Spotification of Popular Culture in the Field of Popular Communication

This edited collection considers various meanings of the "Spotification" of music and other media. Specifically, it replies to the editor’s call to address the changes in media cultures and industries accompanying the transition to streaming media and media services. Streaming media services have become part of daily life all over the world, with Spotify, in particular, inheriting and reconfiguring characteristics of older ways of publishing, distributing, and consuming media.

The contributors look to the broader community of music, media, and cultural researchers to spell out some of the implications of the Spotification of music and popular culture. These include changes in personal media consumption and production, educational processes, and the work of media industries. Interdisciplinary scholarship on commercial digital distribution is needed more than ever to illuminate the qualitative changes to production, distribution, and consumption accompanying streaming music and television.

This book represents the latest research and theory on the conversion of mass markets for recorded music to streaming services.

Patrick Burkart is Editor in Chief of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture (with Christian Christiansen). He is Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University, and author of Why Hackers Win: Power and Disruption in the Network Society (University of California Press, 2019, with Tom McCourt), Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests (MIT Press, 2014), Music and Cyberliberties (Wesleyan University Press, 2010), and Digital Music Wars: Ownership and Control of the Celestial Jukebox (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, with Tom McCourt).