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 examines the paradoxical relationship between discourses of sincerity and an aesthetics of imperfection in twenty-first-century pop culture, with special attention to the Russian music scene. We focus on the career of cult musician Sergei Shnurov to address this broader question: What do present-day anxieties around sincerity tell us about pop-cultural production and consumption processes? First, we offer a genealogy of post-Soviet sincerity rhetoric. We then use this genealogy to unpack the approach to sincere expression that Shnurov and his critics and fans adopt. Two recurring artistic strategies stand out. First, Shnurov creates a sincere effect by insisting on insincerity. Second, he amplifies this ‘insincerely sincere’ rhetoric by foregrounding a visual aesthetics of imperfection. We argue that these strategies play an important role not only in Shnurov’s biography but also in a broader story: that of sincere expression as a prime concern of twenty-first-century media and popular culture.

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.

Making a living from music is an endeavour fraught with challenges associated with building a career in a rapidly changing, digitalised world and a labour market characterised by intermittency and the need for diversification. It is difficult to achieve a sustainable career that provides sufficient income to make music one’s primary occupation. As a result, many musicians explore different opportunities beyond performance to make ends meet. This article focuses on artists working in jazz and other popular genres on Barcelona’s music scene, with the aim of analysing how contemporary musicians in these genres combine artistic and professional activities. Using a qualitative methodology, including semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the study examines musicians who have attained relative stability and recognition. It identifies three key profiles of the professional musician (the ‘musician-teacher’, the ‘musician-composer’, the ‘musician-performer’) and reveals how these roles often overlap and contribute to the complex multiactivity of artistic careers.

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.

This paper explores the literary value of popular song lyrics through the lens of intertextuality, using the Beatles’ songbook as a case study. It aims to bridge the gap between reader-oriented and author-oriented approaches to intertextual research, emphasizing the importance of viewing texts from a broad, interconnected perspective. The study analyses a selected corpus of 27 Beatles songs, ranging from their early hit “I Saw Her Standing There” to their final recordings such as “The End,” to uncover how intertextuality manifests itself in their lyrics. By doing so, the paper seeks to highlight the depth and complexity of pop lyrics, advocating for their recognition as a legitimate subject of academic inquiry. The findings suggest that the Beatles’ lyrics, rich with literary and cultural references, exemplify the postmodern characteristics of pop music, blending high and low culture and showcasing the dynamic, dialogical nature of language and texts. This research aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the literary qualities of popular music and underscores the enduring cultural significance of the Beatles.

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.

In the 1990s, a protest rock movement developed on the American continent within informational capitalism, the democratisation of information and communication technologies, and the development of transnational social movements that fought against global powers. To complement the interpretations that understand this type of musical practice as a cultural aspect of social movements, or as commodities that obey the imperatives of the market, I use Auslander’s concept of performance to analyse how these protest rock groups deploy political ideologies linked to international leftist struggles, in the space and time of concerts and other types of mediations. Through an interpretive analysis, I identify some spatial, gestural, corporeal, and sound elements used to act out leftist political ideologies.

Cinco do Oriente is Timor-Leste’s most famous band. It was active for a relatively short period (1972 to 1975) and mainly performed songs made famous by Western groups. Yet Cinco do Oriente is praised today as a pioneer of the local music scene. The band was definitely popular, but it was not the only one performing at the time, and it was not the first. It is argued here that Cinco do Oriente has become a legend, not because of its music, but as a symbol of the resistance movement against Indonesia. This is because three of its members are believed to have been killed by the Indonesian military due to alleged revolutionary activities. This is discussed referencing various popular culture theorists. The article also examines the development of other bands of the era, Portuguese and Indonesian cultural missions in Timor, the Indonesian invasion and occupation, and other matters.

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.