Continuum

Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/ccon20

Digital performance at the side stage: the

communicative practices of classical musicians
and music hobbyists on Instagram

Maarit Jaakkola

To cite this article: Maarit Jaakkola (2023) Digital performance at the side stage: the
communicative practices of classical musicians and music hobbyists on Instagram, Continuum,
37:2, 296-308, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2023.2234109

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2023.2234109

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.

Published online: 12 Jul 2023.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 767

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccon20
CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES
2023, VOL. 37, NO. 2, 296–308
https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2023.2234109

Digital performance at the side stage: the communicative

practices of classical musicians and music hobbyists on
Instagram
Maarit Jaakkola
Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper examines musically active individuals’ communication Received 11 May 2021
work online as part of post-professional platformized cultural pro­ Accepted 3 July 2023
duction, inquiring into classical musicians’ and music hobbyists’ KEYWORDS
strategic communication practices on the visual mobile app Musicians; Instagram;
Instagram. The sample consists of pianists’, violinists’ and cellists’ platformized cultural
(N = 269) personal but public Instagram accounts. Described as production; relational labour;
unpaid, visibility, relational and aspirational labour, professionals, aspirational labour;
amateurs and individuals between these poles are making use of recreational labour
the platform’s communication possibilities to share their musical
lives. A thematic analysis of the profile strategies focused on the
communicators’ institutional roles, account strategies and platform-
specific formats indicated that musicians communicate on
Instagram in different professional positionings that imply different
communicative strategies, while the platform-specific formats used
in communication are rather the same across categories. The uses
can be characterized as a virtual ‘side stage’ – a staged and
mediated space that differs from the public frontstage and private
backstage.

Introduction
In the age of the social web, music-makers, like all other types of artists and cultural
workers, are using digital platforms for communication. On these platforms, music-
makers, facing the pressures of promotionalism, often negotiate between commercial
imperatives and artistic-aesthetic integrity (Klein, Meier, and Powers 2017). At the same
time, the social web provides users with unprecedented possibilities to make their work
and practice visible; establish social contact with peers and musical audiences; and create
original work that can be narrowcasted via social media tools ranging from video-sharing
to podcasting platforms, thereby widening their sphere of activity as well as potential
reach and impact.
This article explores the platform-specific communication of musicians and music
hobbyists on Instagram by describing their current communicative practices in the
context of digital labour and post-professionalism. Post-professionalism refers to

CONTACT Maarit Jaakkola maarit.jaakkola@gu.se University of Gothenburg

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med­
ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article
has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 297

diverged, parallel professionalisms and even the contemporaneity of semi- and non-
professionalisms. In online spaces of digital post-industrial content production
(Anderson, Bell, and Shirky 2017), there is an emerging diversity of communicators
with varying degrees of structuration, operating in parallel to the institutional profes­
sionals (Jaakkola 2022). Music has been a prominent topic on Instagram, the popular
visual mobile app launched in 2010 and owned by Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook)
since 2012. For musicians, a mobile-based visual and audiovisual medium provides
a novel possibility for communication. With images and videos, music can be mediated
in a micro format – in extracts rather than entire musical pieces – and in a more
versatile way than just delivering visual press photo material. Indeed, the hashtag
#musiciansofinstagram generated 1.7 million posts in April 2021, and there was an
abundance of variants related to music-making and in various subfields and
instruments.
In this article, I will examine the roles, account strategies and communicative formats of
frequently followed music accounts on Instagram. By roles, I refer to the positioning of
a musician according to his or her degree of professionalism. Instagram, similar to the
other prevalent audiovisual services TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and Musical.ly – as well as
non-Western apps such as ByteDance, TenCent, Baidu and Sina – hosts music-playing
individuals with different degrees of professionalism, ranging from top-ranking world
stars and experts to autodidacts and amateurs and everything between these extremes.
On a platform in which anything can be merged into the same content feed, it is
important to identify the institutional infrastructures behind the content producers and
distinguish communicators according to these. Account strategies refer to the informed
choices users make to match certain purposes in their communication. These goals are
achieved by creating repeatable and patternized content, characterized by certain itera­
tive elements, which I call formats. Through the emergence of new formats, such as
playing out on the streets (e.g. downtown ‘saxophone walks’ by @nicolejohaenntgen) or
in the living room or bedroom, or coupling playing with the embodied performance of
dancing (e.g. the ‘dancing fiddler’ @hillaryklug), platforms create new ways of presenting
music specifically tailored for the platform. Examples of common formats on social media
platforms include ‘unboxing’, ‘my day’, ‘haul’ and ‘play-though’; the formats depend on
the channel genre, which can be, for example, a vlog or review (Jaakkola 2018). The most
frequently followed user accounts tend to introduce and establish these formats, while
the lower-ranked users (users with fewer followers) tend to mimic them (Himma-Kadakas
et al. 2018). This makes it appropriate to lean upon the platform-intern algorithms that,
when a new account is created, offer popular accounts as recommendations.
In particular, I will ask how musicians and music hobbyists with different degrees of
professionalism are using the perceived affordances of the Instagram app to commu­
nicate about their musical efforts. I choose to focus on three popular instruments: piano,
violin and cello. I will examine the users’ communication in terms of roles, strategies and
formats on the platform. The research task can be broken down into the following
research questions:

