Musical Contagions, Circulations, and Ecologies of Listening to Social Media

Cuba ranks among the world's least connected and most repressive nations for information and communication technologies. To circumvent these restrictions, technologists and entrepreneurs have developed an alternative to the internet called el paquete semanal (EP) or "the weekly package." Cubans across the country use el paquete semanal to share digital content without cables or modems. Through a nation-wide, underground "sneakernet"-the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media between computers, rather than transmitting it over a computer network-this 1-terabyte collection of music, movies and software applications is delivered discreetly to participants' USB drives ostensibly without the knowledge of the Cuban state. Though officially illegal, I argue that el paquete semanal acts as a dynamic, grassroots form of virtual communication that is more equitable to artists and their audiences than the globally accessible, high-bandwidth internet models propagated by application-based music streaming platforms.


Among other media, EP makes available an unprecedented range of musical choices to consumers, including reggaetón reparto (or Cuban-style reggaetón), which is otherwise banned from the nation's state-owned media platforms. Due to official biases regarding the perceived vulgarity of reggaetón reparto, these artists-almost all of them Afro-Cuban-are censored from broadcast over official media channels. For Cubans without internet access, this means that their work is only accessible through EP. This seeming limitation, however, does not impose limits on artists' popularity. EP, in fact, provides a platform whose scope and frequency allows artists the opportunity to disseminate music throughout the nation without requiring the support of state media or other cultural gatekeepers. Artistic activity is instead centered around make-shift music recording studios that often serve dual roles as both bedroom and digital recording setup. In these intimate spaces, music is created, contested and shared across virtually accessible public spaces.


In this paper, I employ ethnographic observations, informal interviews and material analysis of the informal methods of "sneakernet" circulation of several artists and producers working in and around these Havana-based bedroom recording studios. From these private spaces, producers use el paquete semanal to participate in both ends of music circulation: Pirated software is first downloaded from the device, allowing artists the means to generate new musical material. Finished products are then distributed through subsequent releases of el paquete semanal. Lastly, through increasing access to social media platforms, artists promote their music virtually across the world. How does this production cycle contest the authority of popular music streaming platforms accessed throughout the Global North (e.g. Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music), and how is the increasing adoption of internet-capable devices shifting the way in which Afro-Cuban artists distribute and promote music through social media platforms? I situate pirated sonic technologies employed at Havana-based recording studios as central to the production and circulation of music, and connected to an emerging network society existing outside Cuba's official media sphere. Against the assumption that media piracy produces only copies, el paquete semanal sounds new possibilities.

Scholarship around the YouTube platform has often centered the bedroom as metonymic for the platform's aesthetics and participatory practices more broadly: low-quality video and audio production, a modality of intimacy and unscripted direct address, and harvestable as content for response or remix. In this paper, I analyze how users on the late-2010s platform TikTok build on this framework and savvily deploy the bedroom (and other individualized domestic enclosures, including the home and car) as performance space-the location of displaced and asynchronous collaboration, instruction, and display. 


A decade past the rise of YouTube, TikTok performers complicate simple collapsings of intimate space with amateur aesthetics; the platform's own built-in filtering and editing features encourage the creation of content that uncannily sutures high and low production values. The TikTok bedroom is necessarily porous, honeycombed together with others across the app, modules linked through music and dance. A popular platform feature enables "Duets"-split-screen video responses that amplify both original creator and new collaborator. Similarly, dance challenges abound, linked by the musical tracks that accompany them and supplemented by a tutorial subgenre in which skilled dancers demonstrate popular choreographies. 


On TikTok, moreso than on any preceding platform, music and sound function as fundamental components of contagion and spread. Crucially, each video's sound file is made visible as a metadata hyperlink; when clicked, the file assembles an archive of all other videos using the same sound--and the viewer can easily tap a button within that archive to contribute to it, making a video accompaniment of their own. With music as an architectural platform feature designed to condense participation around sound files as hooks, performing along with a popular sound functions as a gateway to visibility, affording guaranteed inclusion in a potentially-viral archive. Across videos, sound and music thus serve as sites for both sink and sync, ensnaring user attention and behavior as they construct digital communities of shared affect and practice.


I situate this centering of the microsoundtrack as a culmination of longer histories of digital virality, in which sound and music have been widely instrumentalized to render surveillance, advertising, and the mechanics of digital platform capitalism more palatable. TikTok, I argue, functions as an accelerated YouTube-in the duration of its videos, the speed of its production and exhaustion of memetic content, and in its blatant absorption of the bedroom into the sphere of digital aspirational labor.

In 2011, Alex Heitlinger, then a senior at New England Conservatory (NEC), uploaded the video "The Lick" to Youtube. A 1:34 compilation video, it excerpted different performances, from John Coltrane to Stravinsky, that each deployed the same seven-note musical riff (a "lick" in colloquial jazz terms). Heitlinger was in a Facebook group of mostly NEC students where users would post instances of the lick that they found, but his particular gathering of the videos went viral: it was retweeted by Questlove and NPR and currently boasts nearly three million views.
 
While the lick had an offline presence as a famous jazz cliché because of its common presence in many solos, as well as a life online that preceded Heitlinger's video, the lick's online trajectory accelerated at the moment the video went viral. The lick was inserted as punchline into stock visual and sonic meme formats, from five- and ten-hour videos where it was repeated, to instances of the lick in classical music or played as different genres, to its use as the conclusion to a solo.
 
This paper looks at the widespread digital dissemination of jokes, videos, and memes that feature the lick, focusing on Facebook and Youtube in particular, and suggests that it functions as a mimetic device that individual users can deploy to signal both their belonging and their individuality within a larger jazz community. I argue that recognizing and using the joke becomes synonymous with belonging to the group of those who possess jazz knowledge. Those who do not recognize it become outsiders--they have not learned their history well enough, and remain disconnected from communities that could clarify the lick and its iterations, and so they are excluded in their non-recognition of the sonic signifier. By examining the circulation of the lick across different communities of jazz knowledge, I use this paper to open new possibilities for tracing jazz discourse and practice within such communities. The lick, in its formulaic deployment within these "insider" spaces, suggests the death of improvisation, the use of a set riff over spontaneity. It becomes a calling card for performers and listeners alike to determine who was a legitimate participant on and offline--who gets the joke?
 
Using Sianne Ngai's concept of the gimmick as a labor-saving device, I suggest that the lick's online proliferation runs to the point of gimmick intentionally through its repetition, pointing to both the lick's hyper-presence and the way that complaints about the excessive posts of the lick are themselves recycled into copy-pasted, over-repeated jokes. In doing so, I argue that the lick serves as the basis for a study in intracommunity dynamics and specifically the use of humor and gimmickry in identity formation. I note how the lick becomes a shorthand for participation in and recognition of a larger jazz community via its repetition, and a signifier individuals can use to make formulaic contributions to that community within a pre-built humor structure that allows for infinite variation.