Hang with Me—Exploring Fandom, Brandom, and the Experiences and Motivations for Value Co-Creation in a Music Fan Community

The latter part of the 20th century saw a strong interest in fandom: fans having engaging relationships with popular culture and mediated artefacts (see Holt, 2004) and being part of groups of like-minded consumers with a unifying interest (so-called consumer fandom; see Hao, 2020). Fans were early adopters of the Internet, and their increased access to information and greater speed of social interaction made their activity more public and visible (Duffett, 2013b). Fans are highly active in their engagement around the object of their affection (Chung et al., 2018; Fiske, 1992; Gray et al., 2017). However, fans’ engagement on social media can be characterised by low to high activity (see Muntinga et al., 2011; Malthouse et al., 2013). Engagement behaviour on social media can also be positively and negatively valenced and categorised according to level of intensity, as outlined by Dolan et al. (2015).

Fans’ deep and positive emotional experiences (Baym, 2018; Duffett, 2013) and broad knowledge of their object of interest are often expressed in everyday and social situations as a consistent, loyal and often religious-like allegiance (Löbert, 2012; Obiegbu et al., 2019). At the centre of fandom is the ability to transform personal feelings into social interactions (Jenkins, 2006). Fan communities form around a common interest and offer a sense of belonging to fans (Duffett, 2013b). Duffett (2013) claims that fandom should be studied not just by looking at the individual fan, but at how fans find intimacy and build relationships with those around them, developing a kind of family. In a study about the music artist Lady Gaga, fans even went as far as to describe the artist as taking on a kind of parental role in the fans’ lives (Click et al., 2013:361). Fans felt part of a family called ‘Little Monsters’, associating Lady Gaga with the name ‘Mother Monster’.

The fan phenomena of today are moving faster than ever before and can take place anywhere and anytime. Online interaction has changed fan communities into ‘a non-stop process of social effervescence’ (Hills, 2003:181), rather than being networks of local culture. These communities have become a portable haven where fans can belong (Sandvoss, 2005). Maffesoli's (1996) concept of tribe elaborates on the fan community by describing an affinity-based group with a common affective repertoire and ‘collective privacy’ (1996:91). The affective belonging is reinforced by technology both within and across groups. Adams and Smith (2008) drew on Maffesoli's concept to describe electronic tribes as fluid, postmodern groups that want to belong together, interact socially and share information within the tribe, actions that are facilitated by social media and its affordances. Studying the fan army of the South Korean boy band BTS, Chang and Park (2019) drew on the tribe concept to explain emerging global music fandom—how private fandom, its tastes and its desires have transformed into ‘cultural, political, and economic expression in the public realm’ (2019:260)—via digital intimacy and transnational locality, made possible by social media. These kinds of tribes organise themselves online without any kind of organisational structure. This is central to becoming an influential and often global fan group made of members who share and create values and distribute content as they see fit.

One aspect of fan community activity is the action that the fandom object (the product or brand) benefits from commercially. The management of a brand recognises the possibilities of using fans in branding and transmedia marketing and seeks to optimise the relationship between the brand and fans. This kind of fan community can be created by the brand itself: a brand community (see McAlexander et al., 2002; Muñiz & O’Guinn, 2001; Schau et al., 2009). Several definitions of brand communities have been suggested. Muñiz and O’Guinn (2001:412) define brand community as ‘a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand’, whereas Cova et al. (2015:466) define it as a ‘co-consuming group of people with a common interest in a specific brand that creates a parallel social universe (subculture) with its own myths, values, rituals, vocabulary and hierarchy’.

The organisational activities of steering, measuring and monetising fan communities in order to build brands are profoundly enabled by social media (see, for example, Guo, 2020). Guschwan developed the term ‘brandom’ to describe fan culture ‘engineered by brand managers eager to cultivate consumer labour and loyalty while preempting the possibility of resistance that participatory fan culture promises’ (2012:26). The term brandom has partly been elaborated in relation to sports (Guschwan, 2012) and film industry (Marsh, 2014) but not regarding the music industry. O’Reilly, Larsen and Kubacki (2013) explore music brands and fandom from a consumption perspective. To further elaborate on the term in cultural industry, but more specifically to build on the distinction between brandom and fandom, we find it important to understand the fan perspective of taking part in this and to create and understanding of the sociological dimension of emotions of fandom and brandom (Yeritsian, 2018).

