Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Chicago
M.A. Anthropology, University of Chicago
B.A. Music and Anthropology, Whitman College
- Ethnomusicology
- Anthropology
- South Asian studies
- Community-engaged research
Jayson Beaster-Jones is a Professor of Music in the Global Arts Studies Program at the University of California, Merced. He received his B.A. in Music and Anthropology from Whitman College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has previously taught at Augustana University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Chicago. Beaster-Jones is ethnomusicologist whose work focuses upon the music industry of India. He has conducted numerous years of ethnographic research in North India and has been the recipient of grants from the Fulbright-Hays DDRA, the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, and the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University, among many others. He has presented his research at a number of professional conferences and was the 2008 recipient of the Lise Waxer Prize of the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology for the paper entitled Indexing the Past, Selling the Future.
