Making Synthwave: How an Online Music Community Invented a Genre

Making Synthwave: How an Online Music Community Invented a Genre documents the journey of an online community in their formation of the synthwave genre.

Taking an emic perspective that delivers a behind-the-scenes, access-all-areas telling of synthwave’s story from the very beginning to the mid 2020s, this ethnographic account offers a full history and development of the online synthwave community. Through an insightful longitudinal virtual ethnography by a composer, producer and performer, the book observes how artists, audiences, musicians, producers and performers have come together to negotiate the musical and cultural boundaries of 1980s ‘throwback’ style synthwave. The book makes visible tacit knowledge of the synthwave creative process, as well as providing rich and experiential subcultural detail that situates synthwave as an active community of practice which formulated its roots as a music genre exclusively online in the mid to late 2000s.

This book is essential reading for music makers in a variety of genres and scholars of popular music, cultural theory and music production, as well as those interested in the nuances of music-making on the internet, creative processes with synthesizers and the mechanics of genre theory and community music in the digital age.

Jess Blaise Ward (Leeds Beckett University, UK) is a synth artist and researcher of genre formation, online music communities, subcultural theory and feminist scholarship. Past publications include Who remembers post-punk women? (2019) and her paper on metalheads in the online synthwave community at the Internet Musicking conference (2022).