A digital turn for community music? Lessons from corridos tumbados

This article takes up Lee Higgins’s suggestion that community music can function as a critical lens, using it heuristically to examine the recent rise of corridos tumbados , a trap-inflected offshoot of the Mexican corrido . The genre consolidated during the worldwide COVID-19 lockdowns, when face-to-face gatherings were curtailed, a development seemingly at odds with community music’s welfare-state, facilitator-centred and co-present model. Drawing on Higgins’ typology (music of a community, communal music-making and facilitated intervention) and critical debates about the field’s ‘positive bias’, we map the ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes that enable corridos tumbados ’ platform-driven transnational circulation. We argue that the genre’s consolidation is best understood as an acceleration of digital affordances whose operating principles long predate the pandemic, rather than as an anomaly. This reframing shifts facilitation from a single host to an ecology of artists, influencers, algorithms, platforms and low-threshold conventions, through which inclusion, exclusion and commodification are co-produced. By allowing the lens to work both outwardly (on corridos tumbados ) and inwardly (on community music), we propose a ‘digital turn’ that equips practitioners and educators to locate their work within wider digital infrastructures and their attendant power asymmetries.