Review
The music industries are a field that has attracted the attention of scholars from very different disciplines, including economics and industrial organisation, business administration and strategy, finance and political economy, public policy and cultural policy, marketing and consumer research, sociology of work and culture, media and communication studies, law and intellectual property, information systems and computer science, psychology and health research, or popular music, cultural studies and musicology. In a deep theoretical dialogue with almost 400 references from these areas, the authors of The Rise of the Platform Music Industries (2025) contribute from a different perspective: Andrew Leyshon, an economic geographer, is Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography and Senior Fellow in the Centre for Economy, Policy and Place at the University of Nottingham, where he focuses on exploring the evolving intersections between finance, technology, space and place. His previous research relating to the music industries includes “Time–Space (and Digital) Compression: Software Formats, Musical Networks, and the Reorganisation of the Music Industry” (2001) and Reformatted: Code, Networks, and the Transformation of the Music Industry (2014).
Allan Watson is Reader in Economic Geography—Geography and Environment at Loughborough University, and explores the geographies of music and the musical economy, but he is also interested in film and the wider media landscape. His work combines geographical, economic and sociological perspectives on cultural production, technology, labour and consumption, as in Cultural Production in and Beyond the Recording Studio (2014) or “Digital Disruption and Recording Studio Diversification: Changing Business Models for the Digital Age” (2016).
The topic is indeed relevant. A quick search, using “music industr*” AND “platform*”, on Web of Science has yielded a total of 339 documents, 252 since 2017 (the publication year of Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism), and 70 items in the period 2025–2026 (since the year Leyshon and Watson’s book was released). Despite the high interest in the topic and the timeliness of the research, to the knowledge of the reviewer, The Rise of the Platform Music Industries has surprisingly not yet been reviewed in any scientific journal since its publication in June 2025.
The aim of the present book is to provide a holistic evaluation of the contemporary music industries through the lens of “platform capitalism” (Srnicek, 2017). It examines how “platformization”—the penetration of digital platforms into infrastructures, economic processes and governance (Poell et al. 2019)—is reshaping music. Situating platform reintermediation historically, it assesses the economic and cultural effects of the “platform music industries” and how technology, capital and intellectual property interact with market change to affect industry participants. In fact, the authors’ motivation for writing this book is their argument that “the music industries have served as frontier industries for processes of platformization that have subsequently been rolled out elsewhere […] as the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for a series of digital disruptions […] that have guided subsequent developments in a host of other industries” (p. 161). The term “music industries” is used in the plural, following Williamson & Cloonan (2007), to better capture their diversity, and to avoid the common identification of the “music industry” with the recording industry.
Regarding the methodology, the book engages not only in deep theoretical discussion with a vast number of authors and perspectives but also in empirical research using quantitative and qualitative data, namely, a dataset of the royalty earnings and the social media accounts of 255 artists signed to a large UK-based independent music publisher, 26 interviews with MusicTech start-ups and related organisations, 29 qualitative semi-structured interviews with musicians who performed regularly on the Twitch live streaming platform during the COVID-19 pandemic and a further 29 qualitative semi-structured interviews with participants working within the musical economy across North West England.
Chapter 1 introduces the book’s general framework and central argument: rather than bringing about genuine disintermediation, digitalisation has produced three successive waves of reintermediation, associated respectively with P2P networks, multisided streaming platforms and the MusicTech ecosystem. These processes initially dismantled and later reshaped a music industry business model centred on the exploitation of music rights. This framework usefully organises the historical development of digital transformation, although the metaphor of waves may imply an excessively linear succession, when in fact these systems accumulate, overlap and develop unevenly across territories. The next chapter examines the platformisation of the recorded music industry, explains each wave in detail and shows how streaming enabled it to recover its revenues while reorganising power among platforms, major companies, rights holders and creators, without necessarily democratising the sector. Chapter 3 focuses on rights and rents, examining the “value gap”, royalty distribution, recording contracts, catalogue acquisitions, the financialisation of intellectual property and the problems raised by artificial intelligence (AI). Although its analysis of the continuing power of the major labels is persuasive, one could say that the emphasis on recorded music and commercially oriented repertoires partly limits the plurality of music industries announced by the authors.
