Music fans as mediators in the age of digital reproduction

In their recent Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington note two levels of analysis that have shaped fan studies. From its beginnings, fan studies have attended closely to the ways in which new media blur the lines between fans and artists, or in a related idiom, consumers and cultural producers. Music and music scenes have been on the cutting edge of these developments. As Entwistle notes, cultural intermediaries are in charge of ‘bringing a range of cultural things to market: goods, images, taste, and aesthetics’. Inevitably, the work of cultural intermediaries becomes attractive to market agents. Multinational record labels were crucial during the nineties, especially after the censorship that characterised the scene during Pinochet’s dictatorship in the seventies and the end of the eighties. Corona Clash was a marketing event organised by Alta, the advertising agency of the long-established beer company, Corona.