‘Myspace-Bands’ and ‘Tag-Wars’: The Case of Online Social Media and the Deathcore Scene

In my talk I aim to interpret the transformations that took place in the relations of the extreme music scene known as ‘deathcore’ due to online community practices in recent years. All this interests me in respect to the questions concerning genre communities: how do web 2.0 applications affect communities organized around certain genres? How do certain genre-definitions and communities form each other as well as the relation to the transformation process itself, and what kind of conflicts does this engender? First, I look at — through the career of the band Job For a Cowboy on Myspace — how the online success of the band led to the devaluation of the ‘deathcore’ genre label and to the decreased reputation of Myspace as a medium among the people conceiving of themselves as the authentic members of the scene.
Second, by the discourse analysis of the deathcore label on Last.fm, I sketch out new practices and oppositions deriving from the structure of online publicity that emerged in the scene beside these subcultural conflicts. I argue that using the concept of the ‘genre music scene’ seems to be the most appropriate to understand these new musical / social patterns in the age of online social media.

Tamas Tofalvy, Guest Lecturer, Budapest University of Technology and Economics