The idea for this special issue of Popular Music arose from three conferences that took place in 2020, 2021, and 2022: Mainstream! Popular Culture in Central and Eastern Europe (Prague, Czechia), Listening to (Mainstream) Popular Music in 2021: Sounds and Practices (Innsbruck, Austria), and Mainstream Silence: Thinking about the Music Everyone Listens to but Nobody Really Discusses (Strasbourg, France). All three conferences took as their main topic something usually not at the centre of popular music studies: the mainstream (of popular music).

During many conversations at and around these events, the idea gradually emerged to bring together scholars’ endeavours in the field of interest more formally and to assemble a collection of articles, following Baker, Bennett, and Taylor’s edited volume Redefining Mainstream Popular Music (Reference Baker, Bennett and Taylor2013). After two attempts in different constellations that unfortunately did not result in a call for papers, the three of us decided to submit a special issue proposal to Popular Music, as its broad thematic spectrum made it seem like the most fitting choice to us.

Initially not restricted to a particular region, the journal’s editorial board suggested narrowing the focus to Europe – an idea we welcomed with open arms. This narrower focus enabled us and the scholars we approached to direct the spotlight more precisely towards contexts where the popular music mainstreams remain relatively underexamined, particularly in English-language scholarship, and even more so in regions such as Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. The large number of proposals confirmed the high level of interest in scholarship on this topic. We initially invited eleven authors or author teams to contribute to the special issue. Unfortunately, four articles could not be delivered due to personal circumstances of the authors, meaning that some European regions, which would have also been in focus, remain underilluminated in terms of the study of mainstream popular music, at least for now.

Nevertheless, after this five-year process, we are pleased to offer you a diverse range of regional and thematic perspectives. The authors of this special issue explore the following topics: the reconfiguration of the relationship between independence and mainstream commercial logic in Italy; the gendered labour of behind-the-scenes workers in the Belgian music industry; notions of a counter-hegemonic mainstream in the contemporary jazz scene in London, England; the disruption of the cultural hierarchy in Poland through the rise of the disco polo genre to the mainstream; the duality of the mainstream in Slovenia resulting from the stratified and relational structure of audience tastes; and YouTube-audience responses to Noonoouri – a virtual idol created in Germany. This special issue also features a critical reflection, in the journal’s Middle Eight section, on the possibilities and risks of using data from music streaming platforms for research, particularly with regard to the frequently streamed recordings.

The theoretical foundation of this special issue, on which the call for papers was based, is the notion that the idea of the mainstream, or of multiple mainstreams, can be used as a lens through which to analyse the contemporary sounds and practices of popular music in transnational European contexts. Therefore, as claimed in Steinbrecher (Reference Steinbrecher2021), the special issue opens several casements of the same window to comparatively identify the mainstream-related responses to the mechanisms of cultural globalisation influence (p. 410).

However, a fundamental question remained: What concept of mainstream(s) can underlie research in this context, and how can the term be understood and applied to the study of popular music? More crucially, we wanted to grapple with whether it is still productive to use ‘mainstream’ as a concept or an analytical tool for studying musical phenomena, as it may be a dated notion no longer relevant to meaning-making, identity construction, valuation practices, and – more broadly – the production, distribution, and reception of popular music today. Our shared baseline was the claim that mainstream is ‘an evaluative term with strong adherence to economic aspects that refers to a process’ (Steinbrecher Reference Steinbrecher2021, p. 408). Of these three dimensions, the processual character proved most prominent across the special issue’s texts, while the economic tether remained an important factor throughout the analyses. At the same time, drawing on Sarah Thornton’s account of subcultural capital, which operationalises hipness as a currency of distinction premised on opposition to mainstream musical culture (Thornton Reference Thornton1995), we note that the once-axiomatic view of the mainstream as necessarily carrying a negative evaluation no longer fully holds – at least in relation to music. Rather than presuming a rigid binary between the mainstream and an ostensibly authentic ‘outside’ (for example, indie music), it is therefore necessary to reconsider the mainstream as a relational, processual field within which subcultural capital is accumulated through practices of differentiation, and within which hipness, for example, may be articulated both against and within mainstream circuits of value.

