Being a “Global Music Platform”: Platform Work in Light-Tech Capitalism

Abstract

While the literature on music digital platforms has focused mainly on the consequences of production and consumption, few works have looked at platformization from the perspective of companies active in the music business. Drawing on an ethnographic inquiry of Sofar Sounds—a London-based company that organizes intimate and secret concerts in unconventional spaces—I introduce platform work to explore the kinds of practices in which platforms engage. I identify three operations in Sofar Sounds’ platform work: the incorporation of Sofar Sounds concerts into digital devices; its financing by venture capital (VCs) funds; and the activation and generification of its global community. In conclusion, I argue that being a platform involves organizational practices and that studying these practices shifts our attention beyond a few limited successful companies. I propose that light-tech capitalism accounts for this mundane and unsophisticated aspect of platform work.

Introduction

Since the mid-2000s, music has been at the forefront of the platformization of culture (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2023; Qu et al., 2023). The emergence of platforms, such as Napster, Myspace, the iTunes Store, Pandora, and Spotify has profoundly transformed the recorded music market and the way music is distributed and consumed. The consequences of digital platforms on music have been the subject of numerous studies over the past decade. Research has highlighted their emergence as new intermediaries within the music industries (Bonini & Gandini, 2019; Bonini & Magaudda, 2024; Morgan, 2019; Morris & Powers, 2015; Prey et al., 2022; Watson & Leyshon, 2022). ¹ It has described how digital platforms are reshaping the circulation of cultural content and transforming the experience of both artists and listeners (Eriksson, 2020; Eriksson & Johansson, 2017; Fuentes et al., 2019; Hagen, 2015; Kjus, 2016; Raffa, 2024; Siles et al., 2019, 2020). In addition, research has emphasized that digital platforms—and the issues that entail data, algorithms, application programming interfaces (APIs), and so on—are key sites for understanding these transformations (Eriksson et al., 2019; Morris, 2015a; Seaver, 2022). This article brings a slightly different perspective. Drawing on the companies behind digital platforms, I explore how being a platform has involved a series of specific organizational operations. I base my argument on an ethnographic inquiry of Sofar Sounds, a company that presents itself as a platform organizing “intimate” and “secret” concerts in “unconventional spaces” (Riom, 2021a). I describe how Sofar Sounds came to be a platform and what it has meant for that company.

The first section reviews the major findings of studies that have analyzed the entanglements between digital platforms and music. I then outline a complementary perspective that approaches digital platforms as operations—platform work—performed within music businesses. The second section presents Sofar Sounds and the empirical material on which this article relies. The third section describes three operations in which Sofar Sounds has engaged in being a platform: the implementation of its concert format into digital devices; its financing by venture capital (VCs) funds; and the activation and generification of its global community. In conclusion, I argue that Sofar Sounds shifts attention away from the main digital platforms and toward more mundane and unsophisticated forms of platform work, which I describe as light-tech capitalism. In this way, I contribute to a better understanding of what Van Dijck (2021) and Van Dijck et al. (2018) have described as the “platform society.”

The Rise of the Music Platform Economy

Over the last 10 years, scholars have documented the emergence of a platform-based music economy. This economy has been marked by the emergence of new companies—often described as platforms—that have transformed the production and consumption of music from concert ticketing (Behr & Cloonan, 2018; Pires, 2023; Westgate, 2020) to music listening (Eriksson & Johansson, 2017; Hagen, 2015; Raffa, 2024; Siles et al., 2019) to taste recommendation (Morris, 2015a; Seaver, 2022), and artist–fan relationships (Baym, 2018; Hracs et al., 2013). Most of the literature has focused on the consequences of digital platforms on cultural content, and it has aimed to open the “black box” of their infrastructure (Bonini & Gandini, 2020; Eriksson et al., 2019). This section reviews the notions of platforms and platformization as they have been developed within this literature. Then, drawing on authors at the intersection of science and technology studies, economic sociology, and organization studies, I develop an alternative approach to music platforms and how they shape, but are also created from, cultural practices. I build on these authors to suggest the notion of light-tech capitalism to account for mundane, unsophisticated yet wide-spread forms of platform work.

