June 19-21, 2025, Lisbon, Portugal
Call for Papers
International conference
Deadline: September 30
For around half of the world’s population, it is hard to imagine a day without being online in some way or another. The widespread adoption of internet technologies has ostensibly been in service of improving human connectivity, expression, and health. Yet technology companies face unprecedented criticism for the range of changes that internet platforms have wrought on everyday work and leisure practices. In few domains is this clearer than music.
As digital landscapes have shifted and evolved, music has often been the test subject for industrial change, and music cultures have accordingly negotiated the structures of online platforms. A lively body of scholarly and popular commentary has examined the power inequities, constraints, and affordances of online music platforms. In the mid-2020s, however, the formerly stable ecosystem of social media and streaming platforms is changing according to processes of platform decay.
For social media, Twitter has become radicalised into Elon Musk’s X; Reddit faces blackout revolts over API changes; and Instagram cedes ground to TikTok while Meta and YouTube struggle to catch up and re-capture the attention of young audiences drawn to short-form vertical video. Spotify continues to lead an on-demand streaming oligopoly shared with Apple Music, Tencent, and Amazon Music, while global competitors contest some regions, and promising alternatives such as SoundCloud and Bandcamp are being remade in line with the major distributors. Reports indicate that artists and independent labels are, by and large, dissatisfied with contemporary routes to music distribution and promotion.
For musicians, fans, and other stakeholders, things may get worse before they get better. Considerable hype around generative artificial intelligence technologies has already seen a range of creative applications adapting to rely on imperfect, ethically questionable, and environmentally costly machine learning logics.
Given these changing online contexts, there is reinvigorated demand for directing scholarly attention at music as a social, cultural, and artistic practice. This conference aims to bring together emerging and leading thinkers on music and online cultures, cultivating a rich diversity of music and multimedia scholarship to address the changing platform ecosystem.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Music and platform power: marginalisation, resistance, and/or equity in Big Tech’s musical interventions
Music and digital labour: relational and aspirational labour, creative work, and entrepreneurship in late capitalist contextsMethods for studying music and online cultures
Online music fandoms and communities
Music and digital media: online interactions between music, video, sound, games, dance, and more
Music listening in the platform ecosystem: (live)streaming, genre, discovery, filesharing, and curation
Music’s online-offline tensions: logging off, digital detoxing, and touching grass
Music and internet culture: virality, memes, and context collapse
Histories, archives, and ageing of/with music and the internet
This is a limited hybrid conference. We are asking presenters to join us in-person in Lisbon and will livestream all presentations. The online audience will be able to ask questions to engage virtually. The conference will be held at the Colégio Almada Negreiros, Campolide, which is an accessible venue.
The conference language is English. Proposals should offer original contributions based on current research or work in progress. All papers will be 15 minutes followed by 5 minutes’ discussion time. You will be asked to provide contact details, paper title, an abstract of max. 250 words, up to 5 keywords, and a biography of max. 100 words.
Researchers at all career levels are welcome to submit proposals. Individuals from groups that are under-represented in academia (e.g. first-generation scholars) are especially encouraged to apply. To help cultivate an inclusive and welcoming environment, please familiarise yourself with our code of anti-discriminatory practice aka exceptional vibes only
Abstract submission and additional information can be verified on the official conference page on the Music and Online Cultures Research Network (MOCReN) website here
Coordination: MOCReN
With the support of CysMus (Research Cluster in Sound and Music in Digital and Audiovisual Media), GTCC (Grupo de Teoria Crítica e Comunicação), CESEM (Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical), IN2PAST (Associate Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Heritage, Arts, Sustainability and Territory), NOVA FSCH (NOVA University of Lisbon – School of Social Sciences and Humanities) and FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia).
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