The corporate rhetoric of streaming platforms often assumes a tight link between their scale-making ambitions on the one hand and the creative interests of musicians on the other. In practice, most musicians recognise that claims of musical ‘democratisation’ are deeply flawed. The creative ambivalence this produces is an understudied pillar in scholarship on digital music platforms and suggests that these systems can be more creatively constrictive than empowering. Based on ethnographic research among Spotify engineers, record labels and musicians, this article explores how music recommendation systems become inculcated with a corporate rhetoric of ‘scalability’ and considers, following Anna Tsing, how this impacts musical creativity further down the value chain. I argue that the ‘creative ambivalence’ that these technologies produce should be more fully understood as woven into a complex web of social relations and corporate interests than prevailing claims of technological objectivity and ‘democratisation’ suggest.

As festivals were cancelled or people were afraid of participating in mass gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic, the well-being effects of festival participation were missed. How can these missed hedonic, eudaimonic or social well-being impacts be described, and how has the prolonged absence of live music events and the cancellation of the festival summer influenced attitudes towards festivals? Research data comprised nearly 13,000 responses to the Finnish Festival Barometer 2020 at a time when all the large festivals had been cancelled. Clustering the COVID-19 related questions led to three segments named Covid-cautious, Music-driven and Experience-oriented. The findings indicate challenges for event organisers, particularly in terms of communality. The theoretical contribution of this study is in scrutinising the well-being effects of festival attendance at a time when festivals were banned. Thus, survey participants could say the factors they missed most, revealing the most important well-being dimensions for their festival attendance.

The legal history of pop singer-songwriter Kesha Sebert has brought to light serious problems of gender and power in the US recording industry: it remains male dominated to its core. These contemporary problems have specific historical origins. Contextualising the 2008–2014 lawsuit between two rival producers over the exclusive right to Kesha's labour power suggests that elements of Victorian gender relations and class war were baked into the doctrine on which that 21st century case turned. Drawing empirically on court documents, and analytically on perspectives from history and sociology as well as feminist legal scholarship, this paper explains the persistent vitality of a ‘gendered erotic triangle’ in music production. By contextualising Kesha's gendered legal triangulation, and analysing a seemingly technical quibble about the interpretation of a statute of (temporal) limitation, this paper frames the commodification of singers’ labour power as central to a gendered project of class domination.

The last 20 years have seen extensive scholarship on changing audiovisual aesthetics and the blurring boundaries between all screen media. This article draws on this scholarship and engages with critical debates around the musical genre to examine contemporary song-based screen media. While song and singing have a long history across film, television and video, the digital convergence era has engendered new types of song performance and song-based screen formats. To understand the complex connections and exchanges between different forms of singing on screen, this article develops a new evaluative and conceptual framework. I propose the term screensong to refer to audiovisual representations of singing performance across screen-based media. This article understands screensong as both a broad category of song-based screen texts, genres and formats and as a particular type of song-driven, highly commodified, audiovisual and narrative unit – the screensong – prevalent in contemporary American popular screen media.

‘Old Town Road’, a genre-defying song fuelled by proliferating remixes, is a key site to unravel the position of remixes in contemporary popular music and culture. In this article, I examine mainstream press discourse about ‘Old Town Road’, finding that Lil Nas X's use of remixes to boost the song's popularity was generally seen as smart, while the racial politics of genre were contested but still powerful. Ultimately, the popular conversation around the song showed a sense that one key possibility of remixes is to resist the ways that genres normatively operate as straight lines of descent from musical forebears, instead engaging in a queer kind of reproduction, a joyful excess of proliferating versions.

The origins of syncopation in 20th-century American popular music have been a source of controversy. I offer a new account of this historical process. I distinguish between second-position syncopation, an accent on the second quarter of a half-note or quarter-note unit, and fourth-position syncopation, an accent on the fourth quarter of such a unit. Unlike second-position syncopation, fourth-position syncopation tends to have an anticipatory character. In an earlier study I presented evidence suggesting British roots for second-position syncopation. in contrast, fourth-position syncopation – the focus of the current study – seems to have had no presence in published 19th-century vocal music, British or American. It first appears in notation in ragtime songs and piano music at the very end of the 19th century; it was also used in recordings by African-American singers before it was widely notated.

