Counting on you. Considerations on DIY 2.0 and fan funding

Thanks to the participatory architecture of the web, the so-called DIY 2.0 takes the shape – more than in the past – of DIWO (do-it-with-others), where “others” are and web users. Within these practices, new relationships between artists and fans are experimented, traditional distinctions are redefined and new representations of both are articulated. While a lot of discourses about participatory practices tend to emphasize the chances of empowerment both for artists and fans, more involved into the gatekeeping as well as into different functions of the production process, critical aspects pointed out by other analysis have to be taken into account, such as the percistency of factors allowing some musicians – more than others - to take greater advantage of the wealth of networks, or the rhetoric and the affordances of web-services enabling and contextualizing these practices in ways which are functional to specific interests and business models. The aim of the paper is to provide some insights on emerging and extremely heterogeneous DIY 2.0 practices, proceeding on existing literature and personal researches, conducted in particular on the fan funding practices, which illustrate the possible articulations and criticalities of the relationship between musicians, fans and new intermediaries that manage participatory platforms.