There weren’t a lot of people online in the early 1990s. Mark Kelly, keyboard player for the English band Marillion, early internet adopter and self-titled "co-inventor of crowdfunding," was an exception. One night after a concert someone handed him a stack of papers—printouts from an email list of Marillion fans. Kelly went home, cranked up his modem, and subscribed. What he found surprised him. The list, founded by a Dutch fan, had about a thousand fans. And though the band's primary market was the United Kingdom, the list was multinational. Most subscribers were in the United States. Marillion had never even toured the United States.

Kelly spent the first couple of years reading without posting, watching the discussion in secret. But the internet is the internet, and finally, someone said something so wrong that Kelly couldn’t stop himself from jumping in to correct him. His cover was blown.

Immediately North Americans asked why they didn’t tour in America.

"We don’t have a record deal in the States," he told them, "and every time we toured in the past it's always been with money from the record company."

about the author About Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft who’s been studying new media, community, identity, and relationships since 1991. She still loves Madrugada so much she’ll fly to Norway in winter to see them reunite.

"Oh, well," a Canadian fan wrote,"why don’t we raise the money for you to come and tour?" Others quickly agreed that this was a good plan.

"Well I think you're a bit crazy," Kelly told them. This was, after all, nearly two decades before Kickstarter popularized crowdfunding. "But if you want to do it. I mean, obviously we can’t have anything to do with it, but if you guys want to go ahead and organize it. We're not taking the money."

Kelly told them they needed about $50,000 to make it happen. Someone set up an escrow account. Within a few weeks they had raised $20,000. Before long it reached $60,000. It seemed so improbable, Kelly hadn’t even told the rest of the band.

Marillion did the tour in 1997. The fans who had fronted the money also bought tickets. Being fan-funded generated publicity. “Each gig that we were playing, there'd be a little local newspaper that would run the story about the tour fund and how the American fans had raised the money for us to tour." It was exciting, a moment of transition, and a master class in "the power of the internet, and how rabid fans can change things, make things happen."

In many ways, the industrial production of music worked well for music listeners. They gained more access to high-quality music of different types, in different forms, at the varied and often private times they chose to hear it than at any point in history. At the same time, the shift to industrialized, centralized music production disempowered the people who became audiences, reducing them to "consumers" in which their "only power is that of consumers in general, to buy or not to buy." "Audience" is itself a "fictional construct" used to abstractly pull together distinct individuals having varied concrete experiences. Audience members speak with many voices, use music and other cultural materials in many ways, and have different levels of attachment to the objects of their attention. Industrial market logic views these people as atomized, perhaps with demographic characteristics by which they can be grouped and counted, but rarely as immersed in relationships with one another. But what really happened when people were carved off from what had historically been social co-participation in musical rituals was not that audiences became isolated. It was that listeners turned—as they always had—to one another.

No sooner did the first nodes of what became the internet make their first connection than fans began using it to build stable and persistent group infrastructures for their fandom.

Where musicologists see mass media as thwarting audiences' capacity for participation, audience researchers have spent decades documenting and analyzing how productive and creative audiences became in their wake. Just as industrialization and digital media changed the work of being a musician, they changed experiences and opportunities for audiences. While musicians dealt with the challenges of building and maintaining careers in the face of the new realities of their field, audiences developed new histories of participating with one another on their own terms. Now, even as musicians struggle to find their ways in an internet-mediated music world, audiences flourish. The internet has pushed their "hitherto marginal (and marginalized) tendencies into the very mainstream of media use." No sooner did the first nodes of what became the internet make their first connection than fans began using it to build stable and persistent group infrastructures for their fandom. They wove fan practices into the internet’s core, helping to shape contemporary media and shifting the balance of power between audiences and professionals. Practices hidden in private spaces for decades became visible and accessible, amplifying their impact. What Jay Rosen famously called "the people formerly known as the audience" can no longer be treated only as abstract numbers in a spreadsheet. "We need to radically rethink how media audiences are positioned in our new media ecosystems," Tim Anderson argues. What used to be an audience is now "an altogether new actor that is explicitly positioned as an essential part of the design and architecture behind the production, distribution, and exhibition of information that circulates throughout new media ecosystems." Audiences distribute and exhibit others' works. They also make their own creative works—remixes, stories, covers, art, videos, designs—that can at times become more popular than official works. They create museum-worthy archives of musical information on websites and wikis. They write blogs. They share information (both accurate and wrong), recordings, and photographs. They create spaces and networks where they build and share supportive resources, identities, relationships, and practices. They are the ones who spread the word, who watch the gates of popular culture, and who set the norms for how it will transpire. They are the ones who "make things happen."