RQ1. From which conditions is digital labour in music accounts conducted? How are the
communicators positioned on the professional – amateur scale?
298 M. JAAKKOLA

RQ2. In what ways are the communicators using Instagram for their communicative
purposes: what are their strategies and formats?

RQ3. Based on the combination of roles, strategies and formats at stake, how can the
communicators’ digital labour on Instagram be described?

I will begin by looking at the general mechanisms of digital labour in the context of post-
professional platformized cultural production. Thereafter, I will describe my data and
methodological approach, based on a qualitative analysis of Instagram accounts where
it transpires that professionals dominate. In the empirical analysis, I will analyse the roles,
strategies and formats to capture the general character of the musicians’ communication
work.

Digital labour
The platformisation of the web (Helmond 2015) presents recent developments related to
social media (Fuchs 2017), which also crucially affect the creation and delivery of music.
Many studies have stressed the industry and popular-music perspective of the cultural
economy of platforms (e.g. Prey, Esteve Del Valle, and Zwerwer 2022; Zhang and Negus
2021), yet the diverse classical-music practices in virtual spaces controlled by the global
media giants Meta Platforms and Google have been less studied. Communication cen­
tralized on platforms is user-led and organized around the technological, aesthetic,
practical (communicative, functional), social and economic imperatives provided by the
platform. Social media operates upon principles of inclusiveness in that anyone is wel­
come to create a profile and start communicating on a platform, where popularity is not
centrally or hierarchically regulated; rather, in the ‘like economy’ (Gerlitz and Helmond
2013), the micro medium is constituted by the accumulation of other users’ attention to
become established and legitimized as a profile (Djafarova and Trofimenko 2018).
Therefore, online communities are based on a bottom-up principle of structuration
where users create an online presence through the increase of attention, likes, followers
and subscribers, reaching up to audiences that outnumber the institutional organizations’
audiences. Platformized cultural production (Gillespie 2019; Nieborg and Poell 2018; van
Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018) thus implies and builds upon different forms of digital
labour that users are willing to do.
The digital labour that users carry out on these platforms has been typically
described as communication work that is free, unpaid and voluntary. The various
facets of digital labour have been characterized by using the concepts venture
labour (Geff 2012), visibility labour (Abidin 2016), aspirational labour (Duffy 2015,
2017), relational labour (Baym 2015), affective labour (Kennedy 2009) and recrea­
tional labour (Jaakkola 2022). Venture labour relates to the high risks that the
precarious workers in the cultural domain in general need to take. Visibility labour
means promotional work to increase attention directed towards oneself, while
aspirational labour involves taking on assignments without any financial compensa­
tion in the hopes of pursuing a career in the industry. Semi-amateur and freelancer
musicians are to a large extent involved in these types of labour, attached to the
neoliberal imperatives imposed on cultural workers (Kaitajärvi-Tiekso 2020). Baym
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 299

(2015) describes relational labour as the ‘ongoing communicative practices of build­

