Music Fandom in the Age of #MeToo: Morality Crowdsourcing, Racialised Cancellation and Complicated Listening Habits in Online Hip-Hop and Indie-Alternative Communities

In 2017, the re-emergence of the ‘MeToo’ hashtag caused shockwaves across Hollywood, resulting in the imprisonment of grievous offender Harvey Weinstein, and emboldening countless others to speak up about industry abuse. In music, however, legal remonstrations have been noticeably less distinct. Instead, judgement has often fallen to fans, using social media to wrangle with personal dilemmas (and each other) as to how much the abusive actions of an artist should invalidate one’s enjoyment of their art.

Exploring the fandoms of ten assault-accused music artists — five in indie-rock/alternative, and five in hip-hop/rap — this thesis seeks to explore two core questions: what it is like to be an online music fan amidst the ‘culture wars’, and how fans reckon with allegations of #MeToo era misconduct while using social media and streaming platforms. Speaking to 56 fans about their usage of Reddit and Twitter, I propose two ends of a fannish spectrum — emotional closeness and emotional distance — to explore how social media emboldens fans to closely ‘stan’ an artist, and conversely, why streaming cultures might lead others to adopt a more casualised approach, de-politicising their consumption habits. Within these contexts, I then consider how fans navigate 'cancel culture’ to either perform victim allyship, crowdsource morality or vocally critique allegations.

Given that indie-rock and hip-hop are often positioned as cultural opposites, my analysis contends with the differing conventions of race, gender and respectability politics that influence genre-coded responses to celebrity abuse dynamics. Though I keenly demonstrate that fan call-out practices have value and impact, I argue that an overreliance on audiences as moral arbiters can serve as an unfair industry abdication, driving algorithmic infighting instead of directly addressing the endemic issue of music industry abuse.