CfP: Mediations of music and power in online music cultures (Sweden)
Call for Papers
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
Deadline: 28 February 2023
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 visit the conference web page or send an email to mediationsconference@gmail.com.