ing and maintaining interpersonal relationships, central to maintaining some
careers’, including those of musicians. In addition, the communicative work on plat­
forms is typically affective, involving an emotional investment from the users and
creating common spaces for shared affection, which are typically subsumed as
‘affinity spaces’ (Gee 2004). The digital labour also essentially involves
a transformative aspect, as social learning spaces (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-
Trayner 2020) are constituted to create digital informal learning communities for
musicians (Partti 2012). Recreational labour refers to self-supporting but socially
transformative learning processes. ‘Recreation’ here refers to the diversion from the
pressures of the job – pastime that feels fun – and the maintenance and re-
configuration of something that already exists. Recreation can mean a value-
creation process based on an attempt to singularize the ‘musician’s identity’ and
insert it into one’s life, which in the public space can result in promotion, inspiration,
support or something similar. Re-creation in this sense implies configuring the
elements of music and music-maker in a way that becomes one’s own ‘style’.
From a reception perspective, it is interesting that all kinds of professionalism are
mixed in audiences’ feeds. Thus, recognizing the degree of professionalism in the user in
question becomes part of cultural literacy in general and as a more specific and situated
form of cultural literacy, ‘cultural Instagram literacy’. Music professionals may be less
profiled as media professionals, and the other way round, and as ‘calibrated amateurism’
(Abidin 2017) may be a strategy of platform professionalism, the readiness to read plat­
form-specific strategies becomes increasingly urgent.
From a creator’s perspective, digital labour on a platform is an ongoing process where
the use of platform affordances (Gibson 1979) plays a central role. Platforms such as
Instagram ‘afford’ something: they provide users with a set of possibilities and restrictions
that the users, having perceived these functions, make use of. The process is collaborative
in the way that users develop shared patterns; some ways of communication become
more popular than others, getting more exposure and creating patternized structures
such as formats and genres. Gibbs and colleagues (2015) call the outcome of this
adjustment work ‘platform vernaculars’ (Gibbs et al. 2015).
As an easy- and quick-to-use mobile app, Instagram is primarily based on uploading
mobile photos that are accompanied by short texts under the pictures. The written text is
clearly subordinated to visual material, as the text fields are called captions and limited to
2,000 characters. In 2018, Facebook also introduced the possibility of using video, which
can be either short-format (restricted to 60 seconds) or long-format (placed on IGTV and
restricted to 10 minutes). In addition, users can publish ephemeral videos as ‘stories’,
a special video feature attached to users’ profiles, which disappears after 24 hours unless
separately saved as ‘highlights’ in the story archive. In comparison to other social media
tools, Instagram is much more focused on showing things and creating atmosphere than
reporting in long form (like in blogs) or short form (like on Twitter). It is also less
appropriate a tool for sharing links (like Facebook), as in-text links are prohibited in the
captions, and there is only place for one link in the handle. However, as a visual and
audiovisual presentation tool, Instagram is an especially suitable medium for musicians
who want to share their musical lives with others, often accompanied by short analysis
and reflection.
300 M. JAAKKOLA

Data and method

To collect a saturated sample showing different communication strategies applied
in the area of inquiry, convenience sampling based on search operations in the
app’s search field was applied (Etikan, Musa, and Alkassim 2016). The data were
manually collected on Instagram on 8–9 April 2021 by establishing a new ‘blank
account’ with no followers and interactions, which meant that previous searches
and the algorithm-based recommendation system did not affect the search results.
To identify accounts with the selected classical instruments, original searches were
conducted with the keywords piano, pianist, violin, violinist, cello and cellist within
the search tab ‘Accounts’. From each search, 50 hits – the number of accounts
displayed in the mobile screen as results – were browsed through, and the public
accounts run by individuals were selected for the sample. Although not directly
generalizable to the entire musicians’ sphere on Instagram, this sample demon­
strated rich variation, providing a sufficient basis for exploration of the population,
without any pre-categorizations.
While the instrument-based search words seemed to retrieve more commercially
oriented and amateur users, the person-based search words retrieved more
accounts run by professional musicians. Accounts that were excluded were, first,
the ones set as private and, second, curated public accounts with third-party
content creators, typically run by individuals, groups of people or organizations
(e.g. @pianolegendaryvideos, @pianoconcertofestival); fanstagram accounts
(accounts of musicians run by fans); and community accounts (e.g. magazines
such as @pianistmagazine or @theviolinchannel). In total, the sample included
269 individual Instagram accounts. Most of the individuals could be identified, as
they managed their accounts with their own names, and often they even indicated
their place of residence. Only a couple of accounts were completely anonymous,
neither disclosing the name of the user nor showing the instrument player.
The 269 accounts were divided quite evenly between instruments, consisting of 91
pianists (34%), 95 violinists (35%) and 83 cellists (31%). Among all users, 56% were female
(N = 150). Among pianists, female musicians accounted for 64% (n = 58) overall: 57%
among violinists (N = 54); and 46% among cellists (N = 38). Geographically, the most
content creators resided in the Western world: from Europe (19%) or North America
(28%). For pianists, these shares were 45% and 22% respectively; for violinists, 47% and
32%; and for cellists 55% and 29% – and other parts of the world were represented by
a couple of percentages only.
For the analysis, the applied thematic analysis method was employed (Guest
et al. 2012). A user profile, which consists of a presentation of the content creator
(handle) and a feed of images, counted as a unit of analysis. The users were
categorized according to their professional positioning as musicians, conforming
to the categories of institutional professional, vernacular professional and amateur;
they were also categorized by country and gender. Further, a qualitative analysis
was applied to the strategies and formats used by the musicians with different
positionings, thus identifying the most common communicative patterns in their
communication.
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 301

