DISQUS

Thanks Nic for covering this. To fill in the link -- the paper can be found at my blog here:

http://www.onlinefandom.com/archives/fan-labor-...

There are many studies of fan communities, but few that focus on issues of fan labor. A special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies is due out next year which will include the final version of this paper along with others addressing this topic.

Also a great resource, if you don't already know it, is the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT run by Henry Jenkins (http://www.convergenceculture.org). The people involved in that (myself included) deal a lot with these issues.

Cheers,
Nancy Baym

The forthcoming last.fm update has an 'events' component where musicians (and others) can input events and they will automatically get recommended to everyone who listens to that band within a radius from home that they (the user) specify. Just another little piece for a big puzzle.

I'll tell you why this person who did get out of bed thinking "I want to be a band manager" for many years changed her mind.

It took about three evenings backstage at big rock concerts with friends who were getting very famous. I never had any troubles with musicians, but just about every record biz man I ran into (to say nothing of the security) approached me with a blatant "so which one are you sleeping with?" attitude (answer was "none").

I have never been one to let sexism hold me back, but I was not up for a career in which fighting it was going to be a daily requirement. I admire the women who do stick it out in that business, but decided I'd rather be in a career where assumption #1 wasn't "she's a sex toy."

Thank you Kevin for doing this! I agree it captures the feel of the event very well. And fear not, organizers are listening, though bringing the costs down is an ideal that's a lot harder to realize than one might think.