Instrumentalised performers: The track-centred mode and gendered labour in China's platformised music industry

This article examines viral-hit music in China as a non-Western case study of how platformisation reconfigures cultural production and gendered labour. It introduces the concept of the track-centred mode of music production and shows that digital platforms privilege music as measurable and controllable data commodities, treating performers as uncontrollable variables. Drawing on ethnographic research within China's music industry, it analyses how viral-hit production disproportionately instrumentalises female performers, who are stratified into three tiers: stars, grassroots musicians, and singing-dancing influencers , according to visibility, authorship, and disposability. Women in the lower two tiers face intensified exploitation. Grassroots musicians are exploited across the full production cycle, while singing-dancing influencers are bodily objectified and aggregated into post-visibility labour , a systematic, alienated form of visibility work orchestrated by the hit-making industry. The article argues that China's viral-hit phenomenon exemplifies intensified global platformisation, in which gendered exploitation is not incidental but constitutive of platformised cultural work.