ABSTRACT
Music is an important part of the social, emotional, and political lives of children and adolescents. Teenagers have long been the primary audience for popular music, and musical media for children of all ages have expanded greatly in the last generation. Children’s role as a music audience is a key aspect of their expanding public status as consumers, and music listening is a key practice for working through social relationships with peers and articulating identities around gender, race, class, and sexuality. Children integrate musical media into their long-standing cultural traditions, such as handclapping games and play with toys, and products from music and consumer industries are designed to cultivate these sensibilities. This chapter provides an overview of how these issues have been addressed in the US and Europe by scholars from ethnomusicology, music education, popular music, media and cultural studies, and communication, while focusing on recent technological and commercial developments that point to important changes for children’s status in public culture. This chapter does not address children’s musical culture in non-Western contexts.
