Imagine popular music cultures in the mid-2020s without digital platforms: no song snippets as part of TikTok trends, no Spotify playlists, no music videos on YouTube, no concert streams on Twitch, and no reels and stories on Instagram. Since the mid-2000s, web-based communication and creativity have become increasingly dependent on a relatively small number of digital platforms, which can now be understood as the sociotechnical nucleus of today’s internet (Dolata 2021). Platforms occupy a powerful position in modern media cultures, exerting a decisive influence on the exchange of information, processes of communication, and the organisation of work and markets, as well as creating digital spaces for social action (Dolata and Schrape 2023). Functional rules, defined by the tech companies behind the platforms, are expressed in the platforms’ interfaces and algorithmic logics (van Dijck et al. 2018). These functional rules do not determine the behaviour of cultural workers active on platforms, but they can substantially influence it – notably in the field of popular music. Due to the platforms’ pre-defined media formats, such as short-form videos, playlists, and similar content, it appears feasible to hypothesise that musicians endeavour to adapt their content – including songs, videos, visual media, and lyrics – to achieve optimal visibility within the digital spaces facilitated by these platforms.

This article examines the ways that alternative musicians in Lebanon tactically engage in corporate collaborations as a mode of aspirational cartography. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores three artists’ entanglements with Red Bull, underscoring the imaginative, ethical, and aesthetic manoeuvres musicians undertake in pursuit of alternative futures through strategic corporate affiliation. I build on Appadurai’s theory of aspiration in order to argue that in cases like Lebanon, aspiration is a cartographic undertaking through which musicians sonically map and shape spaces of possibility. In the absence of governmental support or infrastructure for the arts, transnational corporations take on developmental roles, allowing artists to leverage personal relationships, material resources, and aesthetic and creative control in pursuit of possibility.

This article forwards an alternative perspective on how authenticity can be constructed through popular music tribute show performances. It adopts Edward Bruner’s (1994, American Anthropologist, 96, 397–415) categorisation of authenticity in relation to the replication of ‘historical sites’ in museum exhibitions. It argues that rather than focusing on sonic and historical ‘accuracy’, tribute musicians strive to curate their history and personal experiences with the music they play to prove their ‘authority’ as cultural ambassadors. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Perth, Western Australia, and a case study of a UK-based international touring tribute to The Smiths, this article highlights how some tribute musicians may purposely ‘put themselves in the music’ to conjure a sense of legitimacy and connect with audiences.

Short-form video platforms have reshaped the practices of record companies and music streaming services, giving rise to new cross-audiovisual platform ecosystems. This article adopts the concept of the ‘platform adaptor’ to analyse how music industry practitioners and content producers in China have adjusted their production, distribution, and promotion strategies in response to the affordances of this emerging industrial ecosystem. It discusses the practices of staff who work with musicians to construct ‘hot songs’ (热歌) that can gain popularity across audiovisual platforms and music streaming services. Connecting theoretical ideas about affordance, platform ecologies, and adaptation, this article contributes to research on how cultural forms are ‘optimised’ to be more amenable to the requirements of platforms. The findings demonstrate that emotional encoding has become a pivotal mechanism through which musical commodities gain value as production processes increasingly conform to shareable short-form video formats within the platform economy.

This article explores the key standards identified by songwriters, collaborative artists, and music industry representatives in the commercial pop and Schlager sectors, along with the platform-centric myths they implicitly address. We first provide a theoretical overview of collaborative songwriting and platformisation. Through original interviews and ethnographic observations, we examine two primary platform standards: streaming and social media. We emphasise the growing significance of collaborative songwriting in the streaming era, particularly through songwriting camps, and the pervasive use of social media in creative and economic contexts. Our analysis demystifies two prevalent myths. The first myth concerns the ambiguous role of intermediaries, especially publishers, who act as new service points for efficient billing and songwriting facilitation. The second myth addresses TikTok’s success and its declining conversion rates for streaming.

Academic inquiries into the motivations and experiences of live music audiences have typically focused on the communal and social experience of concerts and festivals, whereas the experience of individual concertgoers has been relatively unexplored, especially in popular music contexts. In this article, qualitative interviews and focus groups were undertaken with self-declared progressive rock fans to understand their often-individualised engagement with the live music experience. The findings demonstrate the importance of live music performance and appreciation, attentive listening, and detailed personal evaluation of the musicians and their performances to these fans. The co-presence of others in the live music setting served to legitimise not only these fans’ tastes in music but also their individualised way of engaging with, experiencing, and enjoying the concert experience: their preference for the ‘text’ over ‘context’.

