30 October – 6 November 2025

David Hesmondhalgh gave a series of presentations based on MUSICSTREAM research in Brazil and Chile. At an event organised held in the Casa de Cultura Mario Quintan, in Porto Alegre, Brazil on 30 October 2025, organised by Feevale University, Hesmondhalgh spoke about “Digital Platforms in the Realm of Culture: The Case of Music Streaming Around the World”.

In Chile, Hesmondhalgh gave a talk on “Digital Platforms, Cultural Industries and Everyday Users: Dilemmas of Power and Agency” at the Viña del Mar campus of Adolfo Ibáñez University on 4 November.

He then gave a presentation on “The Global Spread of Music Streaming: Capitalism and Colonialism, Technology and Culture” at an event hosted by the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso at its Sausalito campus on 5 November, and participated in a workshop on 6 November on Materialities, Practices and Industries in Popular Music, hosted by Professor Laura Jordan Gonzalez.

22 October 2025

Raquel Campos Valverde participated in the panel “Swimming Upstream? Imagining a Fairer Platform Economy for Musicians and Listeners” as part of the Manchester Festival of Social Science, and hosted by University of Salford and Low Four Studio.

21 October 2025

Music Streaming Around the World, a new open-access collection edited by David Hesmondhalgh has been published by University of California Press. Bringing together case studies from twelve countries, the book provides the first international account of how streaming is shaping music culture today. It analyses the implications of streaming platforms for the production, distribution, and consumption of recorded music around the globe. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.248

15=18 October 2025

Three members of the MUSICSTREAM team presented research at the Association of Internet Researchers conference held in Niterói, Brazil. David Hesmondhalgh and Shuwen (Stella) Qu presented a paper on “Streaming Platforms and Everyday Lives: Musical Community and Individualisation”, and participated with other music streaming researchers in a workshop on “Platforms, Musicians and Listeners Around the World”, chaired by Robert Prey (Oxford University). D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye presented a paper on ““A Safe, Responsible, and Profitable Ecosystem of Music’: Music Industry Culture in the Age of Generative AI”, co-authored with Raquel Campos Valverde and another paper “In the Style of: Exploring Industry Creator and Legal Implications of Copying Style through Generative AI” co-authored with Joanne Gray (University of Sydney) and Kylie Pappalardo (Queensland University of Technology).  

8 October 2025

Members of the MUSICSTREAM team presented the recently published book Music Streaming Around the World, edited by David Hesmondhalgh in the Popular Music Books in Process series of online talks.

David Hesmondhalgh gave a brief overview of the collection, and of his chapter on how streaming fits into the long history of capitalism and colonialism in the realm of music. Shuwen (Stella) Qu discussed her work on how short video platforms have transformed Chinese music production.

Raquel Campos Valverde discussed her chapter on the problematic implications of the taxonomies used by music streaming platforms. Finally, Zhongwei “Mabu” Li summarised his history of how platformization has impacted independent Chinese musicians. (The chapters by Qu and Li were co-authored with D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye). The presentations can be viewed here.

7-11 July 2025

David Hesmondhalgh, Raquel Campos Valverde, and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye gave presentations at the 2025 International Association for the Study of Popular Music conference held at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. David Hesmondhalgh presented a paper on “Subjectivity, Culture and the Datafication of Music”. Raquel Campos Valverde gave a paper on “Engineered Inequity: Music streaming Taxonomies as Ruinous Infrastructure”. D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye presented two papers on assetization of music copyrights (one of them with Shauna-Kaye Brown, Simon Fraser University, Canada), and a further paper on “The Sparkling Shine of #cleancore: Exploring Music Genre on TikTok” with Anders Bach Pedersen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark). Finally, Raquel Campos Valverde and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye presented “A Safe, Responsible, and Profitable Ecosystem of Music”: Music Industry Culture in the Age of Generative AI”.

26 June 2025

David Hesmondhalgh and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye have published an open-access article entitled ‘What do musicians think about digital platforms?’ in the journal Popular Music.

19-21 June 2025

Raquel Campos Valverde and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye gave a presentation at the 2025 Music and Online Cultures Research Network conference hosted by NOVA University in Lisbon, Portugal entitled ‘“A safe, responsible, and profitable ecosystem of music”: Music industry culture in the age of generative AI.’

