan engagement. Relationships with, and expectations on, “active”, “prosuming” or “co-creative” music audiences make it imperative for communication practitioners to produce engagement. The music industry has adapted its promotional strategies accordingly, and data-driven processes and algorithms have become ever more central to understanding and controlling audience practices. Currently, we are witnessing the emergence of new strategic communication approaches to follow, foster, steer, track and commodify audience engagement, via big data. Applying qualitative and ethnographic approaches and socio-cultural perspectives, the thesis explores how strategic communication practices are enacted and designed to cater for, interplay with and steer fan engagement. Drawing on practice and structuration theory, critical questions are asked about the social consequences of communication engagement and an engagement imperative – for both individuals and organisations involved in the strategic communication around a music brand.  Results indicate that the contemporary, digitalised music industry demands communication practices that are at the same time strategic, professionalised, agile and co-creative. The study highlights important implications of such practices, in terms of changing professional competences and ethics as well as context-specific articulations of the power relations that support and are (re-)produced through the engagement imperative. In sum, the thesis is aimed at extending our understanding of how strategic communication practices respond to, and change in, a seemingly liquid, yet at the same time carefully orchestrated, communicative context. 

For the music industry, audiences’ engagement around music artists is central to building and communicating artist brands. Currently, we are witnessing new communication approaches to track, foster and commodify audience engagement, partly via data-driven processes. This thesis studies how the music industry’s strategic communication practices interplay with and steer audience and fan engagement.

The thesis applies qualitative and ethnographic approaches and socio-cultural perspectives. Drawing on practice and structuration theory, critical questions are asked about the social consequences of communication engagement and an engagement imperative – for both individuals and organisations. Results indicate that the contemporary, digitalised music industry demands communication practices that are at the same time strategic, professionalised, emergent, agile and co-creative. The study highlights implications of such practices, in terms of changing professional competences, ethics and power relations that support and are (re-) produced through the engagement imperative. In sum, the thesis is aimed at extending our understanding of how strategic communication practices respond to, and change in, a seemingly liquid, yet at the same time carefully orchestrated, communicative context. 

Due to societal trends, such as digitalisation, platformisation, and active and co-creative audiences, new organisational practices have surfaced. This study examines how communication practitioners experience their changing work in a new communication environment in which participatory cultural norms are becoming standard in strategic communication. I argue that the requirements to produce audience engagement affect the communication work and the communication workers. This study uses the popular music industry as a case, and is based on interviews with communication practitioners as well as on the qualitative text analysis of reports and newsletters from the music marketing firm Music Ally to the music industry. The study shows that communication practitioners within the industry experience a duty to create audience engagement-an engagement imperative. Although the practitioners are highly skilled in digital communication and social media, they often see the development of digital promotional culture as a challenge and express a lack of a deeper understanding of engagement. This study highlights implications for their professional roles, competences, and identities as well as ethical implications regarding the exploitation of audiences in communication work.

Active and co-creative audiences are sought, used, tracked and taken for granted in the quest for strong music brands. Fan communities are co-opted to build value for brands and used to foster communication in transmedia marketing campaigns. However, when focusing on audiences and fans’ digital media activities, digital traces and numbers, important questions of motivations, expectations, experiences, morals and power structures are often overlooked. Drawing on a digital ethnographic study and an interdisciplinary perspective, we investigate a fan community of the Swedish artist Robyn, both online and offline. The article contributes to the concepts of fandom and brandom and the notion of value. It also adds to the knowledge about the perspective of fans and fans’ motivations for taking part and co-creating value in a highly commercialised and strategised music market.

The Internet has changed how music fans come together and how the music industry connects to and communicates with fans. To understand the incentives for becoming a fan and why fans take part in an artist brand, this article considers the diversity in a particular fan community, including its hierarchy and roles. Fans have different levels of engagement, knowl‐ edge, and status, both inside and outside a fan community. To extend the existing research on fan hierarchies into the digital promotional culture, this study focuses on the case of the Swedish music artist Robyn and her Facebook fan community Konichiwa Bitches. To gain insights into a complex online research arena, we use a qualitative and digital ethnographic approach in both online and offline contexts. The article provides an understanding and conceptualization of fan hierar‐ chies, focusing on the top of the hierarchy, superfans and executive fans, and on their incentives for engagement. These high‐level fans function as a key connecting point between the brand management and the fans, thus taking fandom a step further and enhancing the brand.

Over the last decade, the music industry has adapted its promotional strategy to take advantage of the fluid, contemporary, platform-based transmedia landscape. For researchers of contemporary culture, the multiplicity of promotional activities creates substantial methodological challenges. In this article, we present and discuss such methodological approaches using two studies of contemporary promotional music campaigns as illustrative cases. Inspired by digital and innovative methods and guided by the Association of Internet Researchers’ (AoIR’s) ethical guidelines, we developed two data collection strategies—reversed engineering and live capturing—and applied two analytical approaches—visual mapping and time-based layering. The first case study traced already staged music marketing campaigns across multiple online media platforms, and the second followed an online promotional campaign in real time for six months. Based on these case studies, we first argue for the importance of grounded manual capturing and coding in data collection, especially when working around data access limitations imposed by platforms. Second, we propose reversed engineering and live capturing as methods of capturing fragmented data, in contemporary promotional campaigns. Third, we suggest the visual mapping and time-based layering of data, enabling researchers to oscillate between qualitative and quantitative data. Finally, we argue that researchers must pool their experiences and resources regarding how to transcend platform limitations and question a lack of transparency while respecting ethical norms and guidelines. With these arguments, we assert the researcher’s necessary role in understanding and explaining the complex and hybrid contemporary promotional landscape and provide tools and strategies for further research.

The question of what is real in social media is highly relevant today. Authenticity is a key concept that is used in many different aspects, as something that comes across as being trustworthy, but also as a strategic tool in order to create relationships with the audience and a “feeling of true.” This chapter investigates the concept of authenticity in popular music—how authenticity is manifested and created, if it is created, on social platforms regarding music brands. The music industry is both highly branded, commercial, and creative and heterogeneous. The communication on digital platforms is getting more alike, regardless of level of independence, professionalism and artistic integrity. At the same time the audience has expectations of music artist relating to genre and image, that not always match the strategic music brand building. Does this strategy focus make authenticity hollow and vulnerable?

In this paper, we present and discuss methodological aspects of studying engagement in promotional online campaigns within the music industry. We draw on learnings from exploring innovative methods and digital methods in two studies on transmedia marketing campaigns. Based on our method, we discuss researchers' premises when conducting digital data collection, the complexity of analyzing and comparing qualitative and quantitative data sets of different formats, and how to present and handle data in an ethical way. We contribute with innovative methods for studying how engagement is commercially produced, and move between the offline and online in the contemporary platform-based media landscape.