This article explores the key standards identified by songwriters, collaborative artists, and music industry representatives in the commercial pop and Schlager sectors, along with the platform-centric myths they implicitly address. We first provide a theoretical overview of collaborative songwriting and platformisation. Through original interviews and ethnographic observations, we examine two primary platform standards: streaming and social media. We emphasise the growing significance of collaborative songwriting in the streaming era, particularly through songwriting camps, and the pervasive use of social media in creative and economic contexts. Our analysis demystifies two prevalent myths. The first myth concerns the ambiguous role of intermediaries, especially publishers, who act as new service points for efficient billing and songwriting facilitation. The second myth addresses TikTok’s success and its declining conversion rates for streaming.

Recent studies have urged us to consider the materialities of popular music to evaluate its environmental cost. This article orients this discussion towards the materiality of popular music production. It argues that industrial discussions on sustainable music production practices can overlook the ideologies associated with recording technologies that prompt consumption activities. It highlights the key themes discussed in the industry regarding sustainability in music production across various media platforms. It then analyses how these themes relate to the construction of recording studios instead of their everyday use. Although technologies like compressors are not typically considered in this discussion, this article suggests that aesthetic preferences often lead to consumption activities that must be factored in when considering the ecological costs of music production. This practice indicates that music producers tend to focus on sustainability practices that will not interrupt their core business.

This article forwards an alternative perspective on how authenticity can be constructed through popular music tribute show performances. It adopts Edward Bruner’s (1994, American Anthropologist, 96, 397–415) categorisation of authenticity in relation to the replication of ‘historical sites’ in museum exhibitions. It argues that rather than focusing on sonic and historical ‘accuracy’, tribute musicians strive to curate their history and personal experiences with the music they play to prove their ‘authority’ as cultural ambassadors. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Perth, Western Australia, and a case study of a UK-based international touring tribute to The Smiths, this article highlights how some tribute musicians may purposely ‘put themselves in the music’ to conjure a sense of legitimacy and connect with audiences.

Short-form video platforms have reshaped the practices of record companies and music streaming services, giving rise to new cross-audiovisual platform ecosystems. This article adopts the concept of the ‘platform adaptor’ to analyse how music industry practitioners and content producers in China have adjusted their production, distribution, and promotion strategies in response to the affordances of this emerging industrial ecosystem. It discusses the practices of staff who work with musicians to construct ‘hot songs’ (热歌) that can gain popularity across audiovisual platforms and music streaming services. Connecting theoretical ideas about affordance, platform ecologies, and adaptation, this article contributes to research on how cultural forms are ‘optimised’ to be more amenable to the requirements of platforms. The findings demonstrate that emotional encoding has become a pivotal mechanism through which musical commodities gain value as production processes increasingly conform to shareable short-form video formats within the platform economy.

Although some modern popular songs are deliberately composed for the purpose of commentary or protest, most are produced for commercial reasons. However, such songs may nonetheless be adopted by political, cultural, and social movements, and in these cases, fans’ participatory meaning-making has an important role in the songs’ new purpose. Taking the 1935 Korean ballad ‘Tears of Mokp’o’ as a representative example, this article traces how the melancholy love song acquired successive layers of meaning against the backdrop of changing politico-economic contexts throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on political, popular music, and sports histories, I first examine how ‘Tears of Mokp’o’ became known as an anti-colonial anthem under Japanese rule, a position that persisted in postwar South Korea. I then investigate the ways in which fans of the Haitai Tigers, a professional baseball team, utilized the song to express a complex set of emotions and commitments regarding their politically oppressed and economically neglected home region of Chŏlla. Against the backdrop of their traumatic memories of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, Haitai fans, through their collective singing of ‘Tears of Mok’po’ in stadiums during games, transformed it from a colonial-era pop hit/anti-colonial anthem into a baseball fight song that expressed their spirit of regional insubordination in the 1980s and 1990s. Entering the twenty-first century, ‘Tears of Mok’po’ no longer played the same role for the Tigers and their fans, and it receded into historical memory. This change in meaning and association shows how the political and historical meaning-making of popular songs can be constructed, reintegrated, and even dismissed.

This article explores popular music of Japan's Cold War era, with a special focus on singing duo The Peanuts and the film Mothra. It argues that Japanese culture of the Cold War must be understood as participating simultaneously in all three networks of the Cold War order—the First World of capitalist liberal democracies, the Second World of the socialist bloc, and the Third World of the decolonizing and nonaligned Bandung Movement.

This article, intended as a companion to the recent documentary Us and Them: Korean Indie Rock in a K-Pop World co-produced by Stephen Epstein and Timothy Tangheriini, situates Korean indie and punk rock within a broader context in order to demonstrate how what may seem a byway within Korean culture serves as a useful index of important recent societal transformations. As the nature of not only global media flows and musical circulation but Korean national identity and economic structures all undergo significant change, how should observers understand “Korean” “indie” music and its meanings as of 2015? How have the local punk and indie scenes developed in concert with, and in contrast to, K-pop?

This article examines the ‘operetta crisis’ that blighted the Italian operetta industry in the 1920s. Little has been written about the crisi dell’operetta in scholarship on Italian operetta to date, despite extensive coverage in contemporary sources. I attribute this neglect to the contested legacy of the composer, impresario and publisher Carlo Lombardo, at the height of his influence in the 1920s and responsible for most of the best-known Italian operettas today. Lombardo’s works embodied critical anxieties about operetta’s perceived artistic degradation, thanks to their overt sexuality and embrace of popular music (i.e. jazz). However, as I argue with reference to the 1925 operetta Cin-ci-là, narratives of artistic decline may miss the true significance of the crisis. Operetta, striving to be a ‘light’ form of opera but never fully accepted as such by the Italian establishment, was ultimately ill-equipped to survive in an entertainment landscape reshaping itself around popular music.