Music Fan Worlds?: How Indie Fans Construct Interpretive Communities and Audience Paratexts on Reddit

Matt Hills' "fan worlds" (2017) and Nick Crossley's "music worlds" (2015), both extensions of Howard Becker's theory of "art worlds" (1982), are theoretical paradigms that help to extend our understanding of the conceptual worlds of music fans. These formations, when combined, allow us to go beyond exploring music fans as consumers, audience members or fanzine producers to illuminate the ways in which fans construct meaning and identity through their participation in a music-centred discursive world. This conceptual intervention is especially vital in the context of online indie music fans, who place deep importance on building a shared interpretive community that structures and denotes understandings of quality. Using ethnographic discourse analysis to explore novel Reddit data, I have analysed 5,567 threads and 514,638 comments across the period of 2014-2019 to explore the online indie music fan world. Through this analysis, I have found how the indie music fan world constructs the boundaries and quality signifiers of the genre; how the world centres around paratextual engagement from fans, critics and musicians as much as, if not more so, than the music itself; and how the homogeneity of the explored subreddit allows the studied indie fans to construct notions of 'essential' music along the lines of race and gender. Through these findings, I will show how indie fans have constructed an interpretive community within the broader music fan world, and how this interpretive lens is the most suited to understanding online music fandom.