How does music go viral on social media? This presentation briefly historicizes and contextualizes the contagious concept of “virality” on the internet. Participation in the production, watching, listening to, circulating, or sharing of “viral” digital internet objects has constituted a significant site of 21st-century musical practice. And across the 21st century, digital platforms have adapted to facilitate this viral musicality, using music’s positive capacities—aesthetic pleasure, communal participation, social connectivity—to enable corporate profit-making, corral attention, and incentivize acceptance of increasing technocapital enclosure of the internet and everyday life.Paula Clare Harper, an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, is a musicologist who researches music, sound, and the internet. She is interested in putting digital ephemera and oddities into broader context, in hearing the musicality of online meme cultures, and in tracking music’s creation and circulation across digital platforms and communities. She is the author of Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms (University of Chicago Press, 2027) and the co-editor of Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans (Routledge, 2025). Note: This event will not be livestreamed.