Role positionings
As for the positionings of the Instagrammers, the majority (80%) of the users in the
sample could be classified as institutional professionals: among pianists, professional
musicians accounted for 66% (n = 60); among violinists, 86% (n = 81); and among
cellists, 88% (n = 73). Only 14% (n = 38) were amateurs, and 6% (n = 16) were non-
institutional or aspiring professionals (see Jaakkola 2022) – mostly students aiming to
become professionals or more professionalized but still striving for that goal and
willing to document and share their educational journey. Whether beginners or
restarters, the people in this category typically described themselves as being ‘just
a pianist’ who kept a practice diary. For example, the violinist, ‘music-ed major’ Sophia
(@stradivariyas) described herself in her handle as being ‘just a musician trying to be
real about the ups and downs of practice’.
Besides adults, there were also music-making children, whose aspirations of celebrity
were cultivated by their ‘mumagers’. The minors’ age ranged from toddlers (e.g. the
4-year-old Freya: @freya.violin) to pre-teens (e.g. the 10-year-old Leander Hennes Resch:
@juergen_resch). They could also be portrayed as part of a musical family, such as in the
case of three sisters Bianka, Veronika and Frida (@violin_viola_violin) or the daughter of
a musician, the Singaporean Min Lee (@minleeviolin). There were a number of child
musicians with public accounts across the globe: Cecily Miller (@theviolinprincess) from
the U.S.A.; Eliana Yubin Chang (@eliana_thelittlepianist) from Korea; and Natasha Lin
(@natasha_lin_piano) from Russia. Writing in the first-person singular, the mothers and
(occasionally) fathers documented their ‘little musicians’’ practice, typically in video clips
where their mastery could be demonstrated. The child players’ performances produce
prodigy narratives where promising children are celebrificated and made into followable
objects of attention. This has also spawned counter-strategies: the 7-year-old Taneesha,
a ‘wannabe pianist’ (@piano.the_t_clef), used the hashtag #noprodigy.
Institutional professionals are musicians who have received education from an estab­
lished educational institution and, to a great extent, operate within and cooperate with
the established organizations of music, ranging from opera houses to instrument builders
and from record labels to universities providing musical education. Institutionalism refers
to the established hierarchical organizations and implies their centrality in mediating
culture. The institutional order is regulated by the very idea of professionalism that is
maintained by institutions supporting the professional cultures, which entails the prolif­
eration of objective standards of work; a theoretical body of knowledge; education and
training; and the establishment of professional rules and entry criteria for supporting
autonomous expertise and the service ideal in that profession (Freidson 2001).
Institutional professionals often appear in combined professions, featuring not only
professional performers but multiprofessionals and multipreneurs who move across
professional cultures, as is common in the musical sector (see e.g. Albinsson 2018; Mark
2015). Some institutional professionals in the sample were also media personalities, such
as authors, radio or pod hosts and YouTube content creators (e.g. @violinhope and
@graceplaysviolin). Many were also teachers, professors and coaches making use of
mediated communication, such as Aloisia Dauer (@aloisiadauer), founder of Your Music
Mind, a platform for musical practice tips. The users could also work as composers,
arrangers, conductors or festival directors and music producers.
302 M. JAAKKOLA

Most of the professionals, in turn, were classical soloists building international careers:
for example, solo performers or concert masters in world-famous orchestras. Examples
include violinist Hilary Hahn (@violincase) and pianist Lang, ‘the hottest artist on classical
music planet’ according to his handle, quoting the New York Times (@langlangpiano), or
the ‘concertmaster of @MetOrchestra @MetOpera #nyc’ Benjamin Bowman (@bowman­
violin). There were also entertainment- and celebrity-oriented profiles such as the
Croatian cellist Stjepan Hauser (@hausercello). All of these musicians had an institutional
footing, although the former were in the classical cultural organizations and the latter
were in the more commercially oriented music and entertainment industry. The division
of professionals into classical and entertainment was, however, something that charac­
terized the professionals on Instagram, suggesting slightly different account strategies
and reaching out to different audiences, although both groups were institutional in their
structural order.

