The Rise of the New Amateurs: Popular Music, Digital Technology and the Fate of Cultural Production (original) (raw)

This article takes its cue from work on “digital democracy”, web 2.0 participatory cultures and the self-sufficient amateur producer. It argues that we can identify a proliferation of digital culture built upon an increasingly decentralised system of cultural production in spaces like YouTube, Myspace and Flickr. Though largely confined to middle-class techno-literates, the article points to the impact of micro-organisational cultural worlds on the record industry and suggests that punk’s “DIY aesthetic” has become a structural condition of cultural production. The figure of the “new amateur” is injected into this story as a novel technocultural type, equipped with high-quality cultural tools, whose practices are transforming boundaries between professional and amateur, expert and non-expert, authentic and inauthentic. Keywords: amateur, digital, DIY, production, new media, web 2.0, music

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