Live from the internet: online popular music performance

Online concerts represent an understudied form of popular music performance, exhibiting new possibilities for mediation in a geopolitically challenged ‘offline’ world. I argue they are not merely temporary substitutes for physical events, but have wide-ranging, under-explored effects. Using a bespoke methodology combining digital ethnography and web data science, I investigate the impacts of online concerts along five lines of inquiry: cultural and aesthetic experience, technology, accessibility and inclusion, environmental consequences, and economic viability. Five articles and an online conference series will develop interdisciplinary knowledge, innovate methodologically, and inaugurate an intersectoral research network, radically advancing the study of popular music culture.