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Amateur live performances on the city streets of Wuhan give afterlives to songs in the Chinese pop canon; they are sites for this repertory to be adapted and assimilated into musical worlds beyond those of the artists and industries responsible for its original production and dissemination. Singers here learn the songs by following commercial recordings, a process related to oral transmission as it enables and constrains creativity in ways that are reflective of the social and technological circumstances of performers' lives. Recordings feed into the spread of change among Wuhan's amateur singers, with certain limitations and new possibilities also resulting from the technologies and skills available on the streets. Examining popular song afterlives exposes mundane layers of creativity, and comments more broadly on prosaic drivers of new meaning in current popular music practices.
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Samuel Horlor (2019) studied this question.
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