Power to the Prosumer?: Metaspectatorship in Contemporary Music Video

The emergence of cutting-edge digital technologies has in recent times enabled audiences to engage with artists and their content in ways that challenge the linearity of conventional ‘top-down’ models of media production and consumption. While numerous theorists have examined emerging models of participation culture (Jenkins, 2006, 2015, 2024), prosumption and produsage (Bruns, 2007) and interactive and emancipatory spectatorship (Rancière, 2008), a large portion of these perspectives emphasise that the ongoing reshuffling of artist/audience engagement is mostly based on ‘bottom-up’ systems of power displacement grounded on audiences’ domestication of digital technologies. As such, filmmakers and musicians have been exploring uses of extended realities, social media, video games, digital transmedia strategies – among others – to propose new music video formats through which to engage modern audiences.

This remote presentation adopts music video Mountain At My Gates by FOALS (2015) as a core case study, adopting supplementary analyses of Ere Mela Mela by Ethiocolor (2015) and Björk’s Vulnicura (2019) to demonstrate how modern music video directors and musicians alike are turning to digital technologies in order to develop new engagement strategies. Drawing from Foucauldian power discourses, we argue that the musical and visual coauthors of these music videos operate together – across the faculties of sight and sound – to challenge neat and simplistic binaries which (oftentimes artificially) separate audiences and artists, thereby offering an alternative paradigm to articulate some of these shrinking gaps, namely: meta-spectatorship.

Keywords: music videos, participation cultures, meta-spectatorship, interactive media, extended realities, digital power dynamics