12-16 June 2025

David Hesmondhalgh, Shuwen (Stella) Qu, and Zhongwei (Mabu) Li gave presentations at the International Communication Association annual conference in Denver, CO. David Hesmondhalgh and Zhongwei (Mabu) Li presented ‘Platform Capitalism, Surveillance Capitalism, Digital Capitalism: Three Concepts That Fail to Engage with Mediated Culture.’ Shuwen (Stella) Qu presented ‘Making Weirdcore: Creative Mediated Memory Practices in China’ with Xin Wang (Jinan University, China).

12 June 2025

The MUSICSTREAM team hosted an international symposium entitled Changing Mediations of Music, Audio and Sound: New Systems Across the World at the University of Denver. More details about the symposium and the programme of speakers is available here.

21 May 2025

D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye has published an open access article ‘Renting royalties: How the assetization of music copyrights contributes to inequality for musicians’ in the journal Media, Culture & Society.

2-3 May 2025

D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye and David Hesmondhalgh gave a presentation at a Symposium on the Platformization of Music Production hosted at the University of Oslo entitled ‘What do musicians think of digital platforms?’

27 April 2025

David Hesmondhalgh has published a new open-access article in the journal Convergence, on “Subjectivity, culture and the datafication of music”. The article aims to critique the notions of subjectivity, identity and selfhood underlying key approaches to the datafication of music. It forms part of a special issue on Big Data Audiences, edited by Elliot Montpellier and Jennifer Hessler.

4 April 2025

Raquel Campos Valverde presented a joint paper with Bondy Kaye at the Annual Conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology on Digital Futures held at the University of Cambridge, titled “A safe, responsible, and profitable ecosystem of music”: Analysing cultures of generative AI in the music industry”.

March 2025

Raquel Campos Valverde gave a series of lectures in Switzerland and Austria. She delivered a lecture at ETH Zurich entitled                      “Inequity by design: Music streaming taxonomies as ruinous infrastructure” and a lecture at Universität Innsbruck entitled “Using diaries to study popular music consumption”. She also participated in a research workshop on interdisciplinary reform of music streaming taxonomies at Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, hosted by Prof Markus Schedl and Dr Marta Moscati.

26 March 2025

David Hesmondhalgh gave talks in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York (26 March) and in his own School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds (26 February), based on his long introduction to a collection he has edited for University of California Press, Music Streaming Around the World (due to be published in October 2025). That introductory chapter is entitled “The Global Spread of Music Streaming: Capitalism and Colonialism, Technology and Culture”.

20 January 2025

D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye provided expert commentary to BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Radio Leeds regarding the US decision to (not) ban TikTok and the impact of TikTok on the music industry.

2024

26 December 2024

David Hesmondhalgh and Charles Umney published an open-access chapter ‘Non-labour platforms and their effects on work in specific sectors: a major gap in recent research on work and employment’ in the edited collection The Handbook for the Future of Work, edited by Julie MacLeavy and Frederick Harry Pitts.

13 December 2024

David Hesmondhalgh and Raquel Campos Valverde gave a talk at Huitième Journée de l’Economie de la culture, organised by the French Ministère de la Culture (DEPS), LabEx ICCA at Université Sorbonne-Paris-Nord and Centre national de la musique (CNM), titled ‘Impact des systèmes de recommandation des plateformes gérés par algorithmes sur la production et la consommation musicales’.

12 December 2024

David Hesmondhalgh published an article ‘L’indie anglophone et le destin de l’alternative musicale, trente ans plus tard (Anglophone indie and the fate of the musical alternative, three decades on)’ in Volume ! La revue des musiques populaires, which is translated into French by Jedediah Sklover.

9 December 2024

David Hesmondhalgh published an article ‘Indie: politique et esthétique organisationnelles d’un genre de musique populaire (Indie: the Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre)‘ in Volume ! La revue des musiques populaires, which is translated into French by Dario Rudy.

