This article will, in a broad sense, discuss technology-based music from its early radio beginnings to the current participation practices, and seek to place both technical and musical development within broader trends of social development. The introduction of new technologies in industry, composition, mediation and consumption has, in a lasting manner, changed the way most of us listen to, participate in and make use of music in our daily lives. Electronic aesthetics has finally, following a development of nearly a hundred years, started to fulfil its initial promise of becoming widely accepted and popular outside of the narrow circles of musical expertise – a ‘democratic’ music unhindered by the hierarchies of the fine arts in their different configurations. But has it really fulfilled the original promise? Is it rather not so that both the music and its promise have changed over the years?

One thing is certain, our pre-adaption to aesthetic experiences has undergone extreme changes over the last twenty years or so. A paradigm shift brought about by digital media and distribution, as well as the networking of things, has directed large parts of humanity towards a new existence in the cross-section of technology and humanity, an existence where cyborgian qualities increase day by day.