Digital music distributors in Eastern Europe: Cultural intermediaries and power relations in the platformised recording industry

Abstract

This article contributes to studying cultural production and intermediaries through music streaming from an Eastern European perspective, answering recent calls to de-Westernise cultural and media studies. Theoretically, it combines critical approaches to the platformisation of the cultural industries and to cultural intermediaries with world-systems analysis. Through qualitative research conducted in Hungary, it explores the characteristic roles, strategies, and discourses of digital music distributors, often ignored yet key (trans)local intermediaries between local, semiperipheral musicians and global platforms. Characteristic discourses reproduced by digital distributors as cultural intermediaries are analysed through a framework of moral geopolitics wherein the Eastern European semiperipheral position informs discourses around technological and music industry development.