As a phenomenon of great social relevance between 1900 and 1930, the graphic advertising of the pianola must be considered as one of the first great mass media platforms linked to musical activity and, therefore, the analysis of its discourse offers valuable information about the social construction of the musical world during the first decades of the twentieth century. This article shows the results of an analysis of 200 historical advertisements through which it is possible to trace the origins of some of the current advertising rhetoric and also some of our current ideas about musical activity. In this way, the advertisements studied show some interesting links to the mindset and aesthetic and social conventions of the time but also show us to what degree these discourses are, to a large extent, still valid today.

This article attempts to uncover the complex relationship between musical expression, artist discourse and personae, by focusing on the way virtuoso guitarist Steve Vai presents himself and his music in the media. I analyse video and print interviews that span the three decades of Vai's career to trace patterns and contradictions in his views on his music and artistry. This is not to assume intentionality, but rather to ask what sort of gap there is between how Vai sees himself and presents himself as a musician, and whether he sees music as self-expressive, or as involving a constructed persona.

In the years following its independence from Britain in 1964, Malta experienced several changes socially, politically, economically and culturally. In part, these arose from the fact that after independence Malta, as a small Mediterranean island-country, had to take full control of its own destiny, including its economy and politics. At approximately the same time a band called The Malta Bums was set up and eventually gained popularity both locally and further afield. Their 1967 release of ‘Viva Malta’ achieved unprecedented success and is still hugely popular today. This article analyses this song in its historical, cultural and social context. It discusses how and why this track became so popular at that time and is still popular nowadays. For that purpose, it scrutinises its music and lyrics, as well as the production process and how each one of these built on the familiar to convey sentiments of national unity central to the loyalty that the lyrics call for.

Popular music writing has made for strange colleagues and quickly lost legacies. I want to sketch some of them and suggest how they continue to influence the US version of popular music studies, arguably more so in our moment than in the previous period that codified an academic approach. I'll be anecdotal, alive to particulars of language, affiliation, method and form rather than attempting a quantification. Ranging from William Billings in 1770 to Daphne Brooks in 2021, I'll explore how such key framings as vernacular, sentimental and literary have shaped the nature of books on song. My hope is that, in synthesizing the larger history, I can suggest why so often this work could be characterized as, to use one of Robert Palmer's favourite words, unruly.

There is a striking variance between the sounds of highlife music recorded in the 1950s and 1960s and that of the 1970s. This difference can be attributed partly to the advancement of recording technology, a shift from shellac to vinyl records as well as the advent of multi-track tape recorders in Ghana. The 1970s had a unique highlife sound that can be situated within and explained by the socio-cultural context of recording approaches embraced by studio engineers. This paper investigates the technological approaches to the production of highlife songs at the Ghana Film Studio (GFS) and how they reshaped the highlife soundscape in the 1970s. It also draws attention to the influence of Francis Kwakye, the then resident recording engineer of GFS as a case study to explore highlife sound on records within this period. Employing document review, audio review, observations and interview for data collection, the paper reveals that the engineering techniques and tools employed on the recordings were socio-culturally influenced and constructed to resonate with the Ghanaian identity of the time. It further argues that the recording activities have been guided largely by a new imagination of the highlife sound recordings framed within a certain Ghanaian nationalistic context. The paper concludes that the methods employed to record highlife music of the 1970s were masterminded essentially from a Ghanaian socio-cultural sound perspective.

This paper examines player pianos in Portugal between the 1890s and the 1930s. In a small European country with few production facilities, mechanical music developed in a particular way since a local recording industry was expanding rapidly and radio was not yet disseminated. Despite the local market's reliance on imported goods, the music business concentrated on Portuguese pieces. The mechanisation of the piano and its display as a product that embodied modernity illustrates the transformations that took place in Portugal at the beginning of the 20th century. These were reflected in new forms of entertainment, such as cinemas and nightclubs that incorporated new music genres. At the dawn of the century, the leisure market relied on the popular music theatre, which was dominated by Portuguese, French and Spanish music. In the interwar period, English and American pieces made their way into people's lives, transforming the music business.

New Zealand Māori metal band Alien Weaponry rose from local act to international prominence over the course of 2016–2018, lauded by critics and fans for their songs involving Māori history and culture, and with lyrics in the indigenous Māori language. This article examines Alien Weaponry's participation in Māori language revitalisation efforts and explores the use of indigenous frameworks for analysing these issues. Māori principles of kaitiakitanga (protection) and whai wāhi (participation) offer an understanding of the band's contributions to both Māori cultural preservation and global metal, and of how these contributions cooperate in the band's success. In addition to unpacking the issues of identity, indigenousness and language revitalisation inherent in understanding Alien Weaponry's output, this article also expands on previous work on nationhood and identity in both global metal music and Māori popular music.

