Songs in the Key of MP3 - The New Icons of the Internet Age

Event information

Writer and music critic Liam Inscoe-Jones joins Will Burns to discuss his fascinating new book on music in the internet age.

It's 2013. You're a teenager squinting at your laptop in the dead of night, flicking between iTunes and YouTube and PirateBay.Endless reams of artists unspool at the click of a button. New forms of musical discovery open up before your very eyes. This evolving digital landscape exists beyond the radio, HMV and even the most extensive record collection. You've entered a whole new world and, suddenly, just about everything feels possible.

In Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age, Liam Inscoe-Jones explores five contemporary artists who broke the old rules of sound, style and the music industry at large: Devonté Hynes (of Blood Orange), FKA Twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and SOPHIE. Each began their careers as obscure outsiders but, over time, they helped to re-shape pop culture in their image. Through these five extraordinary figures and an eclectic supporting cast of dozens more, Inscoe-Jones
paints a picture of the sonic landscape of the last ten years, exploring the influence of their dazzling music on pop culture, the internet and ourselves.

Liam Inscoe-Jones is a music and fiction writer who has written for The Quietus, Line of Best Fit and Spectrum Culture. He has interviewed members of 5 Seconds of Summer, Dirty Projectors and Tame Impala, alongside Lianne La Havas, Bartees Strange, Enter Shikari, Xenia Rubinos and Amber Mark, among others. His debut short story 'You Have Been Notified' was published in The Social in 2021. He has released playlists of the best new songs from each month, every month, since 2018. Songs in the Key of MP3 is his first book.