Music streaming platforms and everyday musical lives: Dynamics of community, individualisation and personalisation in China

The editors of this special issue invited its contributors to consider how communities are changing as digital platforms become an increasingly important way in which collectivities are shaped and maintained. They also encouraged us to investigate which novel forms of community might be emerging from digital platforms, and to illuminate how digital platforms might challenge prevailing understandings of what a community is and could be. This paper addresses these issues in the domain of music, using a diary-and-interview study conducted in China on people's everyday musical lives, bringing together both online and offline experiences. In examining the musical lives of people in China over a 3-week period, we analyse what mix of individualised and collective musical experiences we find there. We also ask how the role of digitalisation and platformisation might be understood in relation to that mix, especially given the widespread use of personalised recommendation systems on music platforms. We explore how intertwined dynamics of musical individualisation and community are being reshaped in the era of digital platforms and beyond that, whether there are reasons to think, on the basis of an examination of 22 Chinese musical lives, that digitalisation and platformisation are enhancing musical community or reducing it. We address these research questions by analysing three musical lives in some detail over a 3-week period in 2023, supplemented by discussion of two other, younger diarists.