In the first article of this special issue, Massimiliano Raffa, who conducted ethnographic fieldwork with musicians, industry professionals, and audiences, argues that in Italy over the past decade, ‘semantic and aesthetic coordinates of indie have shifted from oppositional autonomy to a stylised modality’. Emphasising the mainstream as a process, he adopts the term ‘mainstreamisation’ not to denote a simple and straight movement from margins to centre. Instead, he recognises a broader cultural reorganisation in which oppositional practices are not eliminated but absorbed. In the Italian context, the boundaries between mainstream and indie have become more permeable than they traditionally were, because ‘the semantic and aesthetic contours of “indie” are now delineated through varying degrees of compatibility with platform logics’. Consequently, according to Raffa, indie no longer functions as a stable cultural formation ‘held together by institutions and oppositional claims’ but is now ‘a dispersed set of attachments and intuitions that still orient practice, but without stable footing’.

Liz Przybylski’s article also emphasises the permeability of mainstream and alternative notions. She uses the example of Belgium to discuss the expectations that women* face in music workplaces due to their intersectional gender identities. Based on a literature review and twenty interviews with behind-the-scenes workers, she finds that in Brussels and Liège, ‘mainstream and underground logics are interdependent’ and ‘overlapping modes of cultural production sustained by shared infrastructures and audiences’. In her research, she operationalises an economic conception of mainstream music sector labour as ‘work pursued for income’ and illustrates that, particularly for behind-the-scenes professionals, a separation of spheres rarely holds in practice, as they ‘often work with musicians ranging from emerging artists to those who already have a large listenership’. However, Przybylski’s interviews reveal that women* find themselves confronted with gendered experiences in several negative ways. This makes it even harder for them to move into the more lucrative mainstream sectors ‘oriented towards broad audiences’ and, as the author details, increases the need for professional mentorship and practice-based experience.

A non-derogatory view that making a living in or with music is tied, to some extent, to mainstream exposure is also advanced by Gummo Clare in his study of the mainstreamisation of the London jazz scene in the early 2020s. He contends that mainstream status is indicated by commercial success, cultural influence, and momentum, but emphasises the need for caution when evaluating this in the ‘current era of fragmented audiences, hyper-personalised listening recommendations, “fake” streams, and the waning influence of the music charts’. Clare reveals the paradox of how something can enter one mainstream while leaving another. He traces the ‘London jazz explosion’ as moving towards the popular-music mainstream and away from ‘mainstream jazz’ – a dynamic he characterises as ‘counter-hegemonic mainstreaming’. While Massimiliano Raffa identifies adherence to algorithmic curation and a turn towards a ‘polished, affectively soft strain of pop’ as the mechanisms by which indie diffused into the mainstream in the Italian context, Clare identifies the ‘distinctive racial and gender diversity, genre fluidity, and influence from club and sound system culture’, as well as the music’s danceability, as decisive features that have rendered the London scene more approachable to wider audiences, thereby ‘driving the increasing mainstream profile of many of its leading lights’.

Katarzyna Wyrzykowska identifies a very different catalyst for the mainstream advance of a particular music genre, specifically of disco polo in Poland. In her article, she discusses the ‘politically calculated programming decisions’ that brought the ‘electronic folk music’ of disco polo into the broad public media, amplifying its presence to win support among social groups in peripheral regions, particularly in north-eastern Poland, that had long been derided for their musical preferences. In a nationwide qualitative study of forty families conducted in 2021, which focused on music and culture more broadly, Wyrzykowska noted that respondents often referenced disco polo in their personal narratives, primarily in the context of rejected musical taste. However, a few respondents, particularly farmers and workers, openly admitted to valuing disco polo, revealing a sympathy that was previously hidden due to processes of ‘imposition and subordination and class struggles over tastes’ as well as cultural elites and white-collar workers assigning a ‘low cultural value’ to the genre. Thus, this article presents new perspectives on mainstream notions, casting mainstreamisation as the empowerment of marginalised groups and the strengthening of community cohesion around shared musical preferences.

Wyrzykowska’s article makes it clear that the concept of one homogeneous mainstream is no longer – or has never been – applicable, even in national contexts. Jernej Kaluža and Robert Bobnič provide strong support for this observation in their study of mainstream popular music in Slovenia. Their data-driven analysis of a survey of musical preferences and radio airplay lists is based on the idea of mainstream as ‘a feedback loop between curation and (preferred) consumption, shaped by the logic of mainstream bias: what is heard tends to be liked, and what is liked tends to be heard’. They conclude that Slovenia has a segmented ‘dual mainstream’, clustered around genres that reflect cultural and generational divides between global seasonal high-rotation hits and local domestic and regional evergreens. The authors encounter systematic limitations within the Slovenian music landscape as a result of ‘institutional repetition and audience selection’ and identify a mainstream formed at the intersection of local ties, regional heritage, and global market forces. Current productions by local artists rarely have the opportunity to reach ‘analogue audiences’ via traditional media channels.

