This collection presents a range of essays on contemporary music distribution and consumption patterns and practices. The contributors to the collection use a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, discussing the consequences and effects of the digital distribution of music as it is manifested in specific cultural contexts. The widespread circulation of music in digital form has far-reaching consequences: not least for how we understand the practices of sourcing and consuming music, the political economy of the music industries, and the relationships between format and aesthetics. Through close empirical engagement with a variety of contexts and analytical frames, the contributors to this collection demonstrate that the changes associated with networked music are always situationally specific, sometimes contentious, and often unexpected in their implications. With chapters covering topics such as the business models of streaming audio, policy and professional discourses around the changing digital music market, the creative affordances of format and circulation, and local practices of accessing and engaging with music in a range of distinct cultural contexts, the book presents an overview of the themes, topics and approaches found in current social and cultural research on the relations between music and digital technology.

Author Biography

Raphael Nowak is a cultural sociologist interested in issues of music consumption and technologies. He currently teaches in popular music, social theory and cultural sociology at the University of Bristol, UK. He published his first manuscript Consuming Music in the Digital Age in 2015 with Palgrave Macmillan. Andrew Whelan is a sociologist based at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia. He has published previously on digital media, Australian media regulation policy, `extreme' music and underground electronic music subcultures, peer-to-peer file-sharing and online interaction about music.