Published 2024 with Oxford University Press 🔓 gold open access – read here!

Some fifty years after its birth in the Bronx, hip hop is one of the most significant cultural forms of the internet age. Now that the internet is enmeshed in our everyday lives, hip hop is predominantly encountered and experienced online, where it comprises a third of all streamed music. People are constantly making, commenting on, and sharing hip hop media on internet platforms—Drake memes, viral TikTok dances, AI-generated rappers—challenging hip hop’s conventional connections to place, authenticity, and community. This book provides an urgent study of the most recent chapter in the life of hip hop, one closely intertwined with the networked cultural flows of the internet.

With an innovative method encompassing music and cultural analysis, ethnography, and web data analysis, Digital Flows provides a cutting-edge account of the intersections between hip hop and the internet. For old school heads and Extremely Online memesters alike, for fans and creatives, for students and academics seeking to understand digital transformations of music, Digital Flows uncovers what happens when a cultural form born on the streets thrives on transformative technologies of global reach.

The book is free for everyone to read digitally or you can purchase it in print.

“Internet studies and creator studies are integral to the ways in which we look at contemporary media studies overall. However, there has yet to be a defining text that has highlighted how musicians are early adopters and first movers of both the web and social media platforms. Gamble’s text tackles this task in a very refreshing way. His interdisciplinary ethics of care towards theorizing musicians as innovative creators makes this text very accessible and necessary.” (Jabari “Naledge” Evans, University of South Carolina and Institute for Rebooting Social Media, Harvard University)

“Digital Flows places hip-hop at the very heart of the contemporary internet landscape. This wide-ranging and rigorously researched book provides a forward-looking cultural framework to help scholars untangle the deeply intertwined and ever-changing relationship between hip-hop and the internet. Deftly navigating various digital media platforms, Gamble brilliantly explores hip hop’s new online frontiers, including memes, streams, virtual cyphers, and dance crazes. Digital Flows makes a timely and lively contribution to our understanding of music, media, and culture in the Internet age. Considering that hip-hop continues to shape and be shaped by the online landscape, this book will be critical to any scholar researching digital music-making and foundational to thinking about the potential futures of hip-hop and the internet.” (Jasmine A. Henry, University of Pennsylvania)