Internetmusicking

Internet Musicking: Popular Music and Online Cultures

Call for Papers
A free academic conference, 20–21 May 2022

Hybrid format hosted by Department of Music, University College Cork, Ireland

Over the last few years, music researchers have paid increased attention to the internet and its effects on cultural life. For example, edited collections on digital culture, virtuality, and social media have emerged alongside landmark research projects that seek to understand how the internet shapes the cultural production of music. Meanwhile, interdisciplinary inquiry has addressed internet-based cultural practices of popular music, critically examining the tension between creative platform uses and the political economy of an increasingly privatised internet. Given the intensification of the internet as a site for cultural activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, online popular music communities have recently been transformed and new online practices have emerged. Popular musicians and industry personnel are adapting to a quickly shifting landscape for cultural production and promotion via social media, while listeners, viewers, and fans share, curate, and comment on music across the globe. Video and communication platforms have captured the imagination of participants worldwide, with musical and multimodal self-expression broadcast across the social web. These developments, however, are contextualised by profit-driven corporate entities that reframe cultural producers as ‘content creators’ and other participants as consumers, followers, or subscribers. Concerns about personalisation algorithms, surveillance strategies, and data security are escalating in sites of popular music culture. The widespread use of the web in the developed and the developing world has undoubtedly altered everyday cultural practices, although between the poles of technological determinism and cyberutopian narratives of democratisation, there is still much detail to be sought.

This conference invites contemporary research into cultural practices of popular music taking place online. The phrase ‘internet musicking’ takes Small’s term – and developments of it – to address all social activities involving music on the internet. The conference is particularly (but not exclusively) interested in spotlighting previously undocumented uses and experiences of music online. It is designed to generate discussion, identify major issues, and develop a diverse network of scholars to be formalised in subsequent activities and events. We invite submissions on topics that include, but are not limited to:


 * social media musicking: sharing, curation, and platform interactions
 * viral new media and musical memes
 * music and internet socialities: (imagined) communities of practice, networked individualism, and online music sub/countercultures
 * genres of popular music and their online mediations
 * non-musical expressions of online popular music cultures, such as dance and games
 * ‘the I in Internet’: popular music and identity, otherness, queering practices, and resistance
 * online music and cultural economies: datification, platformization, surveillance, and attention
 * music and cultural industry agents in the context of Big Tech
 * global participation in music culture, digital divides, and issues of internet access

The conference will also celebrate the publication of a special issue of Global Hip Hop Studies, ‘It’s Where You’re @: Hip-Hop and the Internet’, edited by Raquel Campos Valverde and Steven Gamble.

Logistics
The conference language is English. The conference will run in a hybrid format, ensuring online access to presentations. In-person activity (subject to the developing situation of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic) will be hosted in the Ó Riada Hall, Department of Music, University College Cork. Delegates will be surveyed regarding their preferences for online or in-person participation.

The conference especially seeks presenters from under-represented groups, and encourages submissions from postgraduate students, early career researchers, and specialists without traditional academic posts. The conference is committed to ensuring a diversity of views, following (as closely as possible) the REACH Inclusive Conference Guide. All participants will be asked to agree with a code of conduct to support an inclusive attitude and respectful behaviour towards all delegates.

All submissions can be made here. This form will ask you to include basic personal information, submission format, title, abstract (250 words), and bio (100 words). The deadline for submissions has been extended to 14 January 2022.

The submissions will be reviewed by the organising committee and presenters will be notified of the outcome in late January.

If you have any queries, please contact the conference organisers here. The conference is funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) grant Digital Flows. It is also sponsored by Fáilte Ireland’s Meet In Ireland initiative. The organising committee is Raquel Campos Valverde (King’s College London), Steven Gamble (University College Cork), and Jason Ng (University College Cork).