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This chapter contains sections titled: Music and the Internet: The Music Industry Music and the Internet: The Audience Music and the Internet: Musicians Conclusion References

This paper introduces the musical haptic wearables for audiences (MHWAs), a class of wearable devices for musical applications targeting audiences of live music performances. MHWAs are characterized by embedded intelligence, wireless connectivity to local and remote networks, a system to deliver haptic stimuli, and tracking of gestures and/or physiological parameters. They aim to enrich musical experiences by leveraging the sense of touch as well as providing new capabilities for creative participation. The embedded intelligence enables the communication with other external devices, processes input data, and generates music-related haptic stimuli. We validate our vision with two concert-experiments. The first experiment involved a duo of electronic music performers and twenty audience members. Half of the audience used an armband-based prototype of MHWA delivering vibro-tactile feedback in response to performers’ actions on their digital musical instruments, and the other half was used as a control group. In the second experiment, a smart mandolin performer played live for twelve audience members wearing a gilet-based MHWA, which provided vibro-tactile sensations in response to the performed music. Overall, results from both experiments suggest that MHWAs have the potential to enrich the experience of listening to live music in terms of arousal, valence, enjoyment, and engagement. Nevertheless, results showed that the audio-haptic experience was not homogeneous across participants, who could be grouped as those appreciative of the vibrations and those less appreciative of them. The causes for a lack of appreciation of the haptic experience were mainly identified as the sensation of unpleasantness caused by the vibrations in certain parts of the body and the lack of the comprehension of the relation between what was felt and what was heard. Based on the reported results, we offer suggestions for practitioners interested in designing wearables for enriching the musical experience of audiences of live music via the sense of touch. Such suggestions point towards the need of mechanisms of personalization, systems able to minimize the latency between the sound and the vibrations, and a time of adaptation to the vibrations.

China has attached increasing importance to the overseas dissemination of traditional culture as it continues to strengthen its comprehensive national strength and develop globalization initiatives. The electronic game, as the ’ninth art’, with its booming development and inherent cross-cultural communication platform attributes, has taken on the important task of taking culture abroad. This study selects ’Genshin Impact’, a game highly praised and well-received globally, which contains an abundance of Chinese cultural elements and cultural elements from various regions of the world, to study cultural interaction in cross-cultural communication of electronic games. This study conducts text sentiment analysis and semantic network analysis on the comments of ’Genshin Impact’ videos on the overseas video platform YouTube and studies the cultural interaction in the cross-cultural communication of the ’ninth art’, telling the cultural stories of China and the world from a multicultural perspective. The study found that games and derivative videos triggered positive emotional responses from audiences both at home and abroad. While experiencing pleasure and surprise, audiences also arouse deeper emotions such as admiration, identification, and expectation. Meanwhile, in the complex art form of the ’ninth art’, audiences can absorb the cultural elements of different cultures, resonate with the elements of their cultural circle, and even trigger further profound thinking. Finally, this study provides constructive suggestions on using the ’ninth art’ to better ’tell China’s stories and disseminate China’s voice’.

In our account of artistic identities among electronic music artists, we point to the notion of persona as a key element in a triadic framework for studying the dynamics of identity. Building on pragmatist theory, we further draw on Pizzorno’s concept of mask and Luhmann’s notion of second-order observation to highlight the dual properties of persona: whether like a mask that is put on or like a probe that is put out, persona is a part that stands apart. Persona is an object that alter can recognize and by which ego can be recognized; but what is recognized defies the person’s complete control. We thus conceptualize identity as a multi-sided relationship that involves person, persona, and others. Building on our ethnographic research among electronic music artists in Berlin and New York, we characterize this relationship in terms of attachment between artist and persona, between artist and audience, and between persona and audience. These attachments are variable and independent from one another. The resulting model is an analytic tool to examine identity as the ongoing outcome of the three-way dynamics of such shifting attachments. We are attentive to persona because the creation and curation of online profiles have become a pervasive element in many people’s daily interactions in both social and work situations.

PurposeThis article examines the ways in which the popular music industry markets artists through integrated transmedia marketing campaigns. These campaigns unfold across multiple media and create multiple pathways for audience engagement, particularly fan engagement, across social media platforms. The purpose is to further theorise the relationship between artists, the music industry and audiences.Design/methodology/approachThe study used digital ethnography to scrutinise the activities within a contemporary music transmedia marketing campaign, focusing on the release of Taylor Swift's album Reputation as an illustrative case.FindingsThe study demonstrates how strategically curated activities encompass platforms' affordances and industry events by making use of fan engagement across social media platforms and streaming services. Fans shift through platforms, as well as across digital and physical spaces, through defined marketing activities at specific times. This article proposes the concept of choreographed engagement to specifically address the ways in which the temporal and spatial aspects of social media marketing are used at the intersection of platform logic, algorithm economy and fan engagement to reach wider audiences.Originality/valueBy proposing the concept of choreographed engagement, the authors bridge the gap between fan practices and marketing practices, providing insight into how commodification of fan engagement is utilised spatially and temporally within the contemporary platform economy. Choreographed engagement constitutes a significant aspect of strategic communication and marketing. The term expands the vocabulary used in the debate on the commodification of artistic work, and audience engagement in the platform era.

