The rapid spread of digital platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and WeChat is reconfiguring cultural production in profound and complex ways. Longstanding media industries are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations – live-streaming, social media influencing, and podcasting, among others – are evolving at a breakneck pace.

Platforms and Cultural Production explores both the processes and implications of platformization in the cultural industries. Poell, Nieborg and Duffy identify key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and citizenship. While foregrounding three industries – news, gaming, and social media entertainment – they also draw upon examples from music, television, advertising, and more. The book is diverse in its geographic scope, and builds on case studies from North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia and China to reveal crucial differences and surprising parallels in the trajectories of platformization across the globe.

Combining lively cases with a novel conceptual framework, this book is essential for students, scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners seeking to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are transforming in the era of platforms.