Imperial lag: some spatial-temporal politics of music streaming’s global expansion

Abstract This article takes the music industry in Egypt as an empirical case study for understanding some imperial politics of music streaming’s global expansion. Based on accounts of industry professionals, it suggests that the digitization of the music industry in line with the logics of global streaming technologies is characterized by a spatial-temporal regime of “being behind,” which I refer to as “lag.” Lag is marked by a perpetual striving for that which is always just out of reach, and it demonstrates how streaming can act as a technology of temporal recalibration. I argue that lag is the lived experience of imperial power by showing how it is rooted in longer histories of colonial dominance and control in Egypt. Most broadly, this article suggests that theorizing digitization from the Global South invites greater attention to history and culture to avoid universalizing theories of streaming that uphold Western histories and ideologies as normative.