[Commlist] CfP • Music and online cultures in a changing platform ecosystem

CALL FOR PAPERS
International conference 'Music and online cultures in a changing 
platform ecosystem'
June 19-21, 2025 • Lisbon, Portugal

Deadline: September 30
For around half of the world’s population, it is hard to imagine a day 
without being online in some way or another. The widespread adoption of 
internet technologies has ostensibly been in service of improving human 
connectivity, expression, and health. Yet technology companies face 
unprecedented criticism for the range of changes that internet platforms 
have wrought on everyday work and leisure practices. In few domains is 
this clearer than music.

As digital landscapes have shifted and evolved, music has often been the 
test subject for industrial change, and music cultures have accordingly 
negotiated the structures of online platforms. A lively body of 
scholarly and popular commentary has examined the power inequities, 
constraints, and affordances of online music platforms. In the 
mid-2020s, however, the formerly stable ecosystem of social media and 
streaming platforms is changing according to processes of platform decay.

For social media, Twitter has become radicalised into Elon Musk’s X; 
Reddit faces blackout revolts over API changes; and Instagram cedes 
ground to TikTok while Meta and YouTube struggle to catch up and 
re-capture the attention of young audiences drawn to short-form vertical 
video. Spotify continues to lead an on-demand streaming oligopoly shared 
with Apple Music, Tencent, and Amazon Music, while global competitors 
contest some regions, and promising alternatives such as SoundCloud and 
Bandcamp are being remade in line with the major distributors. Reports 
indicate that artists and independent labels are, by and large, 
dissatisfied with contemporary routes to music distribution and promotion.
For musicians, fans, and other stakeholders, things may get worse before 
they get better. Considerable hype around generative artificial 
intelligence technologies has already seen a range of creative 
applications adapting to rely on imperfect, ethically questionable, and 
environmentally costly machine learning logics.

Given these changing online contexts, there is reinvigorated demand for 
directing scholarly attention at music as a social, cultural, and 
artistic practice. This conference aims to bring together emerging and 
leading thinkers on music and online cultures, cultivating a rich 
diversity of music and multimedia scholarship to address the changing 
platform ecosystem.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Music and platform power: marginalisation, resistance, and/or equity 
in Big Tech’s musical interventions
- Music and digital labour: relational and aspirational labour, creative 
work, and entrepreneurship in late capitalist contexts
- Methods for studying music and online cultures
- Online music fandoms and communities
- Music and digital media: online interactions between music, video, 
sound, games, dance, and more
- Music listening in the platform ecosystem: (live)streaming, genre, 
discovery, filesharing, and curation
- Music’s online-offline tensions: logging off, digital detoxing, and 
touching grass
- Music and internet culture: virality, memes, and context collapse
- Histories, archives, and ageing of/with music and the internet
This is a limited hybrid conference. We are asking presenters to join us 
in-person in Lisbon and will livestream all presentations. The online 
audience will be able to ask questions to engage virtually. The 
conference will be held at the Colégio Almada Negreiros, Campolide, 
which is an accessible venue.

The conference language is English. Proposals should offer original 
contributions based on current research or work in progress. All papers 
will be 15 minutes followed by 5 minutes’ discussion time. You will be 
asked to provide contact details, paper title, an abstract of max. 250 
words, up to 5 keywords, and a biography of max. 100 words.

Researchers at all career levels are welcome to submit proposals. 
Individuals from groups that are under-represented in academia (e.g. 
first-generation scholars) are especially encouraged to apply. To help 
cultivate an inclusive and welcoming environment, please familiarise 
yourself with our code of anti-discriminatory practice aka exceptional 
vibes only (https://www.mocren.org/code/).

Abstract submission and additional information can be verified on the 
official conference page on the Music and Online Cultures Research 
Network (MOCReN) website here: https://www.mocren.org/lisbon2025/. The 
deadline for submissions is 30th September 2024 23.59 GMT.


Coordination: MOCReN

With the support of CysMus (Research Cluster in Sound and Music in 
Digital and Audiovisual Media), GTCC (Grupo de Teoria Crítica e 
Comunicação), CESEM (Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética 
Musical), IN2PAST (Associate Laboratory for Research and Innovation in 
Heritage, Arts, Sustainability and Territory), NOVA FSCH (NOVA 
University of Lisbon – School of Social Sciences and Humanities) and FCT 
(Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia)

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