ABSTRACT

This chapter draws on my long-term ethnographic investments in amateur music making and reception in Lisbon’s fado scenes. It asks questions about both the place of urban ethnography and the material stakes for musicians in a moment marked by the burgeoning global tourist industry along with the proliferation of heritage practices, “low-cost” travel, city branding, and new practices of urban tourism. These phenomena are currently aligning to produce significant shifts in the ways in which experiences of urban popular musics and their cities are consumed, experienced, and shaped for local residents and tourists.