The Artist-as-Intermediary: Musician Labour in the Digitally Networked Era
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The advent of digital distribution platforms has removed middlemen from the musical supply chain — better known within the industry as the process of “disintermediation.” Often celebrated, disintermediation is understood to have lowered the barrier to entry into the music industry, following the sudden rise in access to marketplace and distribution platforms. However, this increased access to the means of distribution comes with increased responsibilities; musicians not only write, record and produce their own music, in the digital era, they are charged with the added responsibility of promoting, circulating and distributing their music. To understand this disruption, this essay presents the conceptual framework of the artist-as-intermediary. Suturing the artist to the intermediary, the artist-as- intermediary articulates the ways in which the responsibilities formerly held by music label executives — promoters, managers, A&R representatives — have not disappeared with disintermediation but have instead been downloaded onto the musician. To more fully illustrate this phenomenon, this essay proffers a brief case study of marketplace and distribution platform Bandcamp and indie musician Car Seat Headrest.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it