Communication strategies
As a second question, we will now focus on the communication strategies maintained by
the groups described above. A communicative strategy includes the alleged purposes
and intentions of updating an Instagram account. These purposes are typically stated in
the profile description where the user presents him- or herself and is expected to tell other
users why he or she is keeping the account. In general, the following common purposes
could be identified across the groups, as described in Table 1.
Among the professional users (n = 214), four different strategic profiles that differed
from each other could be identified: career-oriented; everyday-oriented; service-oriented;
and lifestyle-oriented. The career-oriented communication strategy means that the user
was mainly focused on the official scenes of his or her occupational or study activities and

Table 1. Central communication strategies across professionals and amateurs.

Labour Strategy Professionals Amateurs
Relational Promotion and Self-promotion as a musician; portfolio Self-positioning as an aspirant
visibility work work and a learner
Dialogue, community Personal audience management: creating Networking and community-
and outreach work a dialogical relationship to potential building with like-minded
and real audiences people
Internationalisation Creating international contacts and Creating international contacts
networks; presenting oneself as an and networks; learning from
international player other cultures
Venture Funding Raising money Searching for crowdfunding for
continued musical activity/
studies and/or media existence
Visibility Self-celebrification Creating a media personality to become Creating a media personality and
better known among relevant groups of being seen as a person
people, at least on the platform
(‘Instafamousness’)
Documentation of Making the accumulated professional Making the accumulated activities
activity activities visible of learning visible
Recreational Self-management and - Self-leadership Self-improvement and -
structuration of the development by structuring
everyday practice one’s own practice routines
(Shared) motivational Role-modelling Increase of motivation by sharing
work ideas and cultivating peer
support and learning
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 303

posted pictures on upcoming and past concerts or exams, as well as press photos and
photos from official shootings, releases and so on. These accounts are individual-centric
and self-celebratory, and they can be primarily regarded as self-promotion. The career-
builders were roughly divided into two: the classical artists and the entertainment-
oriented artists. While the accounts of Claudio Bohorquez (@claudiobohorquez_cellist)
and Kian Soltani (@kian.soltani_cellist) present classical-oriented career profiles, the
accounts of Tatiana Durova (@tatianadurova) and MARA (@cello.mara) count as entertain­
ment-oriented career profiles.
The everyday-oriented communication strategy implies a focus on the day-to-day toil of
the musician, mainly showing practice and the person behind music. As said earlier,
staged authenticity is a widely used online profile strategy (Abidin 2017; Gaden and
Dumitrica 2014). The authenticity perspective is central here to show the ‘real musician’
behind the scenes. The primary intention in this strategy is to achieve a sense of intimacy –
the ‘friendly neighbour musician’ image – which also creates a contrast to the highly
competitive, masterfully controlled image of a soloist. In this respect, it works as
a counter-strategy to career-oriented professionalism. The everyday-oriented musician
also aims to deliver an image that is true to his or her own personality, spirit or character,
which makes the Instagrammer closer to their followers and allows the creation of
parasocial relationships.
This type of strategy has a process dimension, showing how the practices of different
works evolve, and how the musician’s life looks beyond official performances and pub­
lished works. The chronicling and documentation fits well into videos where extracts from
daily practice can be shown. Most of these videos were casually recorded at home, but
Johannes Raab (@johannes_raab_cellist), for example, took a picture of himself practizing
between two photoshoots in a glossy hotel, saying: ‘I really try to use every free moment
to have some rare practicing time. Today I had a couple minutes between two photo
shootings’. The practice is often turned into a series that can be followed and in which
fellow players can synchronize their practice. For example, the American cellist John-
Henry Crawford (@cellocrawford), a 2019 Juilliard graduate, launched in January 2018
#the1000dayjourney project, where he provided users with ‘your daily dose of cello’
through short video clips; counted each post; and committed to his followers to be
present for a certain period of time (1.5 years). This project resulted in a 10-hour
YouTube video with a repertoire index that allows users to jump to specific pieces. In
a similar fashion, the British violinist Rachel Barton Pine (@rbpviolinist) played ‘24 violin
concertos in 24 weeks live and accompanied’.
The service-oriented communication strategy refers to moving towards a pedagogical
approach where the musician takes on the role of a peer learner, teacher or coach, sharing
tips, suggestions, experiences and best practices for others who may benefit from them.
The purpose of the musician’s Instagram presence, then, centres around being there for
others and prioritizing the community building. Sharing practices and tips, at the same
time, serves to highlight the specific expertise that the musician has in his or her field,
which reinforces the strategic purpose of educational showcases of this kind as self-
promotion. For example, the piano soloist and professor Emilio Pavanello (@emilio.
pavanello) encourages users to book private lessons online.
The lifestyle-oriented communication strategy means focusing on extra-artistic dimen­
sions in the presentation of the musician and his or her life. Some musicians clearly make
304 M. JAAKKOLA

