#4181. Music, Digitalization, and Democracy

September 2026publication date
Proposal available till 25-05-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript0 $

The title of the journal is available only for the authors who have already paid for
Journal’s subject area:
Music;
Cultural Studies;
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Abstract:
Contemporary music scholars and commentators have relied on ‘democratization’ to measure the promises and possibilities of music in the digital age. Yet ‘democracy’ is conceived in this discourse as a technological rather than a historical achievement, undermining its normative foundation. Two historical instances in which musicians and critics engaged in democratic controversies through music highlight the contingency of the linkage between network metaphors and liberal notions of the public sphere that underpin the current democratization discourse. Сritical analysis of music attend to the contested meanings of democracy in the contemporary period, noting its uncomfortably close association with libertarianism. Finally, I reflect on whether democracy might be decoupled from network structures and reconnected to historical struggles in this rethinking, or if different criteria are needed to speak to the question of why or how music matters.
Keywords:
Contemporary music; technology; meaning; metaphors; liberal notions

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