The phonogram as a contested object: listening, platforms, and insurgency in digital ethnomusicology

Abstract

This article offers a critical and ethnographic reflection on the phonogram in the digital age, understanding it as a technical, affective, economic, and political object constantly under dispute. We begin with international and Brazilian legal definitions that still frame the phonogram through material paradigms, despite its transformation into a digital, algorithmic, and dematerialized flow. Drawing on authors such as Gilbert Simondon, Jonathan Sterne, Brian Massumi, Steven Feld, Georgina Born, and Christopher Small, we argue that phonograms do not merely contain sound, they produce listening, relations, and presence. Through an ethnomusicological lens and autoethnographic accounts, we explore how phonograms operate as vehicles of memory, affect, and sonic territoriality, while simultaneously being subjected to systems of erasure, decontextualization, and hierarchical visibility on streaming platforms. We discuss the political economy of the phonogram within platform capitalism, exposing the concentration of symbolic and financial capital in a few corporations and the systemic disauthorship that disproportionately affects independent, LGBTQIAPN+, and racialized artists. We advocate for listening as both an epistemological and political gesture, a sensory practice that enables us to map worlds, resist algorithmic silencing, and reforge connections fragmented by the commodified logic of music circulation. In this context, ethnomusicology emerges as a field of confrontation and creative reinvention of listening practices. Even in digital form, the phonogram remains a living archive and a space of insurgency.