use of Instagram’s photogenetic aspect by presenting themselves as models, posing in

different environments and in different coutures. Images that displayed lifestyle were
photos from the musicians’ travels and tourist destinations, but they also included
pictures of poses in concert halls, castles, hotels and other event venues. Other users,
more often female musicians, regularly exposed aspects belonging to the private sphere
(e.g. their family members, weddings, pregnancies, home and leisure activities) as part of
their visual strategy. For popular music players such as Viktoriia Demi, a pianist, DJ and
piano professor from Dubai (@vivimuse), this strategy was well suited, but even classical
artists such as Flavia Rachwal (@flavi_cellist) employed this strategy. Some musicians even
let the more ‘Instagrammic’ lifestyle content displace the musical content. For example,
the Italian-born ‘sewing violinist’ Giulia Sardi (@giu_sardi) presented her recent sewing
outcomes on Instagram while uploading concert videos to YouTube. The Russian-born
cellist Sergey Antonov (@sergeyantonovcellist), using the hashtag #cellistinthekitchen,
showed more pictures of his plates of food than of his musical life.

Platform-specific formats
A third question was about the communicative structures made up by repeatable formats
that are platform- and community-specific. These formats were less related to the profes­
sional positionings but were more a manifestation of the use of the platform’s affor­
dances, occurring across different positionings. Frequent formats are described in Table 2.
Posing in images relates to the selfie-saturated culture of Instagram, embedded in the
culture of the everyday (Deeb-Swihart et al. 2017). For musicians, the selfie images were
often about posing with their instrument or in a studio; another type of posing was
a practice that I term ‘selfie-dropping’ (cf. name dropping), which refers to taking selfies
with well-known personalities to show that one is part of certain musical circles. Even
mentions of fellow musicians and peer learners across different positionings reinforce the
self-identification on the social map of the musical sphere. Besides persons, close-ups of
instruments were common.
Another type of image that was common was event pictures. These typically displayed
events before or after a concert, but they could also be updates about something

Table 2. Typical formats in musicians’ Instagram posts.

Still
Category Clarification Description Example image Video
Posing, Selfie or self-portrait Mobile or press photos Selfie-dropping x
posture
Event An event photo or recording A video clip or image from a past Throwbacks x x
concert
Tips Educational post Explanation of a technique in Tips, tutorials x
a vlog format
Practice Captured practice Extract of a practice moment Documentation, x x
practice diaries
Challenge Launch of a competition Posing or participating in #100daysofpractice x
a challenge
Campaign A strategic message Collaboration, lobby act or #notsystemrelevant x
announcement
Lifestyle Posts related to something Non-music-related images of Family, food, travel x
beyond music travels, leisure time issues
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 305

upcoming or throwbacks to past concerts and live events. A considerable amount of the
visual material in music accounts was ‘memories’ or throwback photos. In a way,
a performance photo or video clip functioned as evidence of achievements and moments
experienced. To some extent, different formats were employed to create certain moods
and inspiration. A photo of an instrument, artist or a concert venue could function as an
illustration, coupled with a phrase saying something general about (the musical) life, such
as ‘without music, life would be a mistake’ (@konstantin_manaev_cellist), or ‘practice until
you cannot get it wrong’ (@pianist_helga_).
Formats that were initiated on YouTube were relatively common on Instagram,
which testifies to the tight connection between the image-app Instagram and the
video-sharing platform YouTube. This is an optimal match for the performers who
usually placed long-format performance videos on YouTube and created more
mood-related reflections on Instagram to reach out to larger audiences and to
add another layer to the performances. These formats included, above all, unbox­
ings and question and answers (Q & A’s). For example, Johannes Raab (@johan­
nes_raab_cellist) performed an unboxing of sleeves for cello, based on a non-
commercial partnership, and also made a couple of Q & A’s to cultivate a living
contact with followers.
The more music-specific formats included the campaigns and collaborations,
which were also for establishing peer partnerships and dialogue between musicians
supporting each other, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Musicians, also
amateurs, could give online concerts either as solo recitals or collaborated events.
One example of typical COVID-19 collaborations was a video where the cellists
Johannes Moser, Alisa Weilerstein, Camille Thomas, Pablo Ferrández, Gautier
Capucon, Kian Soltani and Alban Gerhardt played Heitor Villa Lobos’ Bachianas
Brasileiras nr. 1. This was made up of separate videos the cellists recorded by
themselves and then put together into a musical online piece. Especially during
the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, when the cultural sector was basically closed down
and concerts cancelled, the musicians seemed to discover a collaborative form of
creating content.

