Snowflake Music: A Music Production Company in the Making

Through an ethnographic case study of a Swedish music production company, this dissertation explores what it implies to be making music together. Music is here understood as a matter of doing, i.e. ‘musicking’, encompassing anything from singing, programming drums and writing lyrics, to booking studio time and and administering payments. Music making is approached as processes of assembling, in which a range of human and non-human participants come together as songs, artists and studios. The study provides an up-close and in-depth analysis of ways in which such musicking participants come into being, and the role they play in the making of Snowflake Music. One of the main findings is that as a continuous outcome of the music making processes they are involved in, Snowflake can itself be considered a form of assemblage or actor-network, whose formation fluctuates between flow and crystallization, in resonance with the possibilities that present themselves, and materialize into actual work and projects. Based on fieldwork in Stockholm and Russia, this study follows Snowflake Music’s efforts towards musical mediation in the intersection of Swedish and Russian music making environments. These two musicking environments are here conceptualized as musical spheres, whose structural conditions, practices, and aesthetic preferences are diverging, yet intertwined. As music makers from these two musical spheres come together a range of challenges make themselves audible, causing friction. Their interactions thus unfold as a form of negotiations over power, in which the participants must relate to structural conditions as well as the intentions, desires, goals and aims of others. Through practice theory the study investigates how the music making process gives priority to some agencies over others, demonstrating how opportunities and constraints are unequally distributed among the participants involved.