Introduction to the Special Issue on Listening In: Musical Digital Communities in Public and Private

At the end of 2018, a proudmember of the Barbz – obsessive online fans of rapper NickiMinaj who defend her against her critics and naysayers – used the short-form video platformTikTok to promote and circulate a newly released song that would eventually breakmultiplemusic industry records: ‘Old Town Road’. While plentiful critical discourse has focused on the significance of Lil’ Nas X’s breakout viral single for how it shattered genre conventions and troubled music industry institutions, the song’s rapid ascendancy also showed aspiring musical creators a new path for success – by leveraging online musical communities and platform affordances, amateurs and professionals can reap huge rewards. In the years since, onlinemusical formations across social media have become spaces rife with risk and reward, exposing the ways in which digital mediation has transformed and is transforming our relationships with music well beyond the scope of the music industries as previously and traditionally understood. Despite the title of this journal, this special issue is unambiguously situated in the twenty-first century. In the opening decades of the millennium, musical creation, circulation, and community formation have been – like so many aspects of personal and public life – significantly reshaped amid the rise and rapid advancement of digital networks and technologies. Pervasive social media and digital streaming services have effected new modes of authorship; they have also opened new pathways of circulation and engendered new forms and practices of participatory culture. As we have seen in recent years, these new pathways have the side effect of limiting user agency to opt out of some experiences, ranging from audiovisual experiences that automatically play to enabling music surveillance and amplifying chauvinistic undercurrents in various genres and musical communities. The articles in this issue consider strategies for circulatingmusic and sound – abundantly, secretly,meaningfully, profitably – that are negotiated at intersections of individuals and communities, digital devices and platforms, creators and consumers, aesthetics and algorithms, and protocols and behaviours. This special issue expands upon recent publications in music and media studies that examine the intimacy and infrastructure of new digital technologies – expanding not just topically and temporally, but also geographically. The work of our contributing authors