Previous research has shown that uses of media technologies (Gray 1992, Lally 2002) as well as music consumption (DeNora 2000) are gendered practices, while scholars have also emphasized how national context and ideas about nation, ethnicity and race play into the uses of media technologies (Miller & Slater 2000) and music cultures (Roy 2010).  Drawing on such analyses, this paper investigates contemporary practices in music use from an intersectional feminist perspective. It takes as its starting point the Internet as a core music platform, which is transforming listening modes and potentially also meanings of music.

Posing questions about how to understand emerging trends in music use in relation to music as a gendered and place-bound practice, the paper presents one part of a larger study of music use online among young adults in Stockholm and Moscow. The study is ongoing and is conducted by the presenters and their colleagues. Analyzing focus group interviews with young adult men and women, the paper explores how – primarily – gender and nation is articulated (Hall 1996) in the talk about music and online media technologies. Through discussions about their favorite music as well as their favorite media to use when listening to music, and how music is intricately intertwined in their social networks, the participants display ideas about themselves in a context of gender, place, ethnicity and race. We argue that the way they listen to music and use media technology such as Spotify and Last FM can be understood as interplaying with the process of articulation of gender and nation, and that this articulation may differ between different places.