The Platformization of Cultural Production

With the success of companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Ticketmaster, digital platforms have become a major trend within cultural production. When it comes to relationships between digital platforms and cultural industries, the most accomplished reflections on the subject are the work of Thomas Poell et al. (2021), David Nieborg et al. (2020), and Brooke Erin Duffy et al. (2019). Drawing on Anne Helmond (2015), these authors define platformization as “the penetration of digital platforms’ economic, infrastructural, and governmental extensions into the cultural industries, as well as the organization of cultural practices of labor, creativity, and democracy around these platforms” (Poell et al., 2021, p. 5). They add that “platformization is not a single process of transformation but, rather, constitutive of a wide variety of shifts shaped by the interactions between particular platforms and specific cultural producers” (Poell et al., 2021, p. 4).

This definition relies on the idea that, within digital platforms, cultural commodities become “contingent” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018). Here, contingent should be understood both as a new dependency of content producers toward platforms and the fact that cultural contents are produced in such ways that they can circulate and fit into varied media environments. Therefore, these authors suggest examining “strategies, routines, experiences, and expressions of creativity, labor, and citizenship that shape cultural production through platforms” (Poell et al., 2021, p. 2).

This perspective is echoed by several authors who have taken an interest in the entanglements between music and digital platforms. While not directly using platformization in their book Spotify Teardown, Maria Eriksson et al. (2019) give a great account of how music streaming platforms are reshaping the circulation of music content. They show that Spotify does not operate alone but relies on heterogeneous entities to enable its infrastructure, that is, its backbone network, content delivery networks, programmatic advertising, cloud platforms, and data centers. These entities are essential for circulating data within the platform’s IT architecture. They not only enable music to be delivered to users via the metadata attached to tracks and playlists (see also Eriksson, 2020) but also feed the company’s business model and its ability to offer personalized service to its users.

In a similar vein, Jeremy Morris (2015b) examines the commodification of music at work through these platforms and their impact on the music economy. In Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture, he details innovations that have enabled the digital commodification of music from Winamp’s online music player to the Napster peer-to-peer network and Apple’s iTunes Music Store. He highlights the new ways in which these markets operate and, in particular, the central role of data in “optimizing” content (Morris, 2015a, 2020; see also Prey, 2020). Furthermore, a number of studies have looked at how musicians adapt to the use of platforms (Haynes & Marshall, 2017; Morris, 2014). This work shows both how musicians invest in these tools for their creative and communication practices (Baym, 2018; Hracs et al., 2013; Kiberg, 2023) and how they make sense of the way platforms operate (Freeman et al., 2023; Morgan, 2021; Prey & Esteve-Del-Valle, 2024).

This literature gives two crucial insights into the music platform economy. On one hand, platformization helps emphasize the processual and historical character of digital platforms: “Rather than seeing platforms as objects or services, they can be conceived as dynamic processes,” note Nieborg et al. (2022, p. 43). On the other hand, these authors insist on moving beyond the idea that platforms are simply market intermediaries (in two- or multi-sided markets) to explore their socio-technical complexity as well as the practices attached to them.

Being a Platform: Music Platforms as Organizations

Most of this literature focuses on the consequences of digital platforms on musical practices. This perspective is particularly illustrated through concepts, such as “contingent commodity” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018) or “platform-dependent creativity” (Duffy et al., 2019). From this point of view, little attention has been paid to what it means “organizationally speaking” (Latour, 2013) to be a platform for a business in the music industry. Therefore, with rare exceptions (Eriksson et al., 2019 notably Chapter 1; Hesmondhalgh et al., 2019), few works focus on music platforms as organizations.

This article aims to achieve a flank movement in the understanding of music platforms. For this purpose, I draw on several recent articles at the intersection of economic sociology, science and technology studies, and organization studies, all of which aim to characterize digital platforms as organizational forms (Stark & Pais, 2020; Watkins & Stark, 2018). For instance, David Stark and Ivana Pais (2020, p. 48) argue that platforms can be described as a “Möbius organizational form” that “co-opt[s] assets that are not part of the firm and create[s] value in a social and economic space that is neither inside nor outside of the platform.” Koray Caliskan (2020, 2023) suggests that platforms work as “stacks.” Çalışkan borrows the term from computer science, where it refers to the different components (computer languages, database engines, libraries, etc.) on which software relies. ² According to Çalışkan, platforms are not just a marketplace or infrastructure. Rather, they are produced through various practices that contribute to the instauration of a set of heterogeneous elements that enable something like a platform to exist.

