Making Sweet Music Together: The Affordances of Networked Media for Building Performance Capital by YouTube Musicians

Abstract

Following Miller, who looked at offline performance capital for musicians and discovered important gender and genre impacts, we examined the role of gender and genre in the development of performance capital for YouTube top cover song artists. This case study suggests that online performance capital on YouTube is slightly different than offline performance capital, and benefits from the affordances of networked media, and specifically YouTube. While there is some gender-based homophily in channel linking behaviors, there are also connections between weakly tied individuals with respect to video category, meaning that musicians are linking to others outside of the music community and vice versa. While music video channels tend to link to other music video channels, and non-music channels tend to link to other non-music channels, the most popular videos tend to post from multiple categories including both music and non-music. Findings suggest that being a long-time poster and having a rich and diverse network are likely elements of building performance capital for YouTube musicians.