Despite the growing academic interest in internet-based music research, there is not enough scholarship analysing the changes and continuities of musicians’ practices of engagement with audiences in the contemporary mediascape, particularly from an ethnographic point of view that avoids the how-to marketing manual format. Nancy Baym tackles this topic in Playing to the Crowd, critically investigating how a sustainable career in music today involves managing online forms of relating with fans as strategic “relational labor” (p. 19). Combining personal observations and experience, ethnographic interviews with musicians, and historical research and supported by scholarship from ethnomusicology, popular music, and media studies, she dissects “the expectations that musicians connect with their audiences in more intimate ways, the dialectic tensions this ongoing relational maintenance entails, and the ways that musicians make sense of and strategically manage their connections with audiences” (p. 7). In the same vein as her 2010 analysis of human connection through digital media, Baym looks at relationship building and maintenance as “strategic accomplishments” (p. 6) of social life, yet highlighting musicians’ online relationships as intrinsically human, dedicated to and concerned with connecting with audiences beyond commercial success. Musicians’ balancing of this duality between online practices of self-promotion and human connectedness—and their often-blurred boundaries—is the central discussion of this book.

The volume is divided in three parts for music (part I), participation (part II) and relationships (part III). Each has two chapters focusing on an element of this relational labour, and all three themes are successfully interwoven throughout the text. The first part outlines perspectives of music as a social object of culture for meaning-making, human communication, affective relating, and gift-giving, which ethnomusicologists will find familiar. The second chapter summarises the historical appearance of music as a commodity, from its pre-industrial character as an inherently participatory form of culture to the current mediascape of “digital hustle” (p. 68) to connect with fans. Here and in the next chapter Baym argues that when audiences were reduced to consumers by the commodification of music during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they developed participatory practices through music fandom, although this history of the music industry may not be applicable to some non-Western contexts. The second part continues this historical analysis approaching music audiences as digital pioneers of participatory culture, therefore setting the rules of how to connect online long before musicians paid attention to the internet. Here Baym provides first-person accounts of her own fandom practices comparing old and new forms of fans’ “vernacular creativity” (p. 103), such as mixtape exchange and early online forums, which further contribute to humanising musicians’ and fans’ stories and experiences. This third chapter successfully reminds readers that audiences’ expectations of gift-like music circulation and ubiquitous, always available, banal and profound conversations about music are not products of the social media industry. Chapter 4 discusses the dialectic tensions between these audiences’ expectations and artists’ desires and strategies to control their work and image while engaging in participatory culture. Baym classifies artists strategies between forms of control (owning audience data and invoking copyright) and forms of participation (accepting fans’ autonomy and help with promotion). The third part starts by comparing online and offline platforms in chapter 5, understanding them as spaces “creating possibilities for action” (p. 140) and assessing how concert hall areas such as the stage and the merchandise table provide distinct relational affordances that often overlap with social media interactions. This chapter also crucially highlights that social media encapsulates multiple dualities of fans versus haters, commercial economy versus gift exchange, connection at a distance, and individualisation that expands the audience, which requires a new and ongoing negotiation of boundaries and communication that concert halls had highly ritualised. The final chapter further develops this argument, analysing how this relational work is an exercise in authenticity performance for musicians, who are forced to rethink and manage not only their ideas of the self as artists and humans, but their conceptualisations of friendship, privacy, and commodification, navigating the risks of losing mystique and being dangerously close to fans. A greater emphasis on fans’ perspectives beyond the author’s own experiences could have enriched the discussions in chapters 4–6, showing the other side of these participatory strategies and relationship boundaries. Baym’s objective of humanising musicians and foregrounding their stories as genuine people concerned with maintaining their autonomy while establishing meaningful connections with audiences is further reiterated in the conclusion. The final sections provide recommendations for fans and artists, including a welcome call for social media developers to responsibly promote civic spaces where humans can flourish.

Overall, Baym’s book sheds light on the previously unexplored territory of musicians’ own management of their social media presence through ethnography, and for this reason many sections of this volume deserve a place in music and media syllabi for undergraduate and graduate studies, particularly to study Western cultural contexts and popular music scenes.