Building on this literature to extend Anne Helmond’s (2015, p. 8) invitation to consider platforms in their “computational sense,” this article explores their organizational sense. I consider a central question of platform studies—of platforms as intermediaries—and give it a pragmatic twist (Hennion, 1989). Rather than objects, I understand platforms as order-words and being a platform as a performance that is realized through platform work. According to Gilles Deleuze & Guattari (1988), order-words are something that “indicates what is to be” (Alauzen & Muniesa, 2022, p. 37, my translation). In his seminal article on platforms, Tarleton Gillespie (2010, p. 3) notes that “the point is not so much the word itself; ‘platform’ merely helps reveal the position that these intermediaries are trying to establish, and the difficulty of doing so.” If Gillespie insists on the discursive and semantic aspect of the term platform—in an elaborate and elegant way—I suggest paying the same attention to the platform as a practical realization. What kind of operation does a practical realization imply? What does it make companies do? How does it contribute to ways of performing music (Hennion, 2017)? Therefore, I argue that being a platform needs to be described as work to be done. I draw here on ethnomethodology and the idea that “doing being” is the result of situated practices (Müller, 2016; West & Zimmerman, 1987; on organization see Cooren et al., 2011). By platform work, I do not mean jobs in the platform economy (like in expressions, such as digital labor or platform labor) but activities required for a company to perform as a platform. In this understanding, the focus of the inquiry is less on the process by which digital platforms affect or govern things (whether musical content, creativity, or listening practices) than that music companies’ performances to be a platform.

This perspective considers two aspects of the literature on platformization of culture that have yet to be fully explored. On one hand, being a platform is a vernacular approach. It is not just a matter of analytic grids but, above all, a practical concern related to platform work as performance. Such an approach might consider aspects, such as branding (Arriagada & Concha, 2020) or venture capitalization (Riom, 2024; Watson et al., 2023), that have been neglected in the analysis of the entanglements between music and digital platforms. On the other hand, considering platform work enables a shift in attention beyond a relatively limited number of successful companies (e.g., Spotify, Apple, Ticketmaster). I argue that this movement invites a relocation of digital platforms within mundane business practices that are spreading widely across the music economy. Drawing on José Van Dijck’s (2021, p. 2805) call to “disentangle[e] complex platform ecosystem dynamics,” I proffer the notion of “light-tech capitalism” to account for this mundane and unsophisticated aspect of digital platforms. Unlike high-tech or deep tech, light-tech emphasizes that the proliferation of platforms extends beyond the tech industry and does not depend solely on advanced technology.

Cases and Methods

Sofar Sounds is a London-based company. Since 2009, it has organized “secret concerts” in “intimate” and “unconventional spaces”: coworking spaces, offices, living rooms, fashion stores, or art galleries. The company produces about 500 events per month in over 440 cities worldwide, although its main markets remain major urban centers of the United States and the United Kingdom, such as London, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Each city is organized into a “chapter,” a local team made up of volunteers and in some cases—“full-time cities”—of paid staff. In addition to the chapters, the “Global Office” based in London and New York coordinates Sofar activities across the world. It is also in charge of the company’s business development, marketing and the website, which enables audiences to apply for events.

In cities run only by volunteers, donations to pay for an event are made by simply “passing a hat.” In full-time cities, spectators pay between US$10 and US$30, depending on the city and the day of the week. While ticketing is Sofar’s main source of revenue, the company has also developed sponsored events with brands (recently Firestone, Xfinity, Century Fox, Jameson). In addition, some events are filmed and then one song per artist is published on the Sofar Sounds YouTube channel. According to the majority of my informants, the special atmosphere of Sofar events is a key element of its branding (on this point, see Janotti & Pires, 2018).

Between October 2017 and March 2020, I conducted a multi-sited ethnography of Sofar Sounds (Riom, 2021a). I attended 20 events in Paris, London, Lausanne, and Geneva and interviewed musicians, Sofar Sounds staff (volunteers and paid) and spectators based in Switzerland, France, Turkey, Brazil, the United States and the United Kingdom, for a total of 51 interviews. In addition, I carried out an in-depth analysis of Sofar documents, websites, and press articles. This material was processed in a logic of continuous analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 2017).

