Obviously, we talk about streaming a lot on this show. It is, after all, the 3,000-pound gorilla determining the basic political economy of the contemporary music industry. But all too often we—and let’s face it, pretty much everyone else in the Anglo media-sphere—are actually talking about a handful of geographically focused companies, rather than a truly global ecosystem. You know the ones, and you know the places.

But what does streaming look like outside the U.S./Western Europe—or beyond Spotify? To learn more, we talked with Ryan Blakeley, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, whose research focuses on a wide variety of locally-oriented streaming services, from state-affiliated systems in Greenland to fast-growing (Chinese-backed?) African startups. He also digs into the business infrastructure that makes such services possible, shedding light onto the firms that connect local companies to global rights-holders—and in doing so, pull them into the structural logic of the streaming industry. Come for a discussion of how streaming works in the Middle East. Stay for the ways in which nationally-organized streaming could remake the artistic economy.

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