It is hard to think of another field of cultural practice that has been as comprehensively turned upside down by the digital revolution as music. Digital instruments, recording technologies and signal processing techniques have transformed the making of music, while digital dissemination of music – through the Internet and earbuds – has transformed the way people consume it. Live music thrives and mostly relies on digital technology, but alongside it music has become integrated into the patterns of social networking and urban mobility that increasingly structure people’s lives. The digital revolution has destabilised the traditional music business, with successive technologies reconstructing it in different forms, and at present even its short-term future is unclear. (Just as this book is going to press, Apple has announced the discontinuation of iTunes, the most commercially successful response to Napster.) Meanwhile digitalisation has changed what sort of thing music is, creating a multiplicity of genres, some of which exist only online – indeed, downloads and streaming have problematised the extent to which music can reasonably be thought of as a ‘thing’ at all. Technology that is rapidly pervading the globe is re-engineering relationships between geographically removed traditions (including by removing geography from the equation). Some see this near meltdown of so many aspects of traditional musical culture as a harbinger of fundamental social change to come.

A brief reflection on the founding and development of algorave, events where musicians and visualists create music using algorithms, usually through live coding: live manipulation of algorithms as code. The essay reflects on the now-traditional role of projected code, the experience of performing at an algorave, and the role of code as creative material in embodied music improvisation.

‘Giving history a voice’ explores the process of designing sound installations for heritage sites. It discusses the role of technology in communicating intangible cultural heritage by focusing on a case study based on research on the acoustics linked to the medieval drama cycle known as the York Mystery Plays.

This chapter provides an overview of the role of algorithmic recommendation in contemporary music streaming services, describing how they work, how they relate to other algorithmic applications, and problems that have emerged from their use. Against a dominant discourse that pits algorithms against humans, it argues that contemporary recommender systems are best understood as ‘ensembles’, comprising a variety of algorithmic and human parts working in conjunction with each other. This suggests new directions for research, focusing not on the intrinsic character of human or algorithmic mediation, but rather how this sociotechnical ensemble is composed and conducted. The issues raised by algorithmic music recommendation are not new but variations on past concerns including payola, the treatment of so-called world music and the power of cultural intermediaries.

In this essay, I describe the experience of serving as an expert witness in the copyright infringement lawsuit popularly known as the Blurred Lines case. The case hinged on similarities between Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke’s song ‘Blurred Lines’ and the Marvin Gaye hit ‘Got to Get It On’, but the nature of the Copyright Act of 1909 used in the case raises key questions of definition. Is a popular song comprised of only the melody and the chords with everything else considered arrangement? Or does the nature of popular music as frequently aurally composed or groove-based indicate that we should expand our understanding of creative composition?

This chapter examines the role of music and sacred sound in three types of digital devotional rituals, interpreting these through the lenses of scholarship in media, music and religious studies. In examining these digital devotional practices, including virtual pilgrimages, digital music resources for offline use, and online devotional screen media, the chapter addresses several interrelated questions, including how and in what contexts music is used in online ritual; to what extent music connects online and offline religious practices; and how engaging in music within participatory digital technologies is changing how people experience and practice their religious faith. Addressing these questions through the lens of musical and audio-visual experience will help scholars understand and assess the implications of music within the digital apparatus on religious authority, religious experience and the formation of religious communities.

One of the most important recent developments in practices of recording and listening to digital audio has been the documentation of police violence against marginalised communities, especially African Americans. Prior to the digital, audio-visual technologies served to document similar forms of racist violence as in the killing of Emmett Till (photography) or the beating of Rodney King (home video). But the increasing ubiquity of handheld recording devices has intensified and expanded those dynamics of documentary, creating new modes of witnessing race, bodies and power. In turn, these new forms of witnessing, which have played a central role in the Black Lives Matter movement, call for equally new forms of reception – ways of listening, viewing, sharing, and, in turn, recording, that amplify and disseminate that multimedia witnessing. Key examples of such witnessing, including Beyoncé’s Lemonade and recordings of police killing Philando Castile, offer sober reminders of the stakes of digital cinema.

DJ/producers in world electronica are technicians of ecstasy actively transporting dancefloor participants into states of altered consciousness. In the kitbag of these digital alchemists is a form of media-shamanism I call nanomedia – i.e. audio samples from film, TV, games, etc. – repurposed in a remixtical practice by which producers and performers of electronic music evoke and promote nonordinary states. A repurposed media ecology provides the sonic decor to the ecstatic experience, decaling the soundscape, and augmenting the vibe, on dancefloors planetwide.

This chapter discusses some principal themes of the Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture, emphasising the social and cultural dimensions of digital music. A historical introduction ranges from the embedding of digital technology in everyday life to the emergence of virtual realities, from digital-only genres like vaporwave to Second Life and Hatsune Miku, the virtual diva whose holographic performances are seen as emblematic of posthumanism: I sketch out an aesthetics of digital culture that emphasises continuities across its expressions, from digital multimedia and internet memes to playfulness on Reddit. Attention is also given to the real-world dimensions of digital culture, including the transition from downloads to streaming, internet-based participation, and so called Web 2.0 businesses. The digital revolution has brought about a radical restructuring of the music industry, culminating in a bizarre situation whereby music is economically underpinned by the collection of commercially valuable personal data on listeners.

Popular music subcultures have acknowledged, engaged with, or rejected digital platforms to varying degrees; their relationship to it is often made fraught, ambivalent and ironic by projections of the Internet as inauthentic or impersonal and their inheritance of Romantic-influenced countercultural aesthetics. The genre vaporwave offers a key example of this, especially given that it emerged and exists almost exclusively on digital platforms. Vaporwave addresses its own digital nature and historicity in sound and image, as recent scholarship on it has observed. Its life online represents not an abandonment of traditional formulations of the relationship between culture, technology and authenticity, but a new arena in which to negotiate them.

Human curation has earned itself a permanent place in the streaming media world, though it wasn’t always clear whether or how that would happen. For a time, it seemed like tech didn’t want to justify the use of human labour if the future could be won without it. That time seems to have passed, and with handmade playlists and other editorial products, human curators have a unique ability to help the widest-ever audiences find great music. People from different backgrounds are more able now to hear each other’s sounds than ever before. Whether the streamlining of these services matters to a given user is wholly subjective, since the joy of discovering new music is often so inefficient and chaotic. It was never clear that this same sense of joy would make it into streaming products – for many of us, it cannot. And that’s okay. Services offer only what they can.

This chapter investigates digital technologies that variously assist, enable or simulate musical praxis. The first section sets up an opposition between the idea of the digital tool that augments human agency, and the machinic automatism predicated on the idea that reality is fundamentally number (dataism) and ticks along without the need for human consciousness. This gives rise to the idea that mechanical automatism is also intrinsic to human agency, a strand of posthuman thought on which the rest of the chapter turns. Accordingly, the second section shows how posing algorithmic composition as an expression of the posthuman is problematic. The final section focuses on the synthetic voices of digital assistants from online service providers that generate empathy at the price of a surrogate ‘conscience’. Accommodating this within a humanistic model is possible, but a closing case study of Tod Machover’s futurist opera, Death and the Powers (2010), raises the prospect of what might be called a ‘dark ontology’ of the digital.

The chapter historicises the economics of music in the current age of technological automation – from the invention of intellectual property to the implementation of lock-down technologies at the turn of the twenty-first century. The first section sketches the basic characteristics of music’s technological, legal and political economies. By the late twentieth century, the precarious markets for music – enclosed within large-scale cycles of boom and bust in the nineteenth century – had morphed into a relatively stable set of intersecting industrial networks, including print, radio and phonograph. The second section sketches a transition period for the music industry in the context of distributed digital networks that emerged after the Cold War, producing a disjuncture between practice and policy. The third section traces the dialectics of intellectual property regimes pertaining to digital rights management, arguing that a covert allomorphism of the law effectively disabled both technical and legal functionalities pertaining to music.

The photographic selfie that bulks so large in popular digital culture has given rise to a musical equivalent, in which a facial image is analysed into a set of features used to generate a sonic output – the musical selfie. Michel Foucault coined the phrase ‘technologies of the self’, and Tia DeNora applied it to music, but the musical selfie reveals a different conception of selfhood that relates to many other aspects of digital culture – a conception that is both performative and intimately linked to technology. This chapter explores the musical selfie from three perspectives, in each case a digital form that is linked to a key technological platform and a key practice. These are: the playlist, linked to Spotify and the practice of curation; headphone listening, linked to Beats by Dre and enclosure; and the self-produced video, linked to YouTube and broadcasting. Seen in this light, digital selfhood (or selfiehood) is generated in relation to other selves and through shared activities, and closely linked to such fundamental features of digital culture as self-quantification, algocracy and surveillance.

This chapter considers current and future economies of music production, distribution and consumption, intersecting the question concerning technology – big data storage, distributed network technology, programmable artificial intelligence – with the question concerning contemporary markets – the merchandising of desire, taste and sensibility within a surveillant attention economy, and its concomitant labour ethics. The first section tracks changes in the music industry within the digitally networked environment in the first decade of the twenty-first century. A practice of P2P sharing and free downloading shifted toward a full-scale surveillance economy hitched to licensed music, raising questions concerning data privacy, data security, management of user data, and procedures for third-party requests for data and metadata. By investigating the economic, social, technical and legal dimensions of this shifting terrain, the chapter suggests that the impact on cultural labour practices in the digital age bear uncanny resemblance to a pre-technological one.