Portrait of Sofar Sounds as a Platform

Encountering the term “platform” during my fieldwork was somewhat a surprise. The digitization of the music industry was not primarily at the heart of my investigation. On the contrary, my decision to work on live music was initially to create some distance from the ongoing academic debates of this topic. Yet I began to find “platform” both in the words of my informants and in the documents I had collected. Here are three examples:

Cofounded in London in 2009 by Rafe Offer and Rocky Start, Sofar brings guests and artists together in unique locations, without the distractions that plague other live events. Sofar shows begin as a secret: guests sign on for three unnamed performances at undisclosed locations, hosted by community members in everyday spaces—from living rooms and rooftops, to retail stores. Through the transformation of these spaces into captivating venues, Sofar serves as a platform for artists to connect with engaged audiences in cities around the world (Sofar Sounds, 2023).

In Turkey, Sofar Sounds is one of the only platforms where you can showcase your music. In Istanbul, there are no house shows, just Sofar. The music scene is very limited. There are maybe a total of eight to ten bars, five music venues (bigger venues), no booking agent, no manager, no label. The musicians are all doing this by themselves. It is starting now to develop, there are some small labels. In this context, Sofar brings a great infrastructure, a new and nice platform (Interview with Ayrie, an Istanbul-based musician, conducted in September 2018). ³

Our website or like what we call the platform—the back end of our website—we never built it thinking that we’ll be doing over 500 shows a month globally. We built it thinking we’ll be doing ten [laughs]. So, it just was not built for that scale, and we had to rebuild it from scratch, kind of byte by byte. So, it’s been a big project, but probably in the next year or two, the website is going to look very different, and function really differently. I think it is going to be very intelligent and we will be able to get some really good data collection, really good functionality for all the various types of people that use our website (Interview with Elizabeth, an employee of the Global Office, conducted in April 2019).

The first example came from a Sofar Sounds presentation on LinkedIn and was typical of company marketing material. In the second example, Ayrie explained that for musicians based in Istanbul, Sofar Sounds was a rare platform to promote their music. ⁴ This description of Sofar Sounds was exemplary of the interviews I conducted with musicians. In the third example, Elizabeth reflected on the development of the company’s new IT infrastructure, which offered new analytic possibilities and made it easier to organize events.

It is striking to note that in all these instances “platform” referred to different things. Therefore, what did it mean for Sofar Sounds to be a platform? In what way did it engage the company? As Nick Seaver (2022) invites us to do with the term “algorithm,” it is useful not to try to oppose these meanings but to track the different paths to which these quotations point that is to unfold Sofar Sounds’ platform work. The remainder of this article explores three operations. In the first subsection, I look at how the development of the Sofar Sounds’ mobile app and website reshaped the format of events. In the second subsection, I show that being a platform related to the company’s transformation into an object of investment. In the third subsection, I look at how Sofar Sounds activated and made generic its global community.

Developing a Mobile App: Putting Secret Shows Into a Smartphone

Perhaps the most obvious way in which Sofar Sounds is a platform is through its IT infrastructure. As the interview with Elizabeth suggests (see above), the website is a key element in organizing Sofar Sounds events. If the company’s project is to bring people together in the same place for an “IRL” (in real life) experience, it is impossible to attend an event without a smartphone. Similarly, local chapters rely heavily on the website to manage ticketing and guest lists.

Since its creation, the company has had several websites and developed a mobile application. The launch of the Sofar Sounds mobile app dates to April 2017. In a blog post, a developer looked back at the various stages of the process, unfolding an account of the app’s development and providing a grasp of how this tool led Sofar to reframe the format of its events. ⁵ The blog post explains that the development team began with “mapping” the “ticketing process” that led a spectator to choose a show and then buy a ticket. Until then, spectators had to “apply” for a ticket and hope to be included on the event’s guest list. As the number of events multiplied—the development of the mobile app coincided with the first professionalized staff in full-time cities—guest list management became increasingly complicated. The developers drew a preliminary conclusion: “Applying to gigs was resulting in an overly complicated ticketing flow which would involve designing, developing, and maintaining many different in-app touchpoints.” An alternative was to simplify the process and allow users to purchase tickets directly.

