ABSTRACT
Music is an integral part of the lives and media cultures of children and adolescents. As audiences and consumers of music, children cultivate peer relations and identities related to age, gender, race, class, and sexuality. Their activities are configured according to changing practices and modes of access to music as well as to shifting identifications with genres such as commercial, folk, mainstream pop, and tween pop music. Changing media landscapes, from print sources and phonograph records to film, television, and digital culture, construct childhood and children's music while children, in turn, engage with these media according to their needs. Longstanding children's cultural traditions, such as handclapping and singing games combine reciprocally with contemporary media cultures, while digital technologies create new contexts for young people's music use and social relations, with young people and their music and media devices serving as emblems of the digital age. Subject to discourses about their media use, children navigate complex realities through music media. This chapter addresses children's musical media in the United States and Europe, focusing on recent technological and commercial developments, which point to important changes for children's status as participants in public culture.
