Fandom as Audience

What does it mean to be an audience today-and why does it matter more than ever?

Fandom as Audience takes readers deep into the shifting terrain of audiencehood, tracing how fans interpret, negotiate, and transform media in ways that challenge both industry logics and academic assumptions. Drawing from decades of scholarship in media studies, communication, and consumer culture theory, Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets offer a vital rethinking of one of media culture's most enduring concepts.

This is not a nostalgic return to old debates, nor a wholesale rejection of audience theory's past. Instead, Fandom as Audience expands the frame: examining the evolving relationships between media producers and media publics; the rise of anti-fans, forensic fandoms, and other audience outliers; and the impact of segmentation, data analytics, and AI on how audiences are imagined, constructed, and acted upon.

Through vivid, grounded cases-from the fragmented micro-tastes of Spotify listeners to Nigerian Bollywood fans to the converging fan clusters drawn to Wednesday-Jenkins and Kozinets show how contemporary audiences are increasingly defined not just by media content, but by code. Audiences today are tracked, sorted, predicted, manipulated and also often misunderstood. Yet audiences continue to surprise, resist, remix, and reimagine.

For scholars, practitioners, students, and fans, this book offers a roadmap to the complex realities of contemporary audience life. Whether you're building a campaign, teaching media theory, analyzing digital culture, or participating in fan spaces, Fandom as Audience will change the way you think about who audiences are, what they do, and what they mean for your work and life.