From Resistance to Revenue: Co-Commodification of Counterculture in Audio- Visual Festivals

The contention of this chapter is that Audio-visuals play a significant role in shaping socio- po-litical landscapes, wherein the social experience and conditions of audience reception are as important as the interplay of sound and images. This chapter will discuss the scholarly work that captures the nuances of how the experience of audio-visuals finds itself an active ex-change driving social action, and will explore the mechanics of how the practice functions as a socialising medium. Acknowledging that these relations are framed by the structures of late capitalism and are thus without borders, the social dynamics can also be understood to be highly situational to geography and regional identities. Often cited as a safe space for the ex-pression of emotion, class, gender, and sexual orientation, this chapter will draw on such inter-sections and consider how contemporary music festivals/concerts become symbolic nexus points that offer both live experiences alongside visual spectacle for different scales of audi-ences. This chapter will also survey both scholarly and pop-culture perceptions of what is deemed mainstream vs counter-cultural artistic output. Conversely, the chapter will also exam-ine how commercial culture re-appropriates both the formal properties of artistic production, as well as these more mutable social attributes, in order to generate both a market and, in turn, profit.