Some argue that a ‘new economy of fandom’ (Galuszka, 2015, building on Fiske, 1992) has emerged due to new conditions for online fan brand communities, empowering and giving fans new roles as stakeholders, sponsors, investors, filters and co-creators of value. Thus, (fan) consumers play a pivotal and dynamic role in value co-creation within the realm of brand communities (Ind et al., 2013; Schau et al., 2009) by acting as ‘providers and beneficiaries, thereby co-creating value for themselves, for brand communities, and for organisations’ (Pongsakornrungsilp & Schroeder, 2011:320), including content, products and services (Muñiz & Schau, 2011).

Brand communities can offer brand loyalists a place to assemble, often of their own accord, to discuss and share their passion for particular brands (Muñiz & O’Guinn, 2001). Nevertheless, research has shown that brand communities lead to many beneficial outcomes for brands, including stronger loyalty and purchase intentions (Algesheimer et al., 2010). Co-creative fan practices in contemporary brand communities serve brands and the media industry at large (Artiera, 2012; Arvidsson, 2005; Carpentier, 2012; van Dijck, 2014; Zwick et al., 2008). Fans, in this sense, can be seen as working for the industry as free labour, a concept that has been increasingly used since Terranova's (2000) analysis of user productivity in the networked digital economy and the ways in which such productivity might be exploited by capital. The use of fans as free labour—also referred to as emotional labour (Hochschild, 2012) or relational labour (Baym, 2018)—offers the industry a way to lower the costs of production, marketing and consumer relations and ‘spread its risky business across a broad spectrum of stakeholders’ (Fast et al., 2016:974). The fans seem to accept this, presumably finding the work they do to be rewarding and of value to them.

Traditionally, value has been understood as something that is realised when money is exchanged for products and services, which implies that value is produced by firms and consumed by customers. (Grönroos, 2011; Vargo & Lusch, 2004, 2008). However, in the last decade, traditional demarcations between producers, such as music actors and consumers (i.e., fans and audiences), have been blurred and changed. Value can rather be seen as co-created in collaboration with customers as they subjectively experience, perceive and determine value when using products and services.

To create prerequisites for customer value creation, an organisation and its customers (and other actors in the service ecosystem) contribute and integrate resources, such as information, knowledge and skills (Vargo & Lusch, 2008, 2016). Grönroos and Voima (2013) distinguish three spheres where resources are integrated and value may be created: the provider (organisation) sphere, the joint sphere and the customer sphere. In the provider sphere, the organisation acts as a value facilitator with a focus on integrating resources to facilitate customers’ value creation, for example, by sharing information about a new album, concerts, tickets or merchandise.

In the joint sphere, the organisation and customers act as co-creators of value as they integrate resources through direct interaction. This is considered a dialogical process between the provider (artist) and the customer (fans). An example is creating a game that fans can play to win tickets to a concert.

In the customer sphere, value is created by customers themselves in use, outside direct interaction with the organisation/provider (Grönroos & Voima, 2013), such as the fans listening to a new album with friends at home. However, different customers may perceive the same product or service differently depending on the occasion and social context (Edvardsson et al., 2011). Thus, it can be suggested that the listener may perceive the new music (or another type of service provided by the artist) differently if they experience it by themselves or together as a community.

Through the use of social media, the organisation has an opportunity to follow actions and interactions between customers as well as to co-create value with customers to a larger extent. Social media has also shifted the boundaries of marketing and consumer behaviour (Gamble & Gilmore, 2013). While moving away from the traditional view of marketing and value creation, consumers have also been given increasingly active roles in the marketing process (Bloom, 2006). Gamble and Gilmore (2013) argue that this change is partly perceived by firms as a loss of control, but still a necessity.

In sum, we study how fans in a music brand community interact and co-create value and explore their motivations for participating and being active in this relationship. This study addresses the need to understand individual and social aspects of fandom and how it can be connected to a brand.

A fan community related to the Swedish music artist Robyn was selected as a case for this study. The case was selected for three reasons: first, Robyn is a well-known Scandinavian artist with a large fan base. Second, Robyn made a comeback in late 2018 and created a new Facebook fan community that quickly grew to include fans from all over the world. Third, this case provides a rich empirical context because the artist uses social media liberally to communicate with her fans as well as the fans who are active in their relationships both with the artist and among themselves, as recommended by Hine (2015). Robyn is active on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which all are used for marketing and communication with the fans, in general.