This article offers an ecofeminist interpretation of female pastoral expression in Kate Bush’s song cycle A Sky of Honey (2005). By identifying points of overlap between the re-visionary strategies of female pastoral and the ecofeminist ethics of care, I examine how A Sky of Honey’s sound world interrogates and restructures the primacy of dualist thinking common in pastoral convention. Exploring the creative background of A Sky of Honey, including the accompanying artwork, I first establish points of convergence with and divergence from pastoral tradition. I then analyse musical motifs to trace the development of character voices, before considering how the interactions of human voice and birdsong articulate a pastoral space that dissolves dualist structures in favour of collaboration. Reflecting on how this space demonstrates an ecofeminist ethics of care, I frame A Sky of Honey as an expression of female pastoral that reconfigures pastoral mythologies to envision an alternate vision of empathy and relationality.

Drawing on focus groups conducted with musicians based in England, we discuss how musicians with backgrounds in different genres evaluate the effects of a range of music-related digital platforms on musicians and music culture. Alongside criticisms, some of them familiar from recent public debate and academic research, we identify a number of more ambivalent and even positive perspectives on the platformisation of music. We analyse the divided responses of our focus group participants under three main headings: attitudes towards music streaming platforms and record labels; attitudes towards social media and short video platforms, in particular, their use as promotional and branding mechanisms; and attitudes towards the abundance of data available to musicians from these various kinds of digital platforms. In our concluding comments, we consider the possible objection that musicians’ ambivalent and sometimes positive appraisals might represent misguided or mistaken perspectives concerning the effects of platformisation.

Recent studies have urged us to consider the materialities of popular music to evaluate its environmental cost. This article orients this discussion towards the materiality of popular music production. It argues that industrial discussions on sustainable music production practices can overlook the ideologies associated with recording technologies that prompt consumption activities. It highlights the key themes discussed in the industry regarding sustainability in music production across various media platforms. It then analyses how these themes relate to the construction of recording studios instead of their everyday use. Although technologies like compressors are not typically considered in this discussion, this article suggests that aesthetic preferences often lead to consumption activities that must be factored in when considering the ecological costs of music production. This practice indicates that music producers tend to focus on sustainability practices that will not interrupt their core business.

Music streaming platforms are complex socio-technical infrastructures that co-construct cultural production, distribution, and reception. Different contributions have highlighted that artists, producers, and operators may implement optimisation processes, based on their algorithmic imaginaries, to align their music to the modes of listening and categorisation imposed by algorithmic media. Drawing on thirty-nine semi-structured interviews with producers, songwriters, recording industry professionals, and listeners who are heavy users of streaming platforms, this paper reconstructs the social life of a platform-optimised song. Bridging perspectives from science and technology studies and media studies, we investigate the network of relations between human and non-human actors that contribute to the circulation of a platform-optimised song during a four-phase life cycle: creation, industry mediation, platform mediation, and reception. The findings highlight multiple forms of power asymmetries at each stage, recursive dynamics, the erosion of artistic autonomy, and the collaboration of humans and non-human agents to transform music tracks into datafied products.

In recent years, the genre of UK drill has become the target of a range of ‘posh’ musical parodies. These parodies come in various forms, from private school students making TikToks under the hashtag #privateschool that use the genre’s reputation to illustrate their own privilege (Hall 2020; Complex UK 2023), to folky YouTube covers of drill songs that play off the musical differences between the two styles. Some of these parodies juxtapose UK drill’s reputation as a working class and Black British artform with upper class and white stereotypes, providing a sharp reminder of the issues that can arise through unnecessary socio-cultural comparison. In addition, many creators of these parodies appear to hide behind a veil of self-reflexive acknowledgement to mask the various ethical quandaries that arise in their work, often passing harmful content off as self-deprecating fun.

This article explores the representation of women electric guitarists on Instagram. It examines the ways in which their practices as electric guitarists are represented and surveys the spectrum of gender expressions represented on Instagram. It also considers the interconnectedness between these representations and their significance. The research findings are based on textual analysis of the Instagram content of sixteen electric guitarists of varying ages, success levels, and career stages. The findings show that Instagram is a platform through which a multiplicity of representations of women electric guitarists can be observed that can contribute to a deeper, more nuanced understanding and narrative. This article demonstrates that Instagram is an important site of analysis in its ability to contribute to shaping the discourses around gender and the electric guitar and the normalisation of diverse individuals occupying this role.