Songs in the Key of MP3

The New Icons of the Internet Age

By: Liam Inscoe-Jones

Narrated by: Gemma Lawrence, Liam Inscoe-Jones, Rori Hawthorn, Sam Crerar

It's 2013. You're a teenager squinting at your laptop in the dead of night, flicking between iTunes and YouTube and PirateBay. Endless reams of artists unspool at the click of a button. New forms of musical discovery open up before your very eyes. This evolving digital landscape exists beyond the radio, HMV and even the most extensive record collection. You've entered a whole new world and, suddenly, just about everything feels possible.

In Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age, Liam Inscoe-Jones explores five contemporary artists who broke the old rules of sound, style and the music industry at large: Devonté Hynes (of Blood Orange), FKA Twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and SOPHIE. Each began their careers as obscure outsiders but, over time, they helped to re-shape pop culture in their image. Through these five extraordinary figures and an eclectic supporting cast of dozens more, Inscoe-Jones paints a picture of the sonic landscape of the last ten years, exploring the influence of their dazzling music on pop culture, the internet and ourselves.

An unorthodox mix of criticism, biography and music history - and featuring interviews with the likes of Caroline Polachek, Daniel Lopatin and Nicolás Jaar - Songs in the Key of MP3 is a book of endless curiosity and wonder; a salutary attempt to define pop culture in a fast and ephemeral age.©2025 Liam Inscoe-Jones (P)2025 Orion Publishing Group Limited

Gets Down Into It.

Came for the Devonte Hynes chapter…everything about him is on my radar and enjoyed learning a thing or two…the rest of the book explained artists I know but not as well…I had to look up one or two names but talk about the will and guts…great insight inside into their experiences…technique and process that shaped the trajectory of music for us…modern music history…i wish there was snippets of the actual music from the artists while i was listening to the book…good thing i can pull it up on my device in an instant.