Spotify's former data guru charts how music's digital revolution affects fans and musiciansExplains how songs get onto the tech platforms and the rewards for artistsReveals which songs and artists are popular in different parts of the worldReaders can scan QR codes to get 10 free playlists to expand their listening

We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity—the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement’s invocations of medievalism—never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?

Noise, an underground music genre made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise has captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience. For its scattered listeners, Noise always seems to be new, and to come from somewhere else: in North America, it was "Japanoise." But does Noise really belong to Japan? Is it even music at all? And why has Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization and participatory media at the turn of the millennium? In Japanoise, David Novak draws on more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States to trace the "cultural feedback" that generates and sustains Noise. He provides a rich ethnographic account of live performances, the circulation of recordings, and the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners. He explores the technologies of Noise, and the productive distortions of its networks. Capturing the textures of feedback - its sonic and cultural layers and vibrations - Novak describes musical circulation through sound and listening, recording and performance, international exchange, and social interpretations of media.

Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth- pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdote and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.

The first edition of The Auditory Culture Reader offered an introduction to both classical and recent work on auditory culture, laying the foundations for new academic research in sound studies. Today, interest and research on sound thrives across disciplines such as music, anthropology, geography, sociology and cultural studies as well as within the new interdisciplinary sphere of sound studies itself.
This second edition reflects on the changes to the field since the first edition and offers a vast amount of new content, a user-friendly organization which highlights key themes and concepts, and a methodologies section which addresses practical questions for students setting out on auditory explorations. All essays are accessible to non-experts and encompass scholarship from leading figures in the field, discussing issues relating to sound and listening from the broadest set of interdisciplinary perspectives.
Inspiring students and researchers attentive to sound in their work, newly-commissioned and classical excerpts bring urban research and ethnography alive with sensory case studies that open up a world beyond the visual. This book is core reading for all courses that cover the role of sound in culture, within sound studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history, media studies and urban geography.

From celebrated music journalist Simon Reynolds, a collection of thought-provoking essays that explore how ideas of the future are articulated in modern music

In music journalist Simon Reynolds' previous book,  Retromania , Reynolds explored what he dubbed "a culture-wide malaise with a particularly anguished focus on the music scene’s preoccupation with recycling and reenacting its own recent past." In contrast, this book--and the phenomenon known as "Futuromania"--explores retromania's positive "not a malaise, but perhaps a dangerously excessive vigour, a morbidly agitated state of excitation about anything and everything in the present that could be plausibly described as 'tomorrow’s sound today.'"

Through a series of thought-provoking essays, Reynolds reflects on influential and innovative music that "prefigured" the Future, exploring the then-futuristic electronic and digital sounds that provided a glimpse of what would one day become mainstream pop music. From Donna Summer and David Bowie to Daft Punk, from Afrobeats and Atlanta trap to Autotune and Ambient Noise,  FUTUROMANIA  invites us to reflect on how boundary-pushing music of the past became the popularized beat of the present, and how today's experimentation might hint at the sounds of the future.

Engagingly written, thoughtfully organized, and utterly compelling,  FUTUROMANIA  is required reading for anyone who dares to think about tomorrow's soundscape.

Bring the Noise weaves together interviews, reviews, essays, and features to create a critical history of the last twenty years of pop culture, juxtaposing the voices of many of rock and hip hop’s most provocative artists—Morrissey, Public Enemy, The Beastie Boys, The Stone Roses, P.J. Harvey, Radiohead—with Reynolds’s own passionate analysis. With all the energy and insight you would expect from the author of Rip It Up and Start Again , Bring the Noise tracks the alternately fraught and fertile relationship between white bohemia and black street music. The selections transmit the immediacy of their moment while offering a running commentary on the broader enduring questions of race and resistance, multiculturalism, and division. From grunge to grime, from Madchester to the Dirty South, Bring the Noise chronicles hip hop and alternative rock’s competing claims to be the cutting edge of innovation and the voice of opposition in an era of conservative backlash. Alert to both the vivid detail and the big picture, Simon Reynolds has shaped a compelling narrative that cuts across a thrillingly turbulent two-decade period of pop music.