Songs In The Key of MP3 by Liam Inscoe-Jones

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: Devonte 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 Nicolas 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.

A book about the last ten years of music, through five artists

About the Author: Liam Inscoe-Jones is a music and fiction writer who has written for The Quietus, Line of Best Fit and Spectrum Culture. He has interviewed members of 5 Seconds of Summer, Dirty Projectors and Tame Impala, alongside Lianne La Havas, Bartees Strange, Enter Shikari, Xenia Rubinos and Amber Mark, among others. His debut short story ‘You Have Been Notified’ was published in The Social in 2021. He has released playlists of the best new songs from each month, every month, since 2018. Songs in the Key of MP3 is his first book.

03 Apr 2025
 

Songs In The Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age by Liam Inscoe-Jones ISBN 9781399609630