Fandom: Mania Music Methods

Fandom is a buzzword of the 2020s, connoting big feelings, big communities, and big business. Music and musical celebrities have been the subject of fan devotion, scrutiny, and purchase across the history of mass culture: bobby soxers to Beatlemania, Deadheads to Directioners, Juggalos, Swifties, the Beyhive and beyond. 

What about music and musicians prompt such devotion? What do music fans do? How do they relate--to musicians, to musical media, and to each other? What (infra)structures and technologies afford those relationships, and how are they impacted by parameters like time, genre, and identity? 

In this course, students will be introduced to the academic study of fans and fandom, with a focus on music; readings from the course will familiarize students with the foundations and interdisciplinary breadth of fandom scholarship, spanning sociology, musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and audience studies. Fittingly, in assignments across the quarter, students will engage a variety of methods—archival, ethnographic, quantitative, critical-theoretical—culminating in a study of a particular fandom phenomenon.