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

Critic reviews

Nothing sweets me more than a music book that breaks the mould. This vibrant read amplifies here-and-now talents, featuring some of my favourite artists . . . It defies categorisation and captures the essence of what makes these musicians so captivating. Impossible not to love it

A daring book that affords the multifarious music of the modern streaming age and its most innovative - and successful - creative outliers with the deep, long-form analysis usually reverentially reserved for the dust-covered past. An important and fascinating cultural document

Tremendous, crisp writing. Liam strikes a perfect balance between the infectiously enthusiastic and the surgically thorough

A beautifully researched and deeply engaging exploration of the boundary-pushers who redefined music and identity in a fast-moving, ephemeral era, laid out with such clarity and passion that this book feels as essential to understanding our present as Mystery Train and As Serious as Your Life were to theirs

Fascinating

A modern take on five fascinating musicians and the worlds which created them. Insightful, beautifully told and as exciting as listening to your favourite music. A total breath of fresh air

A great primer [with] a deeper sense of mission . . . Twenty-first century culture can often seem glutted, but this book serves as a rejoinder not to get bamboozled by the algorithm blizzards into thinking it's nothing but simulacra and ghosts (Joe Muggs)

This is speedy, enthusiastic stuff . . . Songs in the Key of MP3 impresses most in the sheer excitement with which its author views his subject

One of those books where you'll find yourself shocked that it didn't exist before: it's a mapping out of the modern musical landscape on terms defined by the artists who've come to define it

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.