HELLO. MY NAME'S LIAM AND I'M A WRITER
pre-order
songs in the key of mp3
foyles
my first book
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, I explore 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.
Hi, my name is Liam Inscoe-Jones and I'm a writer from Wolverhampton, an industrial city in the middle of England. This is the place where I keep the things I've written. Some of them are posted from elsewhere, other stuff will be fresh and crisp and exclusive to this site. If you don't like fresh or crisp things then here's some stuff I've published elsewhere: a short story about a Facebook content moderator, which isn't for the faint-hearted. Here is a piece I wrote about Bruce Springsteen's wilderness years in the 1990s, alongside three profiles of a Palestinian radio station called Radio Al-Hara, which you should listen to while you read them. Here is my work for The Quietus and Line Of Best Fit, where I sometimes review albums and other-times interview artists like Lianne La Havas, Dave Longstreth (of the Dirty Projectors), Stella Donnelly, Ben Frost, Bartees Strange and the guy from Five Seconds of Summer. My agent for both fiction and non-fiction is Becky Thomas of Lewinsohn Literary and my debut book about music - Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age - comes out March 2025 in the UK. I am working on my debut novel as we speak but, in the meantime, I'm also avaliable for all your copy-editing, copy-writing, proof-reading and ghost-writing needs. If you would like to pay me to do any of those things then please get in touch at inscoejones.liam@gmail.com to either ask my rates or chat. ​Since 2018 I've been making playlists of the best new songs released each month, every month. You can find those on my Apple Music here and on my Spotify here. I'm working hard to keep your ears fed.