This article aims to explore the concept of patched/versioned musical works as creative ecologies. It identifies how the internet’s involvement in music creation and dissemination influences choices related to the release of such works. Throughout this writing, the author looks at the increasingly volatile structures surrounding recorded music in the early twenty-first century as a result of streaming platforms such as Spotify and video-based social media sites such as TikTok becoming the primary means for music consumption. It explores this volatility as a method for approaching the release of new music within dynamic musical ecosystems and looks at the growing art scene focusing on this way of working, drawing parallels between artistry and subscription-based services where content continually evolves over time.

Music sharing on social media increasingly involves ‘imagined listening’, a form of sociality based on how we think that others listen to music (as well as on our own imagining of sounds) and typically mediated by the exchange of visual prompts, such as the thumbnail images associated with a particular streaming link or recording. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted online and offline with Spanish migrants in London, I show how practices of music sharing based on imagined listening articulate specific moral economies. In these economies, users imbue the sharing of music with positive value, as something that contributes to human flourishing and balances the negative aspects of social media and the world. I also consider how users reckon with the algorithmic manipulations of social media platforms and the fleeting forms of user engagement characteristic of an online world in which there is more music than could ever be heard.

Hip-hop studies have historically centred on issues of the ‘street’ or virtuosic lyricism and flow, foregrounded as evidence of the ‘seriousness’ of the genre. While these have undoubtedly been valuable theoretical approaches, the prominence of social networking in the 2010s (with its vast implications for communication and identity politics) has sculpted a generation of rappers whose vocal style and self-representation disintegrate prior assumptions about hip-hop identity. These artists, who have flourished in tandem with the rise of streaming services, have been disparagingly dubbed ‘mumble rap’ by traditionalists owing to the apparent indecipherability of their vocals and a lack of emphasis on observational or poetic lyricism. In this article I argue that this myopic label undervalues the groundbreakingly post-verbal nature of the music being created by these rappers, and highlights the innovations of mumble rap, exploring the centrality of social media, memes and streaming to its existence while critically examining its protagonists’ unconventionally stylised vocals. After analysing the impact of streaming, information overload and audience participation (through social media hype and memes) on contemporary hip-hop, I survey the growth of melodic Auto-Tuned vocals and repetitive lyricism in the work of pioneering mumble rappers such as Future, before turning to an extended examination of Atlanta's Young Thug, whose controversially malleable vocal style, which prioritises experimentation with vocal textures while confounding the rules of hip-hop flow, is mirrored by his impulsive exploitation of social media and androgynous fashion sense, establishing him as the most revolutionary archetype of so-called mumble rap.

Generally speaking, audio-visual consumption is changing. More specifically, in recent years young people have increased their viewing of content through the Internet, which is often supplied through online platforms. This article focuses on one the Playz platform, which is one of the key strategies being used by Spanish public television (RTVE), as it aims to reconnect with the new generations through transmedia narratives. Based on studies undertaken by Costa Sánchez (2013) and Cascajosa-Virino (2018), a content analysis of the series broadcast on Playz between 2017 and 2020 has been carried out, taking into account the duration, year of release, and number of episodes or seasons for each of them. This study confirms a clear interest by this platform in generating products that are innovative from their very conception. In fact, a large number of transmedia strategies have been identified, such as episodes turned into films, a high degree of interactivity with the audience, original music videos, promotional events and more, which is in line with Playz’s public service obligation to reach out to all types of audiences through all the platforms available to them.

This article analyses the circulation of Timaya's 2019 music video I Can't Kill Myself as a means of contemplating contemporary media consumption in Nigeria. Beginning with the premise that media forms are best understood as taking part in a complex web of interactive relationships, the article examines the form, content, and relevance of short videos uploaded on YouTube in response to Timaya's work. The videos provide a means of charting audience engagement with the diverse kinds of audio and visual materials vying for attention in a milieu characterised by sped-up access to means of audio-visual production and dissemination. By tracking such productions, we are able to grasp the socio-political issues that constitute predominant concerns for the prosumers and their target audience, such as the increasing unaffordability of certain food items in the country. Also, the comic representation of food and eating featured in the videos enables us to contemplate the cohesive capacity of humour.