ABSTRACT
In less than a decade, a global social media environment has evolved within the media and communications landscape. Since the turn of the millennium, a plethora of local, national, regional, and global social media and networking services have come to populate the online milieu, where they compete and coexist, grow and fade. This chapter explores the political, economic, technological, and cultural tendencies and factors influential in the development of this environment. It shows how the global social media services MySpace and Facebook, along with YouTube and Twitter, have exploited the factors associated with media globalization—the increased linking and intertwining of the global media and communications landscape—to expand. The chapter, then, traces key general developments underpinning the global social media and music nexus from a corporate perspective.
