Peer production and changing norms in music practice: an ethnomusicological perspective

This article explores this by comparing discussions of music practices in the Global South with those of the North through the analytical perspective of ethnomusicology, a discipline concerned with the analysis of music in its social context. Ethnomusicology has traditionally focused on apparently clearly geographically and culturally bounded 'non-Western', diasporic and indigenous musics. Increasingly, however, it offers a critical analytical perspective where centre-periphery models are unstable due to the global spread of mobile technology and cultural diversity within nations. The comparison is organised under a set of headings extracted as key points from the changing norms associated with peer production described above. These are: authorship, ownership and control, participation, and income.