This article reviews studies that examine internationally circulating music which has reached the upper echelon of all-genre single charts in the 21st century. The examinations will be used as examples for the analysis of sonic aesthetics that are embedded in a particular frame of cultural debate, which the article conceptualises as ‘mainstream popular music’. The research field is then mapped and discussed with regard to prevailing objectives, methods and findings, including elaborations on how future research might advance understanding of the aesthetics within the discourses of mainstream popular music and, thus, of contemporary culture at large. The literature review focuses on music- and listener-based analytical directions and critically reflects on the frequent absence of theoretically well-founded and empirically underpinned, context-sensitive music examinations, particularly with regard to quantitative and audience research. The concluding section calls for a more integrated perspective on mainstream popular music as a discourse and praxis formation.

Hip-hop is a global culture, where local representation is a core tenet of its ideology. It therefore provides opportunities to observe how a global cultural structure is interpreted, realigned and expressed in local cultural forms. This article combines autoethnography and rap lyric analysis to consider the complex relationship between the local and global in relation to cultural articulation and authenticity. Through a study of the poetics of Scottish hip-hop, a series of patterns and connections appear relating to interpretation, negotiation and hybridisation of local and global culture, presenting a demonstration of how the local, global and individual intersect to ‘devise unique ways of communicating thoughts, emotions and everyday realities’ (Alim 2003, Journal of English Linguistics, March, 31/1, pp. 60–84, p. 62). Furthermore, this article presents a framework for autoethnographic study of hip-hop, signposting bridging points between scholarship and practice.

Recording studios are shrouded in mystery. Some have become sites of pilgrimage; other studios have been converted into heritage museums. These practices are driven by city authorities, commercial heritage institutions or music fans. This interview study gives a voice to an understudied group: record producers and studio owners as the people in charge of popular music creation. Three German rock and metal producers expressed their opinion on the usefulness of studio museums and explained their own heritage practices. Their insights demystify the ‘magical aura’ associated with recording studios, picturing these spaces as places of pressure and anxiety. Hardly convinced of the technologically deterministic ‘magical contamination’ of technical equipment, the producers see little sense in studios as museums. For them, the released record is what counts. To stay in touch with the community and to keep the memory of their work alive, they prefer to use social media.

Sonic branding – the sonic expression of a brand's identity – is the audio equivalent of a brand's logo, a sound that is both distinct and adaptable to diverse contexts, and serves to communicate a brand's narrative. Sonic branding has been a feature of marketing strategies for the past two decades, but more recently there has been increased commercial interest in sonic branding, a move from the ‘visual turn’ to the ‘sonic turn’, as voice activation technologies such as Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant immerse the consumer in a personal encounter across diverse sensory touch points. While there has been significant scholarly discussion in popular music studies of the ways that sound is employed to increase capital in commercial contexts, little has been written to address the ways in which popular music is courted and implicated in brand strategy specific to sonic branding. In this paper, we consider the ways in which sounds are embedded in contemporary brand practice and detail the ways in which popular musicians and genres are complicit partners in ‘branding to the senses’. Here, we focus on two sonic branding case studies – Mastercard and HSBC – which highlight the key role of popular music in constructing the way we ‘hear’ brands.

This article addresses the relation between Andean ‘traditional music’ and circulations of people, objects, ideas and sounds. Although many studies on Andean indigenous music have explored such circulations, scholars still tend to understand musical practices in terms of ‘cultures’. The case of indigenous music from Otavalo, in the Ecuadorian Andes, encourages us to go beyond this approach. I make two arguments. First, by conceiving of the translocal/transnational flows that have shaped ‘traditional music’ from Otavalo through the concepts of ‘network’ and ‘music world’, I unsettle the link – underlying previous approaches – between a specific people, music and place. Second, through the concepts of ‘assemblage’ and ‘mediation’, I closely look at processes of ‘traditionalisation’ and ‘indigenisation’ to show how, in the context of multiple circulations, social actors nevertheless produce a specific link between people, music and place in order to make a musical practice ‘traditional’ and/or ‘indigenous’.

This article illuminates the musical activism of Juluka, an interracial South African band active in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. Its analyses of three songs focus on intersections between Western popular music and a Zulu song genre called maskanda. By examining these cross-cultural interactions in the domains of harmonic progressions, formal structures and metric and rhythmic organisation, I demonstrate that the artistic fruitfulness of the band's collaboration was a powerful rebuke to the government's apartheid ideology, which sought to segregate not just people, but even their artistic expressions.