23 November 2024

David Hesmondhalgh and Zhongwei (Mabu) Li gave two presentations at the conference ‘Changes and Continuities: Focusing on China’s Cultural and Creative Industries’ at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Dave gave a keynote speech titled ‘Change and Continuity in the Cultural Industries: The Global Spread of Platformised Music’, and Mabu presented a paper on the infrastructural politics of the Chinese path towards platformisation.

14 November 2024

On a recent trip to China, David Hesmondhalgh gave talks about the MUSICSTREAM project at New York University Shanghai (20.11.24), East China Normal University (Shanghai, 23.11.24) and Jinan University (Guangzhou, 14.11.24).

9 November 2024

David Hesmondhalgh and Zhongwei (Mabu) Li gave a talk at the workshop ‘Resilient Cultures in East and South Asia’, held by the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The talk was titled ‘How Resilient is Musical Community in an Era of Platformed Personalisation?’

30 October 2024

David Hesmondhalgh, Raquel Campos Valverde, D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, and Zhongwei (Mabu) Li gave presentations at the 2024 international conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, held at the University of Sheffield. David Hesmondhalgh and Raquel Campos Valverde gave a presentation on music streaming platforms in everyday life as part of a panel on ‘Revitalising the concept of the everyday in internet research’. David Hesmondhalgh and Zhongwei Li participated in the roundtable ‘Music Consumption through Platforms: moving towards a global perspective‘. D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye and Zhongwei Li gave a presentation on music creator perspectives on datafication in the UK and China, and Raquel Campos Valverde gave a presentation on musical taxonomies and streaming recommender systems, both as part of a panel on music streaming.

29 September 2024

David Hesmondhalgh and Hyojung Sun published an open-access chapter ‘How working musicians (finally) became a matter of mainstream political interest’ in the edited collection Handbook of Critical Music Industry Studies, edited by David Arditi and Ryan Nolan.

22 July 2024

David Hesmondhalgh, Raquel Campos Valverde, D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, and Zhongwei Li published an open-access article “Critically Analyzing Platform Interfaces: How Music Streaming Platforms Frame Musical Experience” in the International Journal of Communication.

16 July 2024

D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye gave a presentation at the international EASST/4S Conference at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam entitled “Royalty Bonds and the Assetization of Digital Music” as part of a panel on Assetization as Techno-economic lock-in. The presentation discussed the trend of musical royalties being transformed into investment assets by financial companies and the consequences of assetized royalties for music creators.

01 May 2024

Zhongwei (Mabu) Li and David Hesmondhalgh published an open-access article ‘From P2P to the cloud: music, platformization, and infrastructural change in China‘ in the Chinese Journal of Communication.

4 April 2024

Raquel Campos Valverde presented a paper on “Inequality by design. Music streaming taxonomies as ruinous infrastructure” as part of the joint conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and the Irish branch of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance at University College Cork. Based on her work with the MUSICSTREAM project, Campos Valverde discussed how the technical and human elements involved in organising and editorialising music content for streaming guide and shape music distribution, discovery, and consumption practices, and how they influence musical experiences of diversity.

22 March 2024

David Hesmondhalgh gave a presentation at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, as part of the prestigious Elihu Katz colloquium series. His talk, attended by over 100 people, was entitled “Digital  Platforms, Cultural Industries, and Everyday Users”. https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/events/elihu-katz-colloquium-david-hesmondhalgh-university-leeds

15 March 2024

David Hesmondhalgh and Zhongwei (Mabu) Li gave two presentations at the SCMS (Society For Cinema and Media Studies) 2024 conference, which took place in Boston. Dave’s presentation analysed how the interfaces of music streaming platforms frame musical experience, and Mabu’s presentation offered a history of platformisation of music in China. Both were part of the panel “Researching Digital Platforms in the Realm of Culture: the Case of Music”, chaired by David Hesmondhalgh. The other panellists were Pranathi Diwakar (University of Chicago) and Olivia Sadler (University of Illinois, Chicago).

29 January 2024

Raquel Campos Valverde and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye gave a presentation entitled “Streaming Inequality: Musical Taxonomies, Recommendations, and AI” at Shifting AI Controversies Conference hosted by the Alexander Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin. The presentation presented findings from industry ethnography conducted at international music business trade events in the US and Europe in 2023. Raquel and Bondy highlighted key issues with metadata and classification systems that feed into emerging generative AI systems.