Kaluža and Bobnič’s closing argument indicates that innovation and discovery have migrated online – a dynamic particularly evident in Tiffany Wai Man Fong and Chi Ying Lam’s article. Their focus is on the virtual idol Noonoouri, making it the only study of this special issue to set a particular artist at the centre of attention – in this case, not a human artist. Using quantitative sentiment analysis and qualitative thematic coding of YouTube comments, the authors examine audience reception of Noonoouri, a major-label signed ‘musical performer’ created in Germany who ‘integrates CGI visuals, AI-assisted vocal synthesis, and original pop music releases’. Fong and Lam position Noonoouri within a ‘platform-specific mainstream’ in European music-cultural contexts, understood as a discursive framework shaped by commercial visibility and algorithmic promotion. They suggest that audiences actively navigate AI-generated creativity, artistic legitimacy, and affective resonance, negotiating technologically mediated performances as ‘responses to globally circulating digital music practices’. The authors further argue that digital visibility and participatory interactions can produce ‘alternative forms of mainstream recognition independent of industry rankings’, such as traditional charts.

However, according to Fong and Lam’s analyses, reactions to this non-human performer remain rather reserved, largely because she is assessed according to the same criteria as human performers. This points to another possible axis of differentiation between the mainstreams in Europe explored and operationalised across the articles in this special issue, alongside regional, technological, economic, and stylistic aspects. In the near future, additional parallel mainstream frameworks may take shape, with some centred on real (human) artists and others on virtual (non-human) artists – the latter frameworks potentially developing their own logics and evaluation mechanisms.

The increasing presence of AI-generated content on streaming platforms is certainly an emerging issue for the study of mainstream popular music and the ‘intrinsically connected’ notion of ‘most frequently streamed recordings’, in the words of Nikita Braguinski. In his critical comment on analysing large-scale listening datasets, Braguinski emphasises that statistical features chiefly reflect ‘the interactions of all the actors in the system’, not the recording itself. He advocates a humanities-informed, processual, relational, and interpretive approach to streaming-platform(-controlled) data to study the processes behind the products and to ‘fully capture the dynamic realities of contemporary musical life’. By adhering to critical methodological pluralism, Braguinski suggests that scholars could explore the tensions between the mainstream and the niche, for instance. They could ask whether niche categories do indeed become more visible over time, or question ‘preconceived ideas’ about listener behaviour, such as the notion that platform recommendations narrow tastes.

Taking this approach, large-data-oriented streaming analysis could inform all six articles in this special issue and complement the comparative perspective on European contexts that it opens up. However, this perspective notably lacks an explicit focus on international hit music and current international stars, and on how they are perceived in local contexts. Moreover, musical characteristics are only sporadically indicated and are seldom at the heart of the studies’ arguments. While the latter corroborates the still rather subordinate role of music-centred mainstream popular music scholarship, the former aligns with the notion that the articles’ relationship to mainstream ideas – or, at least, to our mainstream ideas – was not always immediately apparent, owing to differing accounts and operationalisations that challenge more conventional understandings (e.g. adherence to top charts, broad public discourse, or international circulation).

This allows us to reconsider how we might think about (the relevance of) mainstream notions in a musical context – and what is gained by further examining them. On the one hand, the authors still conceptualise the mainstream as a kind of foil, against which musical value, cultural hierarchy, generational divides, economic subsistence, identity norms, or even human self-conception – and all the intrinsic disputes that animate these discourses – are negotiated or become negotiable. On the other hand, the dichotomies long taken (perhaps always wrongly) for granted in the external view of the mainstream are apparently losing their edge – between good and bad, high and low, young and old, wealthy and poor, dominant and suppressed, or the few and the many.

Navigating as a scholar within a system of coordinates that, in one way or another, signal ‘mainstream’ means putting a finger on the fact that – at least in Europe, for now – the ways music is produced, distributed, and perceived still depend on local circumstances, conventions, and inequalities, even as they are exposed to rapid, globally driven technological and societal upheavals, with their attendant uncertainties, fragmentations, and consolidations. The mainstream may no longer always be a society’s loudest stage or ‘the music everyone listens to’, but examining music through a mainstream lens can still yield clues about shared horizons of aesthetic and cultural orientations, friction points, and obstacles. Whether future snapshots will continue to reveal such interindividually experienced discursive spaces remains an open question.