Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology

The first comparative ethnographic study on the impact of digital media on worldwide music.

 Offering a radically new theoretical framework for understanding  digital media through music, this volume redresses anthropology’s  frequent oversight of music as a topic of study. By positioning music as  an expansive subject for digital anthropology, Georgina Born  demonstrates how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music  and sound studies, digital media studies, and science and technology  studies. Music and Digital Media includes five original ethnographies  spanning pop, folk, and crossover musical genres throughout Kenya,  Argentina, India, Canada, and the UK. A further three chapters engage  experimentally with the platforms of music-making and distribution,  presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site  and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent  internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global  software package, the interactive music platform Max MSP.