The Cambridge Companion series provides a valuable contribution with this edited collection, which spans across multiple fields to offer an overview of recent developments in our understanding of music and digital culture(s). Drawing from political economy, posthumanism, platform studies, artificial intelligence studies, ethnomusicology, online identities and religion studies, the collection's 11 chapters cover a commendable range of topics. These include the analysis of business models and the economics of music streaming, to algorithmic recommendations systems, mediated witnessing and race, ritual and religion online, as well as ‘liveness, virtuality, the posthuman, and global perspectives’ (p. 1). The breadth of the collection is a testament to the vitality and diversity of research about music and technology, and the depth in each chapter reinforces the advantages provided by interdisciplinary approaches to the investigation of the complexities between technology and society. The chapters are interspersed with short essays – personal takes written by ‘digital practitioners’ – each discussing the intricacies of ‘life and work in the digital cultures of music’ (p. 1), which bring valuable insights from the ground. Other works about music, technology and society also cast a wide net (see Prior Reference Prior2018), but this instalment of the companion series stands out with its attention to the roles of platforms and the digital economy in music and digital culture(s). Covering a broad collection and the fields it draws from is challenging, and I begin by identifying key debates and common threads in the book. I then highlight topics that deserved more attention and conclude with a brief discussion of audiences who might benefit the most from the volume.

The book delves into the relationship between society and technology, with authors avoiding simplistic explanations in favour of in-depth and nuanced analyses. This approach fosters the analysis of complex relationships between music and technology, and is evident in key common threads throughout the book. The first is the blurred boundary between humans and machines, a central feature in debates about posthumanism, technology, and society. In the chapter ‘Digital Technology and Cultural Practice’, Cook provides a historically informed account of music in digital cultures in three moves, namely from the social to the posthuman, the appeal and aesthetics of audiovisual participatory cultures, and the consolidation of the digital business model through surveillance of users and sales of advertising. He concludes that ‘once again, technology is not the crunch issue. It is whether there is sufficient short-term economic incentive to mobilise those who are in a position to do something about it’ (p. 27). In the excellent analysis of algorithmic recommendation systems in music streaming platforms, Goldschmitt and Seaver demonstrate how the work of humans and machines is fundamental to drive these systems – they analyse a cyborg system that ‘reveals core concerns about music's social role’ and the ‘long-lived anxiety about the relationship between humans and machinery in music’ (p. 64). These two chapters dialogue with the growing interest in platform studies (Nieborg and Poell Reference Nieborg and Poell2018), the detailed workings of music streaming platforms (Eriksson et al. Reference Eriksson, Fleischer, Johansson, Snickars and Vonderau2019), the digital economy (Jordan Reference Jordan2019), and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff Reference Zuboff2019).

Political economic approaches and strong historical contexts make up the two other common threads in the book. Scherzinger's ‘Political Economy of Streaming’ historicises ‘musical labour practices in the … age of technological automation’ (p. 274). Offering a bleak reality for professional musicians, Scherzinger argues that recent shifts have relocated working arrangements to pre-modern conditions, ‘an era where composers struggled in an informal economy of barter and reputation while wealth was concentrated’, with musicians ‘increasingly coerced into performance-only careers, severed, in practice, from the traditional levies once provided by royalties and copyrights’, and ‘enjoined to the labour of making their mark on the digital network’ (p. 294, and for a more balanced yet still concerning perspective about musicians working conditions see Baym Reference Baym2018). Scherzinger makes good use of historical context in his analysis, a feature also important in the chapters about digital technologies and cultural practices (Cook, pp. 5–28), business models and intellectual property (Scherzinger, pp. 33–57), music recommendation systems (Goldschmitt and Seaver, pp. 63–81) and witnessing and race (McMurray, pp. 124–46).

The strong historical context is complemented by a critical view of technologies for music, and this combination is effective in revealing structural inequalities in digital cultures. In a display of foresight many of the issues raised in the discussion of inequalities become more pressing as societies are adapting to life with Covid-19. McMurray approaches the debate about race and technologies for audiovisual production with a discussion of the changing role of mediated ‘witnessing’ experiences of police brutality, namely from a distant television to a closer viewer experience via smartphone live streaming. The focus on the changes of ‘witnessing’ is timely, and writing before the protests galvanised by George Floyd's killing (recorded with a smartphone), McMurray argues that ‘a major rupture has taken place, one that appears to be tied closely to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and especially the acts of digital witnessing that accompany it’ (p. 132). The ubiquity of smartphones is a crucial component of widespread forms of digital surveillance, and Gopinack and Stanyek's chapter ‘Technologies of the Musical Selfie’ highlights serious implications about the use of artificial intelligence with face-recognition software, as it can ‘shape the lifestyle of the individual user and environment’ (p. 111). Moreover, there are other dangers associated with face-recognition artificial intelligence and large-scale surveillance as they could be designed to generate ‘affective information’ and ‘real-time emotion detection on a mass scale’ (p. 111). Tan's discussion of musical ‘algocracies’ in the Chinese context (pp. 258–62) also discusses problems related to algorithmic surveillance under autocratic regimes.

While the book successfully addresses a number of topics some issues deserved more attention. The first is gender. The book contains valuable contributions from female scholars (and practitioners in the personal takes), but unfortunately there is little discussion about gender in the music and digital cultures (see for example Raine and Strong Reference Raine and Strong2019). Secondly, the collection largely adopts a Western-centred approach to music in digital cultures. In fairness, Tan's contribution from ethnomusicology acknowledges the gap, and proposes three theoretical models that embrace a global perspective: (a) decentring, recentring and recirculating musical digitality; (b) considation of the complicated relationships between algocracies and autocratic regimes globally; and (c) a postdigital viewpoint that recognises ‘imaginary gaps’ to attempt to overcome ‘differences in the projection and fetishization of the future – whether naïvely optimistic or dystopian – [that] can overshadow smaller but no less important feats of imagination in the present’ (p. 266). Thirdly, when analysing business models and online platforms the emphasis is on market leaders and corporate conglomerates, companies that dominate the digital economy such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Spotify (the ‘go-to case’ for the study of music streaming). This attention to market leaders is understandable given the power they exert, but doing so risks losing focus on manifestations of digital cultures that may offer an alternative, perhaps even a challenge, to dominant narratives, consequently avoiding the debates about the internet and digital culture(s) as sites of struggle. (See Hesmondhalgh et al. (Reference Hesmondhalgh, Jones and Rauh2019) for an analysis of the potential of independent music streaming platforms as alternatives for DIY music.)

The book is highly recommended for those wanting an introduction to key debates about music in digital culture. The chapters are clearly written and packed with theoretically informed analysis, which should appeal to scholars and advanced students (postgraduates and undergraduates in final years) interested in the intersection of music with digital culture(s), particularly via political economy, platform studies and posthumanism.