Myspace-Bands and Tag-wars

The Effects of the Online Social Media on the Deathcore Scene

The article aims to present and interpret the transformations that took place in the relations of the metal/hardcore and the extreme music scenes known as deathcore due to online community practices in recent years. All this interests the author 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, the author looks 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 label and to the decreased reputation of Myspace as a medium among the people conceiving of themselves as the authentic members of the deathcore scene. Second, by the discourse analysis of the deathcore label as used by Last.fm, he sketches out the other new practices and oppositions specially deriving from the structure of online publicity that emerged on the scene beside these subcultural conflicts. Th e treatise argues that using the concept of the scene of genre as defined in the introductory article seems to be the most appropriate to understand these new patterns.

Released: Replika 64–65, 217–233.
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