«In the two hours I’ve listened to this I’ve become a man»: on the convergence of musical tags, videogames and Youtube in the “epic genre”

In the current era of participatory culture, diverse musical processes from creation to consumption result from various cybercommunities who produce, circulate and share multiple contents online. In addition, the use of co-creativity in various media formats leads to the transformation of behaviours, meanings and capital. In this sense, Youtube is one, if not the main, platform which gathers and multiplies an almost endless plethora of produsage phenomena that employs music in relation to other media, contents and, specifically, everyday life. Among these contents, videogames’ universes are inseparable from the interactive character of the produsers, fostering cultural practices around distinct universes. It’s frequent to ascertain the direct relationship in online spaces between videogames and the epic category due to their narratives, gameplay and commercialisation in a transmedia logic. The circulation of this term on the Internet fragments its use and meanings, and may be a genre, a style, an adjective or a quality. However, the music of these formats can function as a brand, identifying the franchise in question through recognizable themes. By perpetuating musical tropes and conventions in the writing of these soundtracks, audiovisual literacy is consolidated in the representation of imaginaries conveyed in videogames, thus structuring a compositional formula that crosses Hollywood blockbusters to the latest successes of videogames. Through tags and other identification resources, Youtube functions as a creative cluster for thousands of videos and playlists which aim to provide hours of “epic”, “cinematic”, “aggressive”, “dramatic”, among other keywords, of music. In this paper, I aim to examine, in a preliminar analysis, how both produsers and users circulate and transform through videos and tags musical genres, specifically the “epic”, and how it relates to its use in their everyday lives both on and offline.