Digital performance at the ‘side-stage’

As a presentation of their self (Goffman 1973), the ongoing activity of posting images and
videos related to one’s musical doings is a manifestation of digital performance that can
be regarded as an extension of live and recorded performances as well as interviews and
talks that musicians are committed to on a regular basis (frontstage). However, the digital
performance consists of staged acts and thus also differs from the most private doings
(backstage). Instagram allows both on-stage and backstage events to be captured and
shared. When professionals expose their living room practice, they create a ‘side stage’
that adds another layer to the activities. The character of the side stage, located between
the public and private, varies according to the user; some choose to restrict it to moments
of (selected) practice, while others extend it to cover family life and other extra-artistic
occurrences. In general, the music-creating Instagrammers are more directed towards the
central enactment of bodily presence, which is manifest through showing instruments,
shows and practice.
306 M. JAAKKOLA

Creating a side stage is largely a question of producing self-meta-coverage with

venture, visibility, aspirational, relational and recreational labour dimensions. Self-
coverage is a manifestation of being a reflective practitioner (Schön 1989) through
creating an epistemological approach for verbalizing, visualizing and embodying
experience. While being reflective practitionership for the musicians, it may be
a way of cultivating and advancing cultural citizenship for the followers, the musical
audiences. The extension of stages thus holds a pedagogical potential: for audi­
ences (of professionals) and for amateurs (as creators and peers).

Conclusion
This article examined music-making users’ platform-specific communication practices
on Instagram, inquiring into the strategies that users apply in their communication. As
the dominant group in the sample were professionals, the focus was on these institu­
tional professionals, but through an interesting feature on platforms, they were living
side by side with amateurs located in institutional (music school) and vernacular
(hobby) settings. For all users, Instagram content was identified as an ‘extended
practice’ that was subsumed under the concept of digital performance that consti­
tuted a complementary stage: a ‘side stage’ for enhancing one’s own activities.
Different professional groups, from institutional professionals to amateurs, applied
diverging strategies, and there were also counterstrategies. It remains to be further
studied how artists, cultural workers and amateurs in different cultural fields make use
of the platform affordances and domesticate them into the online cultures in the age
of post-professionalism.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

References
Abidin, C. 2016. “Visibility Labour: Engaging with Influencers’ Fashion Brands and #OOTD
Advertorial Campaigns on Instagram.” Media International Australia 161 (1): 86–100. https://doi.
org/10.1177/1329878X16665177.
Abidin, C. 2017. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young
Digital Labour.” Social Media + Society 3 (2): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707191.
Albinsson, S. 2018. “Musicians as Entrepreneurs or Entrepreneurs as Musicians?” Creativity and
Innovation Management 27 (3): 348–357. https://doi.org/10.1111/caim.12254.
Anderson, C. W., E. J. Bell, and C. Shirky. 2017. Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present.
New York, NY: Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
Baym, N. 2015. “Connect with Your Audience! The Relational Labor of Connection.” The
Communication Review 18 (1): 14–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2015.996401.
Deeb-Swihart, J., C. Polack, E. Gilbert, and I. Essa. 2017. “Selfie-Presentation in Everyday Life: A
Large-Scale Characterization of Selfie Contexts on Instagram.” Proceedings of the International
AAAI Conference on Web & Social Media 11 (1): 42–51. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v11i1.14896.
Djafarova, E., and O. Trofimenko. 2018. “‘Instafamous’ – Credibility and Self-Presentation of Micro-
Celebrities on Social Media.” Information, Communication & Society 22 (10): 1432–1446. https://
doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1438491 .
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 307