However, the change was significant. Uncertainty is a key part of the Sofar Sounds experience (Riom, 2021b). In the user profile drawn up by the team, the appetite for discovery and surprise contributed preponderantly to its interest in Sofar events. In addition, the developers noted that a minority of spectators applied to more than a dozen events at the same time, because they “found joy in the lottery of seeing what they were selected for each week (and then confirming one gig from the reduced options available).” The risk was that the mobile app would erode the appeal for Sofar’s secret shows. Therefore, the developers organized a trial to test the direct ticket-purchasing feature. ⁶ It showed that with the option of buying a ticket directly guest “conversion rates,” that is, the proportion actually buying a ticket, doubled. Now, in countries where the mobile app is available (mostly where there are full-time cities), spectators no longer need to wait to be selected to buy a ticket.

Meanwhile, concerns that emerged from the format of the events shaped the development of the Sofar Sounds digital infrastructure. During my fieldwork, several of my informants wondered what discovery remains once an event is over and if Sofar Sounds offers “real discovery” (see Riom, 2020). One informant pointed out that if people listen to the different acts, at the end of the concert, they often do not remember their name and rarely seek out their music afterward. Being a platform for discovery is key to Sofar’s narrative (see the “Generification: The Power of Activation” section). To respond to these criticisms and reinforce the “exposure” offered to artists, several features were added to the Sofar website over time. Here, too, developer publications provided information on these choices.

In a 2019 blog post reviewing the development of new features of the website, designers explained that they wanted to create “more meaningful connections” between artists and “guests”: “Attendees wanted to show extra appreciation for musicians, but felt limited in their options to do so,” explained one of the developers. The team suggested, for example, that “guests” might chat with other audience members, send feedback in the form of an emoji, or offer tips to artists. Artists, for their part, now had the option of updating a personal page on the Sofar Sounds website and including several types of content: YouTube videos, upcoming concert dates, and tracks on Spotify or SoundCloud.

This implementation of Sofar Sounds’ activities on a mobile app or its website not only had computational implications. The development of these devices also transformed the company’s daily activity. Sofar hired a new team dedicated to technology and data analysis. While the first jobs at the Global Office were mainly focused on chapter coordination and marketing, new expertise was brought into the company: UX designers, full-stack engineers, and growth analysts. In other words, being a platform transformed the activity within Sofar Sounds’ offices, attached new expertise to the company, and led it to reframe the format of its events.

Capitalization: The Entanglements Between Technology and Venture Capitalism Funding

During my inquiry, I was surprised to find how important the IT infrastructure development was to the history of Sofar Sounds. How could a company operating in a sector deemed so unprofitable manage to make such an investment? When I took a close look at the chronology of the development of Sofar’s successive websites, I was struck that they coincided perfectly with the successive rounds of funding. Moreover, the development of new tools and devices was omnipresent in the interviews and press releases that follow the rounds of funding. Sofar Sounds’ capitalization followed a standard path for a VC-backed startup (for more details, see Riom, 2024). VCs typically make investments considered risky in promising companies that lack a business model (Birch, 2023; Cooiman, 2023). They support their development hoping to generate a profit by reselling their share of capital in the company to other investors (Hellman, 2022). Losses on most investments are expected to be covered by a few “home runs.”

In 2014, Sofar Sounds raised “seed funding” that preceded the launch of the first website with a proper ticketing system. The 2015 “Series A funding” took place just a few months before a new website update and the launch of the mobile app. ⁷ At the time of the announcement of a US$25 million “Series B funding” in 2019, Jim Lucchese—freshly appointed CEO—announced that: ⁸

Sofar plans to further invest in artist services, as well as a new web presence. You’ll see us investing in a new website, and ramping up our artist-focused team to provide artists support. We also see lots of ways to make touring of Sofar cities more organic for the artist. Sofar is [. . .] a global community which we will continue to build and support, but it should also be seen through the lens of an artist development platform. (Ingham, 2019)

These announcements were followed, in 2021, by the acquisition of another startup, Seated, a “ticketing service including direct-to-fan presale and VIP ticketing” (Rendon, 2021).

During that period, Sofar Sounds experimented with different business models. ⁹ In addition to ticketing, Sofar Sounds produced festivals (mainly in London) and created a music licensing company, Sofar Creative. Sofar Sounds also started to organize events in partnership with various brands (e.g., with Stella Artois, Hyatt Centric, 20th Century Studio, REI). During our interview, Rafe Offer explained that partnership is now considered a “second business model” by the company. If both the festivals and Sofar Creative were eventually abandoned over the years, these experiments attempted to demonstrate the potential value of the company.

