Online music streaming has emerged as a central mode of consumption in Europe and many other parts of the world, representing a distinct break from older forms of music media such as compact discs or broadcast radio. Instead of the one-to-many models that have historically dominated music dissemination – where an individual’s listening habits could only be guessed at through aggregate sales figures or broadcast audience estimates – streaming has introduced a one-to-one model. This shift, which gradually gained momentum during the last two decades (Drott 2024, p. 1), hinges on platforms and devices that also allow unprecedented observation of how individual listeners engage with recorded music. Consequently, hundreds of millions of people are now individually tracked in near-real time, generating vast amounts of granular data.

This ethnographic study examines the transformation of Italian indie culture under platform capitalism, tracing how digital infrastructures have reconfigured the relationship between independence and mainstream commercial logic. Drawing on fieldwork with musicians, industry professionals, and audiences across Italy, it argues that the semantic and aesthetic coordinates of indie have shifted from oppositional autonomy to a stylised modality compatible with platform logics, where visibility and metric optimisation increasingly dictate artistic legitimacy through commercial imperatives and through the internalisation of platform-mediated evaluative frameworks. The Italian case, rooted in a tradition of politicised independence, reveals how local infrastructures and cultural histories mediate these global transformations. Synthesising grounded, abductive analysis with historical reconstruction, the study identifies three intertwined processes – mainstreamisation, semantic drift, and platform gravity – through which visibility metrics and sponsorship logics recalibrate artistic practice, legitimacy, and audience address, recognising that these dynamics interact with diverse cultural trajectories and do not operate as a uniform homogenising force. The emerging configurations still depend on established intermediaries, informal circuits, and human decision-making embedded in longstanding power structures, even as platform mediation intensifies the circulation and repetition of certain stylistic and organisational practices. To theorise these shifts, the article advances ‘poptimism’ as a structural condition. The analysis shows how this gravitational field is absorbed into existing professional sensibilities, where platform mentalities recur within industry judgements shaped by longstanding organisational logics.

The present paper first distinguishes three different ways in which the logic of parthood and composition on the one hand, and the logic of location on the other might interact. It then goes on to explore several relations between location and composition. In doing so it (i) sheds new light on recent results and (ii) proves new substantive ones along the way.

The mudskipper Boleophthalmus dussumieri (Teleostei, Gobiiformes, Oxudercidae) is an amphibious goby native to the Indian Ocean, from Kuwait Bay and Persian Gulf to the northeast of the Arabian Sea and the western coast of India. This study reports on the first record of B. dussumieri in the Atlantic Ocean, based on morphological and molecular evidence. A single specimen was collected in September 2024 in São Marcos Bay, on the coast of the state of Maranhão (Brazilian Amazon Coast). This is the second exotic species of oxudercid goby reported for the coast of Maranhão, possibly accidentally introduced through ballast water discharge.

Welcome to Volume 26, No. 4 of Enterprise and Society. By tradition, this issue carries the Presidential Address delivered at the annual meeting of the Business History Conference, alongside summaries of those dissertations shortlisted for the Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. The 2025 Presidential Address was delivered by Stephen Mihm at the annual meeting in Athens, Georgia (USA). Stephen’s topic was “The Business of Labor.” Unfortunately, unforeseen circumstances have as yet prevented Stephen from finalizing his address for publication. We look forward to publishing the address as soon as possible. Three dissertations were shortlisted for the Krooss Prize: Joshua Lappen on “Electrification, Politics, and Visibility in Greater Los Angeles”; Pablo Pryluka on “Developing Consumers: A History of Wants and Needs in Postwar South America”; and Mattie Webb on “Diplomacy at Work: The South African Worker, U.S. Multinationals, and Transnational Racial Solidarity (1972-1987).” We congratulate all three finalists, and especially Dr. Pryluka, who was the 2025 prize recipient. All three summaries are presented in this issue.

We construct a family of special cycle classes on the regular integral model of an orthogonal Shimura variety, and show that these cycle classes appear as Fourier coefficients of a Siegel modular form. Passing to the generic fiber of the Shimura variety recovers a result of Bruinier and Raum, originally conjectured by Kudla.

Since the 1990s, growing interest in the relationship between clusters and economic growth has highlighted the importance of understanding their internal structures and life cycles. Still, the mechanisms underlying cluster emergence remain largely unknown, especially regarding the influence of public policies in this initial stage. This paper examines the emergence of a metalworking cluster in the Spanish steelmaking pole of Asturias, focusing on Francoist industrial policy and the regime’s relationship with regional firms.

Findings indicate that Asturias presented favorable conditions for cluster formation since the late eighteenth century. However, only the establishment of the national steelmaking champion Ensidesa in 1950 triggered the appearance of self-reinforcing dynamics, finally boosting the cluster’s emergence. This process resulted from the indirect externalities generated by the steel industry and was never part of the Francoist industrial agenda. Despite the recognized sector’s potential, the regime prioritized strategic base industries and systematically ignored calls for direct support for metalworking firms.