19 January 2024

David Hesmondhalgh talked about music streaming, platforms and digital infrastructure in a recent episode of Toby Miller’s Cultural Studies podcast series.

2023

23 December 2023

David Hesmondhalgh talked about music streaming, platforms and digital infrastructure in a recent episode of the Let’s Talk about Media and Communication podcast series produced by Cogitatio Press.

5 December 2023

D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye gave an invited seminar on “Platforms, Policy, and Production in the New Musical System” as a visiting research fellow at the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. Kaye discussed key characteristics of the new musical system as they relate to music creators, such as the ways in which digital platforms capture and process data about creators, shifting financial structures that offer new modes to commodify music, and policy gaps that exacerbate conditions for digital labourers.

1 December 2023

D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye published an open-access article ‘JazzTok: Creativity, community, and improvisation on TikTok‘ in the journal Jazz and Culture.

17 November 2023

Zhongwei (Mabu) Li gave a public talk on the history of music circulation and subcultures in China, hosted by Old Heaven Books in Shenzhen. Mabu discussed how the circulation of music in China in the past thirty years was afforded by different media formats – from physical recording media to downloadable digital files and to the contemporary moment of platformised music streaming, based on his earlier doctoral research at LSE and his current work with the MUSICSTREAM project. 

8 November 2023

Shuwen Qu published an article ‘‘Water, asylum, metamorphosis, freak show’: flourishing through streaming karaoke play in China‘ in the journal Cultural Studies.

2 November 2023

Raquel Campos Valverde gave an invited seminar on “Music streaming, diversity, and cultural inequality” as part of the Music department Research Seminar series at the University of Aberdeen. Based on her work with the MUSICSTREAM project, Campos Valverde discussed how the technical and human elements involved in organising and editorialising music content for streaming guide and shape music distribution, discovery, and consumption practices, and how they influence musical experiences of diversity.

12 October 2023

David Hesmondhalgh gave a keynote presentation on music streaming platforms at the Methods in Cultural Production and Media Industries Research conference, organised by the Media Industries and Cultural Production Section of the European Communication and Research Association (ECREA) delivered online.

11 October 2023

Zhongwei (Mabu) Li and David Hesmondhalgh gave an invited presentation on “From P2P to the cloud: ​Music, platformisation,​ and infrastructural change ​in China​”, to the IRN SOUTH-STREAM Kick-Off Meeting, which took place at Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. Mabu and Dave presented historical research on the platformisation of music in China and discussed its theoretical implications, particularly in relation to theories of infrastructural politics, based on their work with the MUSICSTREAM project. 

21-23 September 2023

David Hesmondhalgh gave a keynote presentation on music streaming platforms to the Communication and Cultural Processes section of the Italian Sociological Association section (PIC–AIS https://www.ais-sociologia.it/processi-ed-istituzioni-culturali/) in Urbino, Italy.

6-8 September 2023

David Hesmondhalgh gave a keynote presentation on music streaming platforms at the Radio and Sound Ecosystems in the Platform Age conference, organised by the Radio and Sound Section (RSS) of the European Communication and Research Association (ECREA), and  hosted by the Catalan Radio Observatory (GRISS-UAB) and the Department of Audio-visual Communication and Advertising of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain).

1 September 2023

Shuwen Qu, David Hesmondhalgh and Jian Xiao published an open-access article ‘Music streaming platforms and self-releasing musicians: the case of China’ in the journal Information, Communication and Society (originally published online in September 2021).

23 July 2023

Zhongwei (Mabu) Li gave an invited presentation on “From P2P to the cloud: ​Music, platformisation,​ and infrastructural change ​in China​”, to the 20th Chinese Internet Research Conference (CIRC) hosted by Digital Asia Hub and Chiang Mai University in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Mabu presented his research on the platformisation of music in China and discussed how this history enriches our understanding of platformisation, digital infrastructure, and Chinese Internet history, based on their work with the MUSICSTREAM project. 