Duffy, B. E. 2015. “Amateur, Autonomous, and Collaborative: Myths of Aspiring Female Cultural
Producers in Web 2.0.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 32 (1): 48–64. https://doi.org/10.
1080/15295036.2014.997832.
Duffy, B. E. 2017. (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Etikan, I., S. A. Musa, and R. S. Alkassim. 2016. “Comparison of Convenience Sampling and Purposive
Sampling.” American Journal of Theoretical and Applied Statistics 5 (1): 1–4. https://doi.org/10.
11648/j.ajtas.20160501.11 .
Freidson, E. 2001. Professionalism: The Third Logic. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Fuchs, C. 2017. Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage.
Gaden, G., and D. Dumitrica. 2014. “The ‘Real deal’: Strategic Authenticity, Politics and Social Media.”
First Monday 20 (1): n.p. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i1.4985 .
Gee, J. P. 2004. Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. London:
Routledge.
Geff, G. 2012. Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262017480.001.0001.
Gerlitz, C., and A. Helmond. 2013. “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data Intensive Web.”
New Media & Society 15 (8): 1348–1365. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812472322.
Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., and Carter, M. 2015. “#Funeral and Instagram: Death,
Social Media, and Platform Vernacular.” Information, Communication & Society 18 (3): 255–268.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.987152.
Gibson, J. J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Gillespie, T. 2019. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Decisions That
Shape Social Media. Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press.
Goffman, E. 1973. The Representation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Overlook Press.
Guest, G., K. M. MacQueen, and E. E. Namey. 2012. Applied Thematic Analysis. Sage. https://doi.org/
10.4135/9781483384436.
Helmond, A. 2015. “The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready.” Social Media
+ Society 1 (2): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080.
Himma-Kadakas, M., A. Rajavee, M. Orgmets, L. Eensaar, and R. Kõuts-Klemm. 2018. “The Food Chain
of YouTubers: Engaging Audiences with Formats and Genres.” Observatorio (OBS*). 41(12), 54–75
https://doi.org/10.15847/obsOBS0001385.
Jaakkola, M. 2018. “Vernacular Reviews as a Form of Co-Consumption: User-Generated Review
Videos on YouTube.” MedieKultur – Journal of Media and Communication Research 34 (65):
10–30. https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v34i65.104485.
Jaakkola, M. 2022. Reviewing Culture Online: Post-Institutional Cultural Critique Across Platforms.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84848-4.
Kaitajärvi-Tiekso, J. T. 2020. “Monetizing Amateurs: Artistic Critique, New Online Record Production and
Neoliberal Conjuncture.” Culture Unbound 12 (2): 412–435. https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.v12i2.894.
Kennedy, H. 2009. “Going the Extra Mile: Emotional and Commercial Imperatives in New Media
Work.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 15 (2):
177–196. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856508101582.
Klein, B., L. M. Meier, and D. Powers. 2017. “Selling Out: Musicians, Autonomy, and Compromise in
the Digital Age.” Popular Music and Society 40 (2): 222–238. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.
2015.1120101.
Mark, G. 2015. “Multitasking in the Digital Age.” Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics
8 (3): 1–113.
Nieborg, D. B., and T. Poell. 2018. “The Platformization of Cultural Production: Theorizing the
Contingent Cultural Commodity.” New Media & Society 20 (11): 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.
1177/1461444818769694 .
Partti, H. 2012. “Learning from cosmopolitan digital musicians: Identity, musicianship, and changing
values in (in)formal music communities.” Doctoral diss.,Helsinki: Sibelius Academy.
308 M. JAAKKOLA

Prey, R., M. Esteve Del Valle, and L. Zwerwer. 2022. “Platform Pop: Disentangling Spotify’s
Intermediary Role in the Music Industry.” Information, Communication & Society 25 (1): 74–92.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1761859.
Schön, D. A. 1989. Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and
Learning in the Professions. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
van Dijck, J., T. Poell, and M. de Waal. 2018. The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190889760.001.0001 .
Wenger-Trayner, E., and B. Wenger-Trayner. 2020. Learning to Make a Difference: Value Creation in
Social Learning Spaces. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Zhang, Z., and K. Negus. 2021. “Stages, Platforms, Streams: The Economies and Industries of Live
Music After Digitalization.” Popular Music and Society 44 (5): 539–557. https://doi.org/10.1080/
03007766.2021.1921909.