#ShareaCoke and a song, the commercialization of user-generated short video performance on musical.ly

Abstract

This thesis aims to acknowledge how musical.ly (referred to here as Musical.ly), a social video network, allows for the utilization of user-generated content (UGC), and how this UGC enables commercialization practices within the Web 2.0 media landscape. The purpose of this thesis is to better understand the development of user agency within Musical.ly and to comprehend how it can be situated in the broader scope of UGC and its marketability. To obtain a better understanding, this study has conducted an affordance and textual analysis, examining the Musical.ly platform’s affordances and examining two videos in more detail to provide analysis for UGC on Musical.ly. Using theories concerning user agency, gestural language and brand communities, this research argues that the platform’s affordances allow for a participatory and creative user contribution, which is able to increase a user’s agency, but simultaneously this user agency has the potential to be exploited by the platform and global companies for marketing purposes. This is problematic in the context of Musical.ly because of its young target group of users. It can be concluded that the proliferation of UGC platforms, like Musical.ly, within the Web 2.0 landscape allows for a new marketing/consumer model, which can almost covertly, harness or even exploit users’ watching and uploading behavior.