At the end of 2018, a proud member of the Barbz – obsessive online fans of rapper Nicki Minaj who defend her against her critics and naysayers – used the short-form video platform TikTok to promote and circulate a newly released song that would eventually break multiple music industry records: ‘Old Town Road’. While plentiful critical discourse has focused on the significance of Lil’ Nas X's breakout viral single for how it shattered genre conventions and troubled music industry institutions, the song's rapid ascendancy also showed aspiring musical creators a new path for success – by leveraging online musical communities and platform affordances, amateurs and professionals can reap huge rewards.Footnote ¹ In the years since, online musical formations across social media have become spaces rife with risk and reward, exposing the ways in which digital mediation has transformed and is transforming our relationships with music well beyond the scope of the music industries as previously and traditionally understood.

Despite the title of this journal, this special issue is unambiguously situated in the twenty-first century. In the opening decades of the millennium, musical creation, circulation, and community formation have been – like so many aspects of personal and public life – significantly reshaped amid the rise and rapid advancement of digital networks and technologies. Pervasive social media and digital streaming services have effected new modes of authorship; they have also opened new pathways of circulation and engendered new forms and practices of participatory culture. As we have seen in recent years, these new pathways have the side effect of limiting user agency to opt out of some experiences, ranging from audiovisual experiences that automatically play to enabling music surveillance and amplifying chauvinistic undercurrents in various genres and musical communities. The articles in this issue consider strategies for circulating music and sound – abundantly, secretly, meaningfully, profitably – that are negotiated at intersections of individuals and communities, digital devices and platforms, creators and consumers, aesthetics and algorithms, and protocols and behaviours.

This special issue expands upon recent publications in music and media studies that examine the intimacy and infrastructure of new digital technologies – expanding not just topically and temporally, but also geographically.Footnote ² The work of our contributing authors actively broadens the discussion of music and new technologies from a focus on the United States and United Kingdom to a more global purview, with analyses of musical media ecosystems in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and India. As is the case with many studies of media technology, research on music and new technology is overwhelmingly written from the perspective of wealthy nations in the Global North, necessarily generalizing from local realities of how new technologies are adopted and the consequences for content (including local memes) and circulation (once the meme ‘goes viral’). While many scholars frame digital media and platforms as globe-spanning, many still end up discussing them from an exclusively Anglo perspective; as a rejoinder to this tendency, the contributions in this issue illuminate the specific ways in which media ecosystems operate distinctly (shaping sounds, determining aesthetics) in a variety of contexts, with only half focused on US and UK contexts. We contend that, taken as a whole, this issue illuminates just how adaptable device-embedded musical platforms and their related media infrastructures are to a variety of cultural contexts. In this respect, we are in dialogue with recent publications in sound studies that aim to show a greater expanse of how new musical media take part in local cultures around the world.Footnote ³ We posit that new technologies afford new modes of listening, circulation, and community formation due in part to how thoroughly these new platforms are embedded in everyday life. They encourage ubiquitous listening while also amplifying existing power structures and regimes of taste.Footnote ⁴

The articles in this special issue explore intersections of music, digital media technologies, and modes of sociality in the twenty-first century – considering how music and musical practices shape – and are shaped by – novel digital modalities and media formats that foreground innovative forms of intimacy and public exposure. These modalities enable the formation of new types of musical communities, around sounds that push at the boundaries of what is considered music and how we listen. Through examinations of aural sports spectatorship, musicking animals, catchy jazz riffs, music podcasts, video autoplay, YouTube stars, the memeification of musical stereotypes, mini dance challenges, and bedroom production studios, the authors of this special issue draw together disparate sonic and audiovisual objects that resonate shared themes of content circulation, affect, and vernacular labour – the articles examine connective features of catchiness, even ‘virality’, enabled by emergent digital ecosystems and the centrality of aspiring amateur creators and remixers to digital musical communities. The objects under consideration illustrate the close proximity, in digital spaces, of audiovisual gimmickry and the stakes of creators’ livelihoods, while also forwarding digital listening as a space for demonstrations of virtuosity, cultural interpretation, and community.

Alongside these new musical communities, these articles also examine the means through which the regimes of taste are transformed by curatorial practices of tastemakers, podcasters, and other so-called ‘influencers’ of popular music in the twenty-first century. As with other media industry infrastructures and intermediaries, these figures wield their power to shape musical meaning and success in a variety of configurations – sometimes responding to grassroots critiques and jokes, or directing their followers to amplify their brand and output through viral musical logics. While the recording industry (like the sheet music industry before it) has famously struggled to predict which artists will have the largest hits, the increasing power of digital virality has made such predictions even more risky. Like other arms of the media industries, reliable properties are receiving a lion's share of investment – resulting in a swelling of popularity in back catalogues, alongside sales of legacy artist catalogues.Footnote ⁵ Much of the new music that receives investment from the major labels emerges as viral soundtracking on platforms such as TikTok. The role of the influencer has so overtaken new musical production that many musicians themselves have wielded social media to shape popular conversation.Footnote ⁶ Another thread across this issue, then, is that of ruptures of social media influence (and influencers) in music, with several articles exposing just how varied and fraught the process of trying to harness online musical communities can be.

