Independence in 21st-Century Popular Music

Cases from Beyond Anglo-America

Shannon Garland, Pedro Belchior Nunes, Pedro Roxo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765112762
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry

Can music be made "independently" in the 21st century?


More than a generation of musicians, music workers, and music companies have now been operating in the context of the profound shifts in music production and dissemination in the "digital era." Scholarly focus on musical independence has often been centered on genres, like punk and indie, rooted in the US and UK. This volume, focused outside the Euro-American context, shows the variety of ways musicians, music workers and businesses manage the economic, media and cultural shifts propelled by digitalization, asking what it means now to say one is "independent." It brings together scholars from around the globe who are researching forms of music production, circulation, consumption and finance that blur the boundaries between the dominant corporate players and "independent" cultural production. With chapters detailing popular music in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Indonesia, Portugal, Spain and Taiwan, independence is shown to be a concept and practice simultaneously nebulous, contradictory, and practical.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Putting Music Independence into Perspective: An Historical and Global Overview
• Part 1 Labels, Genres, and Mediations
• Part 2 Government Funding, Self-management, and the Corporatization of Independence
• Part 3 Political Regimes, Independent Ethos, and Forms of Music Organization
• Afterword: Capitalism and Its Discontented
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright Page