28 June 2023

David Hesmondhalgh, Raquel Campos Valverde, D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, and Zhongwei Li published an open-access article ‘Infrastructure and digital platforms in the realm of culture’ in the journal Media and Communication.

27 June 2023

D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye gave a presentation entitled “Fragmented Musical Communities in the Age of Information Capitalism” as part of a panel on “Rethinking Community Configurations in Globalized Platforms” at the Global Perspectives on Platforms, Labor & Social Reproduction Conference hosted by the University of Amsterdam. The presentation discussed digital music sampling, platform terms of use and copyright law as part of Bondy’s ongoing work studying shifting conditions for music creators.

17 June 2023

Zhongwei (Mabu) Li gave a public talk on the history of music circulation and subcultures in China, hosted by abC (Art Book in China) art book fair in Beijing. Mabu discussed how the circulation of music in China in the past thirty years shifted from the informal “cut-out” underground mechanism to the contemporary system of platformised music streaming, based on his earlier doctoral research at LSE and his current work with the MUSICSTREAM project.

16 May 2023

David Hesmondhalgh gave an invited presentation on “The impact of algorithms on society, culture and music”, to a conference for songwriters and other musicians organised by the Ivors Academy, the UK’s independent professional association for music creators, which took place at Rich Mix in London. Hesmondhalgh discussed musicians’ concerns about music recommender systems and recent debates about appropriate regulation and oversight, based on his work with the MUSICSTREAM project.

7 May 2023

Aditya Lal, David Hesmondhalgh, and Charles Umney published an open-access article ‘The changing shape of the Indian recorded music industry in the age of platformisation’ in the journal Contemporary South Asia.

9 February 2023

MUSICSTREAM team publishes major government-commissioned literature review

The MUSICSTREAM team at the University of Leeds have published a major literature review of The Impact of Algorithmically Driven Recommendation Systems on Music Consumption and Production.

The research was commissioned by the UK government’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) and published as part of the government’s response to the UK House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’s critical report on The Economics of Music Streaming.

The review was published alongside the CDEI’s report on The Impact of Recommendation Algorithms on the UK Music Industry, which makes considerable use of the MUSICSTREAM team’s analysis.

At over 20,000 words, the review is one of the most comprehensive discussions of cultural recommendation systems yet published. Unusually, it brings together and compares perspectives on algorithmic recommendation from computer science work with research from critical social science and humanities.

17-18 January 2023

International symposium held in Leeds

The MUSICSTREAM team have hosted a major, invitation-only international symposium on Music Streaming Around the World in Leeds.

Attended online and in person by guests from 12 different countries, and by a number of staff and PhD students from the University of Leeds, the symposium took place over two days.

A primary aim of the symposium was to provide a basis for internationalising research on music streaming and its place in contemporary music cultures. It is hoped that this will also contribute to a greater geographical diversity in studies of digital platforms in the realm of culture.

Plans are under way to develop a substantial multi-chapter edited volume out of the symposium. 

2022

19-20 October 2022

David Hesmondhalgh presented research on music recommender systems in a keynote talk at the 13^th International Music Business Research Days conference in Vienna, on 19-20 October 2022. In a talk based on a literature review he conducted with the three MUSICSTREAM postdoctoral research fellows for the UK Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI), Hesmondhalgh discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the two main paradigms of research into music recommendation: computer science, and critical social science and humanities.

23-25 September 2022

On 23 September 2022, Raquel Campos Valverde gave a keynote talk entitled ‘(Dé)centrer la musique: culture, taxonomie et contenu à l’ère de streaming’ at the joint conference of the Société Française d’Ethnomusicologie and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology in Paris, presenting research on music streaming taxonomies and cultural inequalities. In her talk, Campos Valverde discussed issues concerning the reliance of music recommender systems on Western-centric music classifications, and the role of ethnomusicology in maintaining values of justice and equality in the era of digital platforms. The talk drew on work conducted by the MUSICSTREAM team for the UK Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI).

21 September 2022

The UK government have published MUSICSTREAM’s response to the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s Music Streaming Market Study. The response, authored by project leader David Hesmondhalgh and Hyojung Sun (University of York) welcomes the valuable information contained in the report, but criticises its treatment of the profitability and market power of the major record companies, especially with regard to playlists.