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Music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and those offered by Chinese web giant Tencent are now central to everyday musical activity across much of the world, with enormous ramifications for musical culture in modern societies. Bringing together case studies from twelve countries,
Music Streaming around the World provides the first international account of how streaming is shaping music culture today by considering the implications of streaming platforms for the production, distribution, and consumption of recorded music around the globe.
David Hesmondhalgh is Professor of Media, Music and Culture at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Why Music Matters and The Cultural Industries and coauthor and editor of many other books.
"This outstanding book offers a vital corrective to dominant Western-centric accounts of music streaming. With richly textured case studies from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, it politicizes the culturalization of technology and complicates global power asymmetries. A landmark contribution that pluralizes music studies and media studies through deeply reflexive, decolonial, and globally grounded analysis."—Xin Gu, author of Cultural Work and Creative Subjectivity: Recentralising the Artist Critique and Social Networks in the Cultural Industries
"This book challenges the assumption that music streaming is a singular, homogenizing phenomenon predefined by the West. Instead it conceptualizes music streaming as a plurality of experiences, processes, and dynamics shaped by the richness of musical cultures—that is, by the diverse ways music is produced, distributed, and consumed around the world. Combining interdisciplinary insight with empirical depth and theoretical rigor, this book offers an essential rethinking of a crucial issue in culture and technology studies: how music streaming today embodies power inequalities that can be fully understood only through global perspectives."—Ignacio Siles, author of Living with Algorithms: Agency and User Culture in Costa Rica
"A timely and important volume. Music Streaming around the World investigates and questions presuppositions about the coloniality of this newly widespread form of recorded music distribution. It shows that, despite the pervasiveness of platforms and individualized listening, streaming's impact on the world's recorded music and its consumption has been uneven, and that this unevenness should temper and qualify grand pronouncements about the current state of an industry dominated by wealthy nations."—Sumanth Gopinath, author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form
270 pp.6 x 9Illus: 5 b/w figures, 3 tables
9780520409057$34.95|£30.00Paper
Oct 2025