Nancy Baym

Here is a ten minute talk I recorded for New Music Strategies’ AmpNMS ‘online music knowledge event’ about Making Friends With Fans:

Last weekend I gave a talk at the International Communication Association about the increasingly interpersonal nature of the relationships between musicians and friends. In it, I draw on the interviews I’ve done with musicians to identify some of the positive new rewards they get when they can interact directly with their fans, cover many of the tricky interpersonal issues they face in trying to negotiate how much those relationships can be like friendship, and briefly summarize the main strategies they use to manage boundaries in ways with which they are comfortable.

Video essay by Simon Lindgren of Umea University (Sweden) - includes a Skype interview with me.

Last week I gave a talk at by:Larm, Norway’s premiere music industry conference and festival. I was invited by GramArt, a nonprofit that works to help musicians, to talk about musicians and social media. If you click here you can download a PDF of the slides and notes from my talk.

Last spring I wrote a research memo for the Convergence Culture Consortium about dealing with the unfettered flow of content in contemporary entertainment industries. It’s now public and you can download the PDF here:

This week MySpace announced it is laying off  half of its workforce. This follows an attempt at rebranding itself as a “social entertainment hub,” a new and widely-ridiculed logo, and a warning from its parent corporation to shape up or get sold.

This is how I’ve been describing the research project I’ve been focusing on:

The last decade has brought tremendous changes in the tools and possibilities for musicians and audiences to interact with one another. On one hand, this brings new possibilities as artists can directly mobilize supporters on their behalf.

As my Facebook friends and Twitter followers know, like many others I’m angry at Facebook. I haven’t written a blog post about it because so many others have been making most of my points so eloquently (forgive me for not linking to them). But I relent, and here it is anyway, in the form of responses to the criticisms of criticism that I keep hearing: