A Mediatized and Decentered Future

Popular Music Studies at IASPM 2025

Abstract

The 23rd IASPM Biennial Conference (Paris, 2025), themed “Recording Popular Music”, directed scholarly attention from external social crises toward a renewed focus on the medium of recording itself. This review identifies three key intellectual currents evident at the conference: an ontological turn that redefined recording as music’s mode of existence; a technological-historical turn that reframed sound technologies as cultural artifacts; and a continued engagement with identity politics, now turned inward to examine recording as a site of gendered power and decolonial contestation. Together, these shifts established recording as a central object of theory and method. The conference also signaled a move toward a more mediatized and polycentric future for the discipline, exemplified by the growing participation of scholars from beyond the Anglo-American sphere.