Conference Program

The digital era has radically transformed the paradigms of music production, distribution, and consumption, raising urgent questions about the sustainability of listening practices in the platform society (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018; Bonini and Magaudda 2024). This contribution analyzes the socio-cultural challenges stemming from contemporary musical homogenization, fragmentation, individualization, and disintermediation (Airoldi 2021; Ocaña Fernández 2014).

Streaming platforms and short-form audiovisual social media (such as TikTok) foster fragmented, hyper-individualized (Webster 2023), and decontextualized listening experiences, inhibiting active selection amid an overabundance of supply (Bonini and Magaudda 2024; IFPI 2025). Here, the apparent freedom of direct access masks a new form of invisible, algorithm-driven intermediation. Without human curation or critical skills to guide users, algorithms and market logics dominate, confining listeners to filter bubbles that limit exploration and depth. Music thus becomes mere functional background or fleeting commodity, stripped of its relational and semantic depth. Moreover, massive overproduction - such as the roughly 150,000 tracks uploaded daily to Deezer, 78% of which go unplayed (Rosenblatt 2025) - drives an inequitable musical economy, privileging standardized cultural hybrids over local productions (Bourreau et al. 2022; Hagen 2022; Navarro Lalanda 2025).

In line with the European Parliament's recent resolution (2024) on protecting cultural diversity and ensuring fair remuneration, this study proposes redefining listening culture through a cultural "re-mediation" that reinstates the human element in the musical experience. To counter homogenization, disintermediation, fragmented discourse, and algorithmic isolation, it advocates a renewed approach to listening education as a strategy for cultural sustainability, targeting: 1) critical literacy in consumption technologies and media logics (Altheide and Snow 1979); 2) skills for situated listening attuned to cultural plurality (Blacking 1995); and 3) music's relational potential via dialogic practices, cooperative models, and participatory user interactions.

Positioned within a critical perspective on listening education and democratic citizenship (Arditi and Nolan 2024), this contribution advances an audience-education policy aimed at fostering critical awareness of technological mediation and encouraging active participation, with the broader goal of supporting a plural and equitable musical ecosystem that strengthens collective cohesion, repositions musical practice within shared public spaces, and reaffirms music as a common good for multicultural dialogue and recognition.