Performing Numbers

Abstract

This chapter explores the implications of performance metrics as a source of self-knowledge and self-presentation. It does so through the figure of the contemporary musician. As performers on-stage and online, musicians are constantly assessed and evaluated by industry actors, peers, music fans, and themselves. The impact of powerful modes of quantification on personal experiences, understandings, and practices of artistic creation provides insight into the wider role that metrics play in shaping how we see ourselves and others; and how we present ourselves to others. Through in-depth interviews with emerging musicians, this chapter thus uses the artist as a lens through which to understand everyday life within the “performance complex.”

Affective Landscapes, Scenes, and Arrangements

“…Ample research documents these developments in terms of shifting commercial and mediational conditions in the 'new music industries' (Hughes et al 2016, Morris 2015, Wikström 2020) and other areas of music culture (Johansson et al 2017, Nowak and Bennett 2022, Prior 2018. Less attention has been paid to the accompanying emotive or energetic shifts, for example, as regards artists' motivation and ability to make sense of metrics, their hopes and despair in navigating sorting algorithms, or the incentives and fatigue of social-media communication (for example, Baym et al 2021, Jones 2021, Maasø and Hagen 2019, Prey 2020b. I refer to such shifts and their (in)capacitating implications as affective dynamics (inspired by Slaby and Mühlhoff 2019), and this article contributes to mending the research lack by asking: How can the intertwinement of local musical engagements and concerns about digital music promotion and distribution be conceived as a matter of affective dynamics?…”