Book excerpt: This book explores the democratization of music in our current era made possible by digital technologies. Music has become ubiquitous and increasingly intertwined with everyday life, rendering previous models of creation, performance, and consumption obsolete. Diffusing Music identifies trajectories between 20th-century innovators and the broader redefinition of the musical art in popular culture today. This approach can inform new modalities of musical thinking in the wake of the transformations being actualized by artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. The author has been an active participant in many of the scenes and movements that gave rise to musical democratization. His experiences and collaborations with influential figures in the field are woven into the fabric of the narrative.