ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the diverse responses of Mexican musicians to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the corresponding emergence and reimagination of virtual musical communities, audiences, and platforms during the pandemic. The creative approaches, and sheer scale and diversity of musical output within the diverse regional genres of music across Mexico, provide an ideal demonstration of the locally-contingent and idiosyncratic ways musicians responded to the global coronavirus moment. The chapter focuses on the ways YouTube-centred music performances and virtual gathering spaces carefully curated by Do-It-Yourself (DIY) media channels such as Querreque Films, GaVBroadcast, and Son Michoacán constituted core elements of the early communitarian responses of son huasteco, jarocho, and calentano musicians to the coronavirus crisis. This chapter describes the emergent phenomenon of these spatialized digital communities within the realm of what the authors term “SonTube,” a network of content creators, performers, and participant-consumers, constituting new and distinctive digital spaces during the pandemic where needs for social intimacy and cultural connection were met in the absence of physical gatherings. SonTube formed a virtual musical ecosystem encompassing sites of artistic production and dissemination, spaces of social and emotional sustenance, and for some, economic value.
