Graduate Program

Communication Studies with Pedagogy Option

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

Spring 2026

Thesis Director

S.M. Nancy Walus

Thesis Committee Member

Josh Grube

Thesis Committee Member

Anna Kochigina

Abstract

I have been to dozens of concerts, but after experiencing The Era’s Tour I became a Swiftie so quickly and passionately that I was looking for comparable concerts and fan experiences and found very few. It made me wonder how and why this fan experience stuck with me and what made it so special. With that question in mind, I started this project with the question of how successful indie music is marketed.

To answer this question, I used semiotics as the driving theory behind this study. Semiotics allowed me to establish a binary between organic and manufactured and allowed me to look at the signifier and the signified. To explore my question, producer studies were used to be able to ask those who were producing work what decisions they were making and how they constructed messages. It is important to ask the producers because they are making the choices to construct the artist behind the scenes and they must make those decisions repeatedly.

Twelve in-depth interviews were conducted for this study. Eleven people were interviewed who professionally promote popular music as well as one pilot study. This thesis uses emergent design because the driving question was initially asking about indie concert promotion, but the setting and more importantly genre could not be carved off so the study shifted to be about popular music. It is important to conduct these interviews because the music industry is a big business, many people are famous, and people cannot give everyone their attention. Therefore, it is valuable to understand how producers understand value and attempt to build it.

Following the research there was one big finding: there is a binary between organic and manufactured and the producers encourage embracing the organic. Appearing organic opens opportunities for connection with listeners. When fans feel that something is organic and they connect with it, they can then authenticate their understanding. The authentication can happen through various sources of authority such as the biography of an artist and the world they have built. Those sources of authority offer the opportunity for more connection and if listeners connect with that and become fans, they can seek out the ultimate authentication which is the live experience. This study expanded semiotics by looking at artists as living signs which are in a near constant process of being constructed, doing a popular music producer study to look behind the scenes, and there were practical applications for artists at all levels.

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