Due to tightened regulatory pressure on cultural expression—most notably the 2018 censorship of hip-hop—China’s indie music scene has been significantly affected, compelled either to conform to mainstream culture or to retreat underground (Nie 2021). This paper examines an independent bookstore and record shop in Shenzhen that remains publicly visible while engaging the indie music scene through a range of adaptive strategies. As both a physical shop and a music label, Old Heaven Books sells books and records, publishes indie music, and hosts free performances and listening sessions featuring alternative music, including works by artists from ethnic minority communities.
Drawing on my 2023 fieldwork, I investigate how the store has both preserved and compromised the ethos of “independence” under regulatory oversight and censorship. Framing the store as a “sonic infrastructure” (Kielman 2018), I analyze how its physical setting, target audiences, and audio offerings blur boundaries between mainstream and subculture, sensitive and safe, and local and global. I also examine the store’s co-present, material engagements—vinyl, recordings, and live events—that create spaces for open conversation and transnational learning beyond China’s internet restrictions (Plovnick 2024). I argue that the independent scene that developed around the store represents a distinct form of subcultural practice, cultivated through collective listening, encounters with external voices, and musical engagement with histories obscured in official discourse.

In 1959, Ralph Ellison stated that “the jam session is…the jazzman’s true academy,” referring to the legendary sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem during the early 1940s. Ellison explained that at the time, jam sessions were where jazz musicians learned “tradition, group techniques, and style.” Jam sessions continue to exist and have branched out into other styles, like blues, classic rock, and funk, now better known as “open jams.” But unlike jazz in the 1940s, musicians can now learn popular music at institutions. I have witnessed the powerful transformations that occur during open jams and believe they are fertile ground for musicians to hone their skills and talents. But recently, I wondered how current popular music pedagogies could benefit from lessons learned at open jams. How do we connect modern bands, open jams, and PME? This paper draws on my experiences as a frequent attendee of open jams and a popular music educator. I will describe where open jams and PME align, where they conflict, and suggest strategies on how they can complement one another to create a better “true academy.” If we hear jam sessions as, to quote Ellison, “some key to a fuller freedom of self-realization”, and “true academy,” can we apply his theory of the the jam session as a place where musicians learn from one another and develop their craft, and emphasize the pedagogical value of the jam session to find their “self-determined identity” as exemplifying Freire’s reconciliation of the teacher-student contradiction.

In recent years, major music streaming platform Spotify has come under significant criticism for a number of issues including low royalty payments, ghostwritten tracks, and user surveillance. In this paper, I critique a more fundamental aspect of the platform: its commitment to popular music genre in user analysis and recommendation algorithms. While streaming music ostensibly reflects a watershed disruption to radio DJ and record label dominance of the twentieth century, significant continuities exist, perhaps most fundamental being the crucial role genre plays as a site for institutions to make sense of user identity and its relationship to listening practice. This is particularly evident in Spotify wrapped, a feature which repackages data collected through digital surveillance as colorful, personalized, quasi-psychological informatic graphics. Ethnomusicologists are well-equipped to critique popular music taxonomies, particularly given longstanding debates in the field surrounding terms such as “world music” and “world beat” in popular music industries. Drawing on interviews with members of the Japan Composers and Arrangers Association (JCAA) and other figures in the Japanese music industry, I critique genre’s function in contemporary music streaming by examining the sonically transgressive category of “anime music,” a widely-used but nebulous term which overlaps in complex ways with both functional (theme song, soundtracks) and generic (J-Pop, J-Rock) musical identifiers. Highlighting Spotify’s recent “Sounds of Anime” campaign, I argue for the ways in which anime music orients users to listening practices at odds with the assumptions about musical genre at the heart of Spotify’s music recommendation algorithms.

The success of the 2007 album Wátina (“I Called Out”) by Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Collective, followed shortly after by Palacio’s untimely death at age 47, significantly altered the musical landscape of the Afro-indigenous Garifuna of the Central American Caribbean coast and North American diaspora. By garnering international accolades and gaining Garifuna music a resounding audibility within the world music industry, it launched a new “Garifuna world music” (GWM) genre, which the Collective has sustained in Palacio’s absence under the continued direction of Belizean Catalan producer Ivan Duran. However, the album’s release also broadened the purview of the culture’s traditional musical practices to include popular music for the first time. Today, Wátina’s songs are performed in Belizean and Honduran Garifuna village drum-and-dance ensembles and religious services as often as in nightclubs and festivals, and the title track’s drum rhythm is being taught to locals and foreigners alongside rhythms over a century old. My presentation engages an important theme of ethnomusicological studies of Black American music – boundary-blurring between commercial and traditional – by examining the diverse takes on neo-traditionalism offered by Garifuna musicians ranging from Generations X to Z in the last decade. As confirmed by ethnographic research conducted since 2020, younger musicians increasingly seek to bypass Duran’s neoliberal route to Global North recognition while simultaneously expressing North America-influenced individualism, through personal branding and sound, and the Garifuna value of mutual dependence (machularadi), through regular joint concerts within Garifuna communities and the fostering of local and regional fandom and support.