Music in the Digital World

Abstract

Digital technologies have impacted and reshaped almost every aspect of 21st-century life, from communication and commerce, to work and leisure, to education and politics. This bibliography represents a collection of scholarship that seeks to detail how varied and ubiquitous digital technologies have reshaped music, and how music has in turn shaped the digital world. Since the first years of the 21st century, widespread access to digital technologies, including social media, smartphones, and Web 2.0 have fundamentally transformed musical aesthetics, creation, performance, consumption, and reception on a global scale. As of October 2020, there are around 4.66 billion active internet users around the globe, nearly all of whom interact with music in one way or another. This bibliography addresses how this “digital world” is implicated in 21st-century digital regimes, and in the global flows and local assemblages of music’s production, circulation, and consumption. Like the technologies themselves, scholarship on music in the digital world is a rapidly shifting field. Readers are encouraged to understand this bibliography as a fluid network of related topics, with substantial thematic overlap between sections. Except when a subject touches on topics unique to this bibliography, the authors have omitted topics covered extensively in other Oxford Bibliographies, including “Film Music,” “Video Game Music,” “Electronic and Computer Music Instruments,” and “Music Technology.”