Music Streaming around the World. By David Hesmondhalgh

In his introduction to this book David Hesmondhalgh writes that ‘Bob Marley, who died in 1981, remains the only genuine global superstar to emerge from the Global South’ (7). It is a bold claim, and a somewhat jarring assertion at the start of a volume on music streaming around the world. It made me immediately wonder how such a statement might come across elsewhere, particularly to musicians and audiences not quite so neatly woven into established histories of the global music industry. Fans of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, for example (in Pakistan and its diaspora), might reasonably raise their eyebrows. And for a volume so admirably—and effectively—committed to decentring ‘the West’ in how we think about such histories, the use of the ‘Global South’ descriptor also runs the risk of reinscribing the very binaries of power the book aims, and often succeeds, in transcending. I mention this early in the review partly to highlight the difficulty of breaking out of Western-centred modes of thinking about music streaming, but mostly because it demonstrates the importance of producing a volume like this in the first place.