The Facebook group ‘Konichiwa Bitches’ (KB) is rather a new fan group, started by Robyn and her management team in 2018 as part of a release campaign for her new album ‘Honey’. One example of the marketing events is Robyn's collaboration with Red Bull in the form of a gamified app that allowed fans to compete for tickets to a concert of Robyn as part of the ‘Red Bull Secret Gig’ the same year in Stockholm, Sweden. Activity in the KB community originally related to this event but continued when Robyn went on tour in Europe, Canada and the US. Soon, the KB group grew to encompass engaged fans around the world—over 3,200 to date. Initially, the group content primarily consisted of branded content and information about campaign events but evolved into more regular fan conversations over time and is now mainly built on fan interactions.

Conducting a digital ethnography is a matter of engaging with the field, watching what happens and listening to what is said (Hine, 2015; O’Reilly, 2012; Pink, 2006), which can be challenging due to the massive amount of data, as well as the heterogeneousness and complexity of the Internet, as it is in constant change and movement (Hine, 2015). We followed the argument of Hine (2015) and Markus (1995) using a multi-sited ethnography approach, both online and in real life (IRL), with several data collection techniques.

Data collection took place between fall 2018 and summer 2020. First, we searched for information about the artist in general and about her fans in particular on social channels and digital news media. We followed fan conversations and participated in blogs and social media platforms (as described by Hine, 2015; Pink, 2006; Postill & Pink, 2012). The mapping resulted in an overview of the fan community and identified where most fan activities took place (e.g., the KB group on Facebook, which we gained access to).

Second, we conducted a small qualitative survey in the KB Facebook group. The survey was conducted as a pilot study in order to identify why fans are active members in the group and how they interact. In total, eighteen fans answered the survey.

Third, we invited fans to an interview, and then conducted semi-structured interviews with four fans in the KB group to deepen our knowledge and gain a broader understanding of the fans, their perceived value of being a member of the fan community, their feelings and experiences, and the marketing efforts by the management team. Probing questions were used to gather more detailed descriptions, which helped prevent misunderstandings in the respondents’ replies. In conjunction with a concert, five more respondents were interviewed. We also identified and interviewed three fans (USA) in the KB group who stood out as superfans as they arranged events playing Robyn music. These superfans had been some of the most active group members and exclusively invited by the management team to be administrators of the Facebook group. To understand the brand perspective, we also interviewed four members of Robyn's management group. In total, sixteen interviews were conducted with both men and women from four countries: the UK, Canada, the US and Sweden. Interviews lasted between 30 and 65 min (except for one that was only 14 min) and were audio recorded and transcribed. Contracts were signed to assure the respondents’ anonymity throughout the process of collecting, analysing and presenting the data.

Fourth, we participated in concerts and dance parties, interacting with other fans and experiencing the event ourselves. In 2020, several virtual dance parties were organised by Robyn and a group of superfans as live streams, which enabled us to observe the fans’ participation and the online discussions related to the live streams. As a part of the digital ethnography, we also actively participated in the KB group, conducting participant observations online, writing comments and posts, liking other posts, talking to fans and so forth. We have also actively collected data by taking screenshots of posts and conversations during the whole period of data collection.

To identify deep and rich descriptions of the context in which the phenomena occur—that is, the fandom and brandom—we followed an inductive approach inspired by grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1998) for our data analysis. As we sought to understand the motivations, experiences and value creation of fans within these contexts, we adopted the Gioia methodology (2013), which enables scientific theorising about people's experiences. This methodology gives the respondents a strong voice in guiding the data analysis, arguing that respondents are able to explain their thoughts, intentions and actions.

As recommended by Gioia et al. (2013), we started the data analysis by coding the extensive data set by identifying empirical codes and constructed empirical phrases closely related to the respondents’ own descriptions (the first-order concepts that can be found in Table 1). We then constructed second-order themes by combining empirical explorations with theoretical reflections about fandom, brandom and value creation. In the aggregate dimension, the key themes were abstracted further into common headings. Table 1 illustrates the three types of ‘individual fan motivations’, three types of ‘collective fan motivation’ and two themes related to ‘brand motivations’ identified through our data analysis.

These themes and aggregate dimensions are explored and elaborated on in the section ‘Findings’. The empirical exploration outlines a framework for creating an understanding of fans and fan communities as part of a music brand universe that is further reflected upon in the section ‘Discussion, Contributions and Future Research’.