Pop music fans: pleasure in text or context? The case of Madonna fans

Fandom, after being negatively depicted as pathology, has been widely analyzed and emerged as a complex emotional, participative and productive experience. However, relevant spaces for analyses still remain in this area of study: even though what fans do has been investigated in-depth, still it is not very clear which role these practices have in relation to fans' pleasure. If a limited view of fandom as an excessive consumption of popular texts has been challenged, even a limited idea of fans' pleasure as mainly aroused by the core consumption of a text, must be challenged. This paper aims at investigating this aspect, specifically referring to pop music fans: does the source of pleasure lie in text, that is in music, or in context, that is in the practices of fandom? The field research conducted on a Madonna fans virtual community and on a sample of non-fans revealed notable differences between the two groups, regarding their mechanisms of pleasure and motivations, with important implications for the management of the two segments of consumers.