Ellis Jones, DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media (London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), ISBN: 978-1-5013-5964-4 (hb), 978-1-5013-5963-7 (pb).

Social media has substantially altered the way communication is carried out within and beyond creative arts scenes. And yet, the impact of social media communication on the process of meaning-making and organization for artforms has received limited critical attention, despite social media dominating the organization, distribution, and promotional facets of creative practice for around ten years at the time of writing. Ellis Jones’s volume is a significant contribution in filling this void, via a thorough examination of the relationship between do-it-yourself (DIY) music scenes and social media. Herein, Jones situates DIY music not in relation to specific genres, but to activities relating to the ‘democratization of culture’, noting also the changing perception of DIY from a niche subculture to its current status as ‘mainstream’ (1–2). Certainly, there is already a great deal of existing writing celebrating and debating DIY culture and music scenes broadly; equally so, the surge in cultural research on social media in the past five to ten years gives Jones much intellectual material on which to draw new arguments. But Jones carries out significant work here in terms of connecting both these dual research areas and the activities in question, engaging deeply with both artistic DIY and social media practice, and carefully traversing the uneasy grounds of each. While we might take for granted the affordances of social media for general use, there is much to unpick about the social nature of DIY music practices and how these play out on social media. Bringing these concepts to life are Jones’s ethnographic case study interviews. Choosing to draw on a single indie-punk DIY scene in Leeds, UK, Jones engages artists in in-depth conversations about how their scene operates within and alongside social media platforms. Jones describes Leeds, the location for this research, as having historical significance given the community’s involvement in post-punk scenes in the 1970s and 1980s (11–12), and as such, aspects of ‘place’ were influential in understanding the current scene via these interviews.