[Commlist] cfp: Mediations of music and power in online music cultures

Call for Papers | Conference

/Mediations of music and power in online music cultures/

21–22 September 2023, Division of Gender Studies, School of Culture and 
Education, Södertörn University, Sweden

Music cultures in the twenty-first century are strongly shaped by online 
media. Music streaming, social media, video sharing sites as well as 
internet-based music production software, radio stations, and music 
magazines have variously affected the formatting, curation, and 
consumption of music. Largely centralized around a small number of 
privatized companies, where human and automated processes intersect, 
online music cultures are sites of mediations of power.

In this context, online music media have entailed economic, 
technological, and cultural changes in contemporary music cultures. For 
example, music streaming illustrates monetary shifts in the music 
industry, where power is newly negotiated between music recommendation 
companies and the record, advertisement, and investment markets. 
Moreover, online music media combine curatorial and algorithmic 
processes that mediate cultural production and consumption and 
re-construct listeners as ‘datafied’ users. While the ‘platformization’ 
of online music cultures impedes the visibility of non-commercial media 
and practices, global music and media corporations present their own 
initiatives toward equality in the music industry and activist practices 
in networked communities on and off commercial sites negotiate the 
affordances and limitations of these media.

This conference asks: What characterizes mediations of music and power 
in online music cultures? What are emergent mediations of subjectivity, 
identity, and difference in online music cultures, and how do they map 
onto or newly shape discourses of taste, value, and authenticity? What 
possibilities may online music media offer for centering artistic and 
fan practices, alliances, and communities that have previously been 
subjugated in music cultures?

This conference invites presentations from research fields including 
musicology, popular music, media, gender, postcolonial and cultural 
studies, which examine emergent mediations of music and negotiations of 
power in online music cultures. We particularly seek to highlight media 
technologies, stylistic developments, user practices, and intersectional 
perspectives that have not yet been emphasized as well as to deepen the 
understanding of central themes, concepts, and practices in this 
cultural field and its scholarly inquiry.

Keynote speaker: Eric Drott – Butler School of Music, The University of 
Texas at Austin

Themes

We invite submissions on topics that may include, but are not limited to:

/Mediations/: Intersecting algorithmic and human logics in mediations of 
music and power

/(Re-)mediations of music/: Formations and discourses of style, genre, 
taste, and value in online music cultures

/Algorithmic culture/: Speculative logics, ‘postdemographic’ 
technologies, and the datafication of listening

/Networked communities/: Listeners, communities, and articulations of 
resistance in online music cultures

/New media/: Emergent online music and social media and their music cultures

/Sites of power/: Platformization and centers and peripheries in global 
cultural economies

Abstracts

Please submit abstracts (250 words maximum) via email by 28 February 
2023 to mediationsconference[at]gmail[dot]com.

Please include the title of your paper and a brief biography (100 words 
maximum).

Organizers

Veronika Muchitsch, Södertörn University

Ann Werner, Södertörn University & Uppsala University

Contact

For further information, please send an email to 
mediationsconference[at]gmail[dot]com.

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