Music Fandom (01/01/2026)

2025-07-25

Music fandom has long been a space where emotional connection, personal identity, and creative expression have converged. Whether this is through live events, online interactions, deep lyrical interpretation, or everyday regular listening rituals, fans often engage with music not just as consumers, but as affective and imaginative participants in the making of cultural meaning. Music fandom can be highly personal, from enabling individuals to connect with key formative stages in their life course and identity, to helping them navigate grief or trauma, to serving as a catalyst for collective resistance, joy, or belonging. Musical engagement can be as present in intimate offline routines as it is in viral moments online. This special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures seeks to explore music fandom as a deeply personal, experiential, emotional and creative practice, shaped by and responding to evolving technological, cultural, and economic conditions.

This issue also seeks to recognize, and potentially challenge, the current visibility and reputation of music fandom. In the last decade, the record-breaking, economy-boosting success of mainstream artists such as Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and BTS has garnered significant media attention, demonstrating the power and influence of global pop audiences. However, an online-centric view of music consumption has at times served to emphasize the negative connotations of fandom, such as parasocial relationships, social media toxicity, and the dwindling attention economy of streaming-era listening. This special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures invites contributions which add nuance to this cultural conversation, considering how contemporary music fandom can interact with personal and shared experiences, emotions, politics, identities, technologies and creative forces. 

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):

  • Live music experiences: dynamic pricing, livestreaming, concert etiquette, camping culture etc.
  • Emotional labor, fan investment, and artist-fan economies
  • Music fandom and AI
  • Music fandom and cultural development; language play, chart gaming, stan praxis etc. 
  • The current state of music fandom as a field of study
  • Media representations of music fandom: news reportage, TV and film
  • Streaming and platform capitalism
  • Access in/to music fandoms and music consumption; gatekeeping, lifelong fandom, family fandom, later-life fandom etc. 
  • Music fandom as a curatorial practice; collections, archiving, physical ownership
  • Music fandom as a site of sociopolitical education, activism or protest
  • Engagements with ‘old’ media: music TV, fanzines, books. 
  • Intimacy, parasociality, and visibility in artist-fan relations
  • Fan imaginaries of authenticity, loyalty, and betrayal
  • Music fandom across platforms: TikTok, YouTube, Bandcamp, WeVerse etc. 
  • DIY scenes, underground fandoms, alternative economies
  • Music fan pilgrimage and tourism
  • ‘Offline’ engagements with music: fanclubs, meet-ups, physical collections and vinyl revival
  • Politics of identity within fandom; race, gender, sexuality, neurodiversity etc.
  • ‘Professionalized’ music fandom; influencers, content creation, journalism

We especially welcome submissions which center marginalized fan voices, non-Western contexts, or genres that are lesser-represented in music fandom studies (i.e. jazz, contemporary classical, grassroots indie, punk, hip-hop and R&B). 

Submission Guidelines

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) is an international peer-reviewed online Diamond Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works, copyrighted under a Creative Commons License. TWC aims to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics and promotes dialogue between academic and fan communities. 

TWC accommodates academic articles of varying scope as well as other forms, such as multimedia, that embrace the technical possibilities of the internet and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. For this special issue, we welcome submissions in the form of full-length articles, symposium texts, book reviews or multimedia formats (comics, video essays etc). Submit final papers directly to Transformative Works and Cultures by January 1, 2026.

Articles: Peer review. Maximum 8,000 words.

Symposium: Editorial review. Maximum 4,000 words.

Book Reviews: Editorial review. Maximum 2,500 words. 

Multimedia: Maximum of 10 images or 5–8 minutes of audio or audiovisual content. May include framing text not to exceed 2,000 words (including notes and references).

Please visit TWC's website (https://journal.transformativeworks.org/) for complete submission guidelines, or email the TWC Editor (editor@transformativeworks.org). 

Contact: Contact guest editors Jenessa Williams and Lucy Bennett with any questions before or after the due date at drjenessawilliams@gmail.com and BennettL@cardiff.ac.uk