This article explores the key standards identified by songwriters, collaborative artists, and music industry representatives in the commercial pop and Schlager sectors, along with the platform-centric myths they implicitly address. We first provide a theoretical overview of collaborative songwriting and platformisation. Through original interviews and ethnographic observations, we examine two primary platform standards: streaming and social media. We emphasise the growing significance of collaborative songwriting in the streaming era, particularly through songwriting camps, and the pervasive use of social media in creative and economic contexts. Our analysis demystifies two prevalent myths. The first myth concerns the ambiguous role of intermediaries, especially publishers, who act as new service points for efficient billing and songwriting facilitation. The second myth addresses TikTok’s success and its declining conversion rates for streaming.

Music streaming platforms are complex socio-technical infrastructures that co-construct cultural production, distribution, and reception. Different contributions have highlighted that artists, producers, and operators may implement optimisation processes, based on their algorithmic imaginaries, to align their music to the modes of listening and categorisation imposed by algorithmic media. Drawing on thirty-nine semi-structured interviews with producers, songwriters, recording industry professionals, and listeners who are heavy users of streaming platforms, this paper reconstructs the social life of a platform-optimised song. Bridging perspectives from science and technology studies and media studies, we investigate the network of relations between human and non-human actors that contribute to the circulation of a platform-optimised song during a four-phase life cycle: creation, industry mediation, platform mediation, and reception. The findings highlight multiple forms of power asymmetries at each stage, recursive dynamics, the erosion of artistic autonomy, and the collaboration of humans and non-human agents to transform music tracks into datafied products.

This study examines the learning processes that take place when upper secondary students apply and generate theories while drawing on their preferred music and writing songs of their own. One music theory teacher and two researchers collaborated to design an emergent sequence of lessons focusing on students’ interests, questions and creative work. Interpretive and musical analysis of students’ progress suggests that learning to theorise through modes and sounds from popular music was experienced as motivating, involved similar difficulties as traditional major/minor-based approaches, and resulted in original songs that the students enjoyed and were proud to perform for their peers.