In his article addressing one of the most popular and rapidly growing areas of music explanation and digital media creation, the music podcast, Byrd McDaniel examines the strategies used by podcast creators and hosts to model different modes of listening to popular music, especially regarding how podcasts convey musical knowledge encoded in sound. These are persuasive modes of listening; the podcast format, content, and style guide the audience's ears and apprehension. McDaniel offers a meta-listening to these podcasts’ presentation of expertise that reveals assumptions made about listening and about hosts’ attribution of musical value. Value also extends to who and what we listen to online. Kate Galloway directs our ears and eyes to the musicking animals of audiovisual memes that are created and shared on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Using a selection of musicking animal memes that have gone viral since 2015, Galloway examines the cultural meanings of sounds and movement of both human and non-human animals online and shows how our digital spaces and screens have become a relational interspecies environment for performance and sound-making. Ultimately, how we as human beings listen to non-human animals online in human-created ‘virtual menageries’ and how humans make these videos to share with others says more about human understandings of animal soundworlds and performance and hierarchies of musical value than it does about animals and their sonic environments.Footnote ⁷ In addition to cute (if noisy) animals, digital spaces and screens also facilitate the widespread dissemination of musical jokes. Hannah Judd examines the symbolic economy of a musical cliché in the insular ‘jazz bro’ online community, linking viral musicality with gender and belonging. Tracking the lick's transformation from a joke, into a viral video, to a meme, and finally to a gimmick, Judd examines the vital role processes of exposure and repetition played in spreading the lick across digital spaces, which shifted the core joke's audience, meaning, and function. These articles collectively contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the modes of audiovisual listening, making, and sharing taking place among the circulating content, devices, and platforms of online musical digital communities.

The creative, political, and social affordances of digital media enable productive and destructive relationalities. Luis Achondo, for example, examines the ways hinchas (soccer or football supporters) utilize the creative affordances of WhatsApp to cultivate digital connections among fans through chants at soccer matches; however, these porous spaces of digital circulation also support the circulation of destructive, anti-social sentiments. On the one hand, these affordances digitally decentre creativity from individuals through the distribution of inventive tasks between different people, but on the other hand, the creative affordances of WhatsApp facilitate the distribution and circulation of soccer violence through the digital spreading of violent media in the form of memes, videos, and chants. The creative affordances of digital media, as Mike Levine argues in his contribution to the issue, can also be mobilized by so-called ‘Internet poor’ regions of the world, such as Cuba, through the development of custom solutions in the form of underground ‘sneakernet’ USB-based networks.Footnote ⁸ The Cuban ‘sneakernet’ of el paquete semanal bridges gaps of technological precarity and provides alternative infrastructural networks of circulation that circumvent the Cuban state's media control and censorship. K. E. Goldschmitt explores the degradation of efforts to critique stereotypes across national lines via social media apps and viral musicking. Through the concept of ‘digital fatigue’, Goldschmitt shows how the feminist message of Anitta's ‘Girl from Rio’ gave way to stereotypes of Brazilian women through its travels on TikTok.Footnote ⁹ The article shows that success through viral media depends on easy associations with implications for other international artists aspiring to breakthrough. These articles in conversation show both the creative potential and the darker side of online musical communities and they stretch the boundaries of music and the musical.

Online musical communities are also engaging with new protocols and infrastructures, raising important questions about aesthetics and the senses that must be navigated and negotiated by both creators and consumers of digital content. Paula Clare Harper analyses the implications of autoplaying video – a widely derided advertising format given new life as a platform standard by Facebook in 2013. Her article demonstrates the myriad ways that creators and other platforms adopted and adapted to this format, in particular its standardizing separation of sound and image via default-muted sound. Harper shows how this split catalyzed the creation of new audiovisual genres, the adoption and co-option of captioning and other accessibility practices, and the commodification of particular twenty-first-century audile techniques. Moving from software and code to hardware and infrastructure, Anaar Desai-Stephens details the rise of YouTube in India, showing how the platform's ‘aesthetics of intimacy’ drove engagement and undergirded its monetization and expansion. YouTube mobilized the sticky propensity of videos in its first decade in India to build a local creator culture and hook an economically elite audience as it expanded its digital and technological infrastructure. Through ethnographic detail, as well as fine-grained audiovisual analysis of the videos in question, the article argues for a new mode of scholarship that takes the aesthetics of infrastructure seriously.

Together, the articles in this special issue model a global outlook on digital musical cultures and suggest some of the expansive ways in which musical creation and consumption operate beyond traditional music industry logics and institutions in the twenty-first century. In addition to bringing together a variety of mediated musical objects, the case studies examined by this special issue's authors stretch across platforms familiar and unfamiliar, corporate and oppositional – from YouTube and TikTok to the ‘sneakernet’ of Cuba's el paquete semanal. The authors examine how the architectures, affordances, and constraints of the platforms themselves shape the musical objects that they circulate, the aesthetic and curatorial strategies of content creators, and the listening behaviours of the listeners and viewers that use them.