Digital platforms and the professionalization of DIY in the popular music field. The experiences of long-time independent musicians

Over the past ten years grassroots music production has been incentivized by an increasing number of web-platforms that allow to autonomously manage music promotion and distribution. The adoption of such tools has been fostered by the promise to facilitate the development of sustainable DIY careers, however is widely debated ‘how much’ and ‘for who’ they are actually able to do so, especially considering the wider changes affecting music production. The paper aims to offer a specific contribution to this debate, presenting the results of a qualitative research which investigates the practices and evaluations of fifteen DIY musicians who experienced the transition from the pre-web 2.0 era to nowadays. It will be highlighted how experiences and uses of digital platforms supporting self-production are generated at the intersection between the conditioning of the hyper-competitive context that they contributed to create, perceived as a request of professionalization, and the different sensitivities, resources and aspirations of the musicians.