Music Research Seminar: David Hesmondhalgh (University of Leeds)

Event abstract

Since around 2010, and especially from around 2015, music streaming platforms have spread across the world. The experience of music has been transformed for hundreds of millions of people and so too have the ways in which music is produced and distributed. Just as music was the first major cultural form to be digitalised, it is now the first to be platformised. This talk, based on a chapter in a forthcoming collection Music Streaming Around the Word (University of California Press, 2025) discusses the effects of streaming platforms on the circulation of music across nations and continents, and what these effects might tell us about power, justice and inequality in music culture. It should be of interest not only to researchers and students in music studies and media studies, but also anyone concerned about the complex impacts of capitalism and colonialism on culture.

Event David Hesmondhalgh

David Hesmondhalgh is Professor of Media, Music and Culture in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Cultural Industries (4^th edition, 2019) and Why Music Matters (2013), and co-author of Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (2010), Culture, Economy and Politics: Cultural Policy Under New Labour (2015), and Music Creators’ Earnings in the Digital Era (2021). From 2021-26, he is Principal Investigator on a five-year research project, funded by a European Research Council Advanced Research Grant, on Music Culture in the Age of Streaming.

David Hesmondhalgh