Authenticity as a Reputation Building Tool Used to Facilitate Success for Indie Artists

Modern indie musicians struggle to earn a livable income from their work; this issue is exacerbated by increasing inflation, dominance of streaming, rise of AI use in the music industries, and growing competition caused by low barriers of entry to access to music making. This thesis intends to find potential solutions to aid the career success of starting indie musicians by exploring the deliberate use of authenticity, hereby defined as "a truthful and sincere presentation of self to one's audience in a way that is in accordance with one's own and the audience's values," among successful indie musicians in aiding to build a reputable and successful career for themselves. This use of authenticity, if used deliberately, is theorised to have the potential to become a tool for success for starting indie artists. Accordingly, the research question posed asks: How can authenticity as a reputation building tool be used by indie music artists to foster career success? The approach taken was thematic analysis of interviews with successful indie music artists, with the data set being composed of two self-conducted interviews and 36 existing media interviews (i.e., magazine articles and video interviews) with 27 indie music artists of various degrees of success, measured by active listener base on Spotify. The coding process was done manually on paper, without the aid of softwares or artificial intelligence. The findings show that indie artists are not consciously curating authenticity or aiming for success. They create music out of a place of genuine self-expression and a love for music (production), without overly concerning themselves with others perceptions of them or their music. Therefore, the paradoxical answer for how indie artists can cultivate success via reputation building with authenticity is to not plan for success and just enjoy the craft without expectations. However, some suggestions for success-building have been provided. This thesis highlights on why 'making it' in the creative industries is often hard to achieve by deliberate planning or hard work.