The music industry’s relationship with technology has historically been characterised by cycles of disruption, resistance and adaptation. From player pianos to streaming platforms, new technologies are invariably framed as progress whilst simultaneously threatening established business models and power structures. This project examines how distribution and communication technologies transform not just how music reaches audiences, but the fundamental economics of who profits from music and how value is created, captured and distributed. Key areas include:

• Understanding continuities and ruptures between analogue and digital practices. What fundamental human behaviours around music discovery, collecting, and community persist across technological change, and where do new affordances genuinely transform practice rather than simply digitising existing behaviours?
• Interrogating technological determinism versus social construction. How do we reconcile theories seeking universal motivations for cultural activity with the profound ways that specific technologies shape behaviour, community formation and aesthetic values?
• Mapping current power structures in music production and distribution. Who controls the contemporary means of production, what are their goals, and how do these differ from previous gatekeepers? How do platform economics, algorithmic curation and data ownership reconfigure relationships between artists, intermediaries and audiences?

Examining creative resistance and appropriation. Given music makers’ historic tendency to subvert, hack and repurpose technologies beyond designers’ intentions, what can histories of glitch aesthetics, DIY distribution, and technostalgia tell us about emerging practices around AI, machine learning and algorithmic systems?