Chapter 4 addresses the third wave of reintermediation, driven by the development of tools and services for music creation, promotion, distribution, financing and rights management by MusicTech companies. One of the book’s principal contributions is to demonstrate that these firms do not necessarily displace established actors: their innovative capacity depends on access to finance, specialised personnel and licences, while many ultimately collaborate with major companies or are incorporated into them. Chapter 5 analyses how social media, crowdfunding, blockchain, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) economically mobilise fan enthusiasm. The transformation of musicians into intermediaries of their own careers increases their possible autonomy but also transfers to them relational, entrepreneurial and promotional labour that is often invisible and unpaid; moreover, digital visibility and follower numbers do not guarantee a sustainable career. Chapter 6 examines live streaming, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its potential for performance, community-building and monetisation. These chapters effectively combine political economy with the experiences of musical workers, although some of their evidence—collected between 2016 and 2022—describes a digital ecology preceding the full consolidation of TikTok and generative AI. This is an understandable but slight limitation in a sector undergoing exceptionally rapid change. The authors acknowledge this but seem confident that the dominance of streaming, the absence of an imminent technological replacement and the growing role of platforms make this book a useful foundation for future research on the music industries.
Chapter 7 considers digital literacy, data and democratisation, demonstrating that access to metrics does not eliminate inequality: interpreting data and turning it into decisions requires knowledge, time, resources and professional connections that are unevenly distributed. Algorithms and playlists have also become selection mechanisms capable of reinforcing the advantages of major companies and the dependence of independent actors. Chapter 8 concludes by presenting the music industries as a laboratory for the platform economy: decentralised technologies, data cooperatives and AI may expand creative autonomy but could also intensify concentration, surveillance and content saturation.
Perhaps the book’s main limitation is geographical. Although the authors acknowledge the Western specificity of their research (p. 11), their empirical evidence comes predominantly from the United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, from the rest of Europe and North America, while some conclusions are expressed in general terms. Platformisation is global but not uniform: its effects depend on the development of each market, digital infrastructures, purchasing power, regulation, rights-management systems and the presence of domestic platforms. The book, therefore, offers a highly persuasive account of platform music industries in developed Western economies, whose applicability and variations should be tested through comparative research in other countries and regions.
Notwithstanding these very few limitations, The Rise of the Platform Music Industries is an exceptionally useful and timely publication, which offers a theoretically ambitious and empirically rich account of a sector undergoing rapid and continuing transformation. It represents a major addition to the literature on digitisation, technological innovation and digital disruption in the music industries developed by authors such as Leyshon (2001, 2014), Tschmuck (2012), Wikström and DeFillippi (2016), Hughes, Evans, Morrow and Keith (2016), Nordgård (2018) and Wikström (2020), while advancing this scholarship through its analysis of platformisation, successive waves of reintermediation, MusicTech, datafication and emerging creator economies. Particular recognition is due to the considerable intellectual and empirical labour underlying the volume: the authors combine extensive theoretical discussion with original qualitative and quantitative research conducted across several projects, methods and groups of industry participants. Finally, Leyshon, Watson and Agenda Publishing deserve recognition for making both the PDF and EPUB editions openly accessible under a Creative Commons licence, enabling this important contribution to reach researchers, students, practitioners and musicians well beyond institutions that can afford specialist academic publications.
Notes
[1] Declaration on the use of Generative AI
During the preparation of this work, the author used ChatGPT for the sole purpose of compressing the original to the journal’s article length limits and improving the readability of the final version of this paper. After using this tool, the author reviewed and edited the content as needed, assuming full responsibility for the content of the publication.