WE ARE...
Music is a hard route for someone to decide to follow; it is a choice for a different way of life. The life of an unsigned artist is difficult and uncertain. It sucks packing all your gear into a van (or whatever vehicles you can find), moving and setting it all up at the gig, to probably end up getting paid less than the cost of the gas and food to get there. All though you may get shit on every once in a while, there is that hope that things will look up and you’ll move up through the music ranks. Comforting you along the way are your fellow artists, not just from your band, but others in the music scene alongside you. A community of people with a common goal, met through a few drinks and good music. A group bonded by a mutual love and appreciation that strive together to pursue their passions. They feed off and push each other through respectful competition to be the best. There is a certain understood etiquette within the group to promote each other, and by doing so you are also promoting yourself because the popularity of the whole helps, the popularity of the individual artists. The unsigned artists of the local music scene group together to form a passionate and creative discourse community through these common goals and pursuits.
We believe that unsigned artists are a discourse community because they show all the characteristics of a discourse community with: a way of communication, competition, a set of rules or etiquette, they have a system of hierarchy, they have a common goal, and they all do their part to reach that goal. Not only do we believe that unsigned artist are a discourse community, we add that unsigned artist are not separated by genre as a community. When it comes to concerts they may be separated but when it comes to communication, promotion, support, and unity, they are closely linked.
Background
A discourse community by definition is a group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. Linguist, John Swales defined discourse communities as "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals" (Borg). “An unsigned artist is a musical artist or group not attached or signed to a record label” (answers). In this particular case we as a group decided to research the discourse community of unsigned artists. One main way that we found unsigned musicians communicate with each other is electronic means. This includes blogs as well as social media sites. When doing this research we found that that the language used in communication is most likely understood by all musicians. It is also found that all members of these communities are supportive of one another due to the difficulty of making it as an unsigned artist. In fact the odds of becoming signed to a major record label are 1 in 3428.
Cover Letter
Our topic was the discourse community of unsigned musical artists. We tried to show that they are their own community with distinct forms of communication that may not be normal for other people or groups. We split up the project relatively evenly. Dayne wrote the background and the cover letter. Anthony did the introduction. Kevin recorded interview results and worked on the website. Xavier worked on the niche as well as additional results from interviews. Woody worked on additional text to be placed on the website.
Overall, our project went relatively well. All group members got along and communicated well with one another.
Something that didn’t go well was the understanding of what needs to be included in the background. This most likely will need to be revised.