The public positions taken by investors provided a better understanding of what is entailed in valuing Sofar Sounds. For example, Malcom Ferguson, partner at Octopus Ventures, argued that Sofar Sounds’ brand equity was insanely good and better than Apple’s (Ferguson, 2019). To affirm this, he relied on NPS (net promoter score), an index typically used in brand valuation that measures the proportion of users who recommend a service to another person (Moor & Lury, 2011). Several investors, like Ferguson, seemed particularly impressed by the ability to drive “new, engaged fans who have been immersed in an authentic, eclectic night, and maybe met a new friend or two as well,” as Sir Richard Branson (2019) wrote. From an investor perspective, Sofar Sounds had value because its brand could be compared to others and because its model seemed highly scalable.

In other words, Sofar’s ability to be a platform was strongly linked to its capacity to raise capital. Technology development—mainly the implementation of its activity into a digital infrastructure (see the “Developing a Mobile App: Putting Secret Shows Into a Smartphone” section)—was therefore both the consequence and the instrument of Sofar Sounds’ capitalization. ¹⁰ On one hand, rounds of funding gave the company resources to make investments that would otherwise have been out of reach for a company active in producing secret shows. On the other hand, platform work played a key role in bonding entrepreneurs and investors. It took the form of both conforming to a growth model (through indicators and metrics) and capturing the financial means to achieve it. For Sofar Sounds, being a platform involved raising funds from VCs and therefore designing a business model to generate future value. In other words, platform work aims to create a close relationship between Sofar Sounds’ activities and a specific form of business capitalization by turning intimate and secret concerts into an object of investment.

Generification: The Power of Activation

In this final subsection, I explore the kind of agency Sofar Sounds performed in being a platform. While paying close attention to the use of the term platform, I noticed that it was always defined as a platform for someone to do something. For example, for music fans to discover new artists or for artists to develop their audience. This operation was a particular way of addressing and activating different entities, while producing a transposable framework. ¹¹ However, this use of the term platform was not merely discursive. This aspect became clear when I examined the organization of the events. For a concert to take place, Sofar enrolled guests, artists, hosts, and volunteers. Each must not only be recruited but also prepared in a specific way. Elsewhere, I describe a typical spectator’s journey to understand how Sofar Sounds, through various devices, detached its “guests” from certain habits—for example, choosing which artist to see or being able to dance—and attached them to a different way of appreciating music (Riom, 2021b). This recruitment was never foregone but required continuous work by the Sofar teams. “I want to be your friend,” said James, leader of Sofar Paris, at the end of an event inviting people with a potential venue to come to him.

Enrolling guests, artists, hosts, and volunteers also involved setting them in motion. I use here the term activation to capture the type of agency at work. ¹² Sofar Sounds did not seek to act directly on these entities by imposing orders or entrusting them with precise tasks. Activation was much more diffuse and required only limited resources. The Global Office had little control over the practices of the local chapters. As Elizabeth explained, Sofar Sounds depended entirely on this activation:

We’re so lucky that we have so many, like, incredibly passionate music people all around the world constantly feeding us information about what’s cool where they are [laughs], and it’s great ‘cause we get videos. Like there was one from South Korea who just blew my mind. Like the rest of us that don’t live in those parts of the world, we’re getting to see music through the lens of our community members across the globe.

This point was conceded by Rafe Offer who reported that when there were management problems in certain local chapters and practices that did not match Sofar’s “values,” the company relied primarily on community members to point out the problem and enable the Global Office to intervene. Instead of managing local chapters directly, the company provided a program of action.

This program of action was firmly inscribed in the events themselves, based on a relatively simple list of tasks (finding a host, booking artists, decorating the space, etc.), events generify different roles linked to their organization. Several authors borrow the term “generifying” from IT to describe the efforts to ensure that “local sites can be treated as the same” (Pollock et al., 2007, p. 257). AirBnB, for instance, generifies the role of host on its platform to give it a definition independent of the local peculiarities of each city (Bruni & Esposito, 2019). For Sofar Sounds, generification was achieved directly through the format of the events. For instance, playing at Sofar Sounds required musicians to adapt their way of playing and thinking about their music (Riom, 2023b). Because they could not rely on a PA system, they learn to “strip back” their music using acoustic instruments. Sofar’s ability to circulate in a multiplicity of different venues relied heavily on these adaptations. Such a model could then be reproduced: in every chapter, Sofar could count on a team of volunteers, artists, hosts, guests, and so on, all working together to make the events a success.

The term “platform” was key in Sofar’s efforts to generify its format, enabling chapters to be flexibly and fluidly activated in a wide variety of venues, with minimal action from the Global Office. The different roles were only partly defined in the terms and conditions of use of the Sofar website, contracts signed with the artists, or information on the website. ¹³ Generifying the actors (and leaving aside those who did not let themselves be generified) not only led to their enrollment but also made them active members of Sofar Sounds’ “global community.” This community contributed to the articulation of multi-sided markets—event ticketing with brand partnership—and network effects, which made the company valuable from the perspective of VCs (see the “Capitalization: The Entanglements Between Technology and Venture Capitalism Funding” section).

The Emergence of Light-Tech Capitalism

In this article, I have suggested an alternative approach to the entanglements between digital platforms and cultural industries. Rather than focusing on how digital platforms are transforming the work of artists or the circulation of cultural content, I examined what being a platform means organizationally speaking for music businesses.

Sofar Sounds’ example is instructive in several ways. Because the relationship between intimate secret concerts and digital platforms was not obvious, considering how Sofar Sounds could be a platform invited a look beyond appearances. I showed that platform work involved at least three operations. First, being a platform meant developing digital tools (website, mobile applications). This development was connected to day-to-day concert organization. It contributed to rethinking the format of the events and was, in turn, shaped by doubts and criticisms about the Sofar Sounds experience. Second, being a platform related to investment practices and raising funds from VCs. Third, platform work engaged in being an intermediary and in activating entities that enabled an activity to take place (in the case of Sofar, organizing concerts). These three operations fully contributed to giving Sofar its organizational form. These findings remain preliminary and need to be enriched with other cases. However, they demonstrate the fruitfulness of examining not only the technical infrastructure of platforms but also other aspects of platform work: interface design, capitalization and branding. In addition, my results provide elements to understanding how an order-word—being a platform—has spread beyond the tech sector.

It is striking that at no point did Sofar Sounds’ being a platform involve sophisticated computational infrastructure. The website and mobile app developments described in the “Developing a Mobile App: Putting Secret Shows Into a Smartphone” section were based on relatively simple IT tools, sometimes outsourced (e.g., the company made extensive use of Google Drive to share documents between the chapters). ¹⁴ This is far from the imaginaries usually invoked when talking about platform capitalism. Here, Sofar Sounds pointed toward a much more mundane form of platform work, which could be described as a light-tech form of capitalism, characterized by the ordinary, modest, and unsophisticated, yet ubiquitous, use of digital devices (see also Bialski, 2024). Here, the term “light” refers to relatively simple and flexible digital devices that do not rely on heavy machinery. Furthermore, my inquiry shows that these digital devices were less about what makes companies valuable (e.g., through patents or data) than as a way for entrepreneurs and investors to envision a corporate project and growth model.

Finally, Sofar Sounds offers a step back toward analyses that present digital technologies and music data as new forms of assets that attract significant financial covetousness (Prey, 2016). In fact, it is striking to note here that the datafication that Elizabeth evoked followed rather than preceded VC investments. This result suggests that the order-word “platform” might be intimately linked to a renewal of the entanglements between the music industry and finance (Riom, 2023a; Watson & Leyshon, 2022; Zhang & Negus, 2021). In the different operations I have described, the question of growth was omnipresent: from the technical issues that arose in mobile application development to the assessment of the company’s value or to the activation of a generified global community. Several authors have pointed out that scalability is a central criterion for evaluating entrepreneurial projects (Avle et al., 2020; Pfotenhauer et al., 2022; Tsing, 2012), a major lever for ensuring growth in a company’s value and therefore in the investments made. From this point of view, being a platform is above all a particular way of addressing the question of value and turning a company into an object of investment.

All three aspects—platform work, light-tech capitalism, and scalability—offer insightful ways to account for what it means organizationally speaking to be a music platform and to open up new ways of grasping its politics.