Popular Music in the Post-Digital Age explores the relationship between macro environmental factors, such as politics, economics, culture and technology, captured by terms such as 'post-digital' and 'post-internet'. It also discusses the creation, monetisation and consumption of music and what changes in the music industry can tell us about wider shifts in economy and culture. This collection of 13 case studies covers issues such as curation algorithms, blockchain, careers of mainstream and independent musicians, festivals and clubs-to inform greater understanding and better navigation of the popular music landscape within a global context.

Business-as-usual has been transformed across the music industries in the post-CD age. Against widespread hype about the purported decline of the major music labels, this book provides a critique of the ways these companies have successfully adapted to digital challenges – and what is at stake for music makers and for culture. Today, recording artists are positioned as artist-brands and popular music as a product to be licensed by consumer and media brands. Leslie M. Meier examines key consequences of shifting business models, marketing strategies, and the new common sense in the music industries: the gatekeeping and colonization of popular music by brands. Popular Music as Promotion is important reading for students and scholars of media and communication studies, cultural studies and sociology, and will appeal to anyone interested in new intersections of popular music, digital media and promotional culture.

The economic geography of music is evolving as new digital technologies, organizational forms, market dynamics and consumer behavior continue to restructure the industry. This book is an international collection of case studies examining the spatial dynamics of today’s music industry. Drawing on research from a diverse range of cities such as Santiago, Toronto, Paris, New York, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin, this volume helps readers understand how the production and consumption of music is changing at multiple scales – from global firms to local entrepreneurs; and, in multiple settings – from established clusters to burgeoning scenes. The volume is divided into interrelated sections and offers an engaging and immersive look at today’s central players, processes, and spaces of music production and consumption. Academic students and researchers across the social sciences, including human geography, sociology, economics, and cultural studies, will find this volume helpful in answering questions about how and where music is financed, produced, marketed, distributed, curated and consumed in the digital age.

Awakening is the definitive account of the music industry in the digital era. It tells the inside story of how the music business grappled with the emergence of an entirely new digital economy with exclusive interviews with the people who shaped today’s industry. Mulligan’s gripping narrative switches between the seismic market trends to the highly personal accounts of artists and digital pioneers. It recounts the events that both spelt the end of the old industry and that are the foundation for the radical new successor that is about to emerge. Awakening is written by the leading music industry analyst Mark Mulligan and includes interviews with 60 of the music industry’s most important figures, including million selling artists and more than 20 CEOs. Alongside this unprecedented executive access, Awakening uses exclusive data presented across 60 charts and figures to chart the music industry’s digital journey and to lay out a vision of the future for the industry and artists alike. For anyone interested in the music industry and the lessons it provides for all businesses in the digital era, this is the only book you will ever need.

The experimentalist phenomenon of 'noise' as constituting 'art' in much twentieth-century music (paradoxically) reached its zenith in Cage’s (’silent’ piece) 4’33 . But much post-1970s musical endeavour with an experimentalist telos, collectively known as 'sound art', has displayed a postmodern need to ’load’ modernism’s ’degree zero’. After contextualizing experimentalism from its inception in the early twentieth century, Dr Linda Kouvaras’s Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age explores the ways in which selected sound art works demonstrate creatively how sound is embedded within local, national, gendered and historical environments. Taking Australian music as its primary - but not sole - focus, the book not only covers discussions of technological advancement, but also engages with aesthetic standpoints, through numerous interviews, theoretical developments, analysis and cultural milieux for a contemporary Australian, and wider postmodern, context. Developing new methodologies for synergies between musicology and cultural studies, the book uncovers a new post-postmodern aesthetic trajectory, which Kouvaras locates as developing over the past two decades - the altermodern. Australian sound art is here put firmly on the map of international debates about contemporary music, providing a standard reference and valuable resource for practitioners in the artform, music critics, scholars and educators.

Popular Polish Electronic Music, 1970–2020 offers a cultural history of popular Polish electronic music, from its beginning in the late 1960s/early 1970s up to the present day, in the context of Polish economic, social and political history, and the history of popular music in this country. From the perspective of production, scene, industry and consumption, the volume considers the issue of access to electronic instruments in the 1970s and 1980s, and the variety of inspirations, such as progressive rock and folk music, that have contributed to the development of Polish electronic music as it is known today. The widespread contribution of Polish electronic music to film is also considered. This is a valuable resource for scholars and researchers of electronic music, popular music and (Eastern) European music and culture.

The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music establishes EDM's place on the map of popular music. The book accounts for various ambiguities, variations, transformations, and manifestations of EDM, pertaining to its generic fragmentation, large geographical spread, modes of consumption and, changes in technology. It focuses especially on its current state, its future, and its borders – between EDM and other forms of electronic music, as well as other forms of popular music. It accounts for the rise of EDM in places that are overlooked by the existing literature, such as Russia and Eastern Europe, and examines the multi-media and visual aspects such as the way EDM events music are staged and the specificity of EDM music videos. Divided into four parts – concepts, technology, celebrity, and consumption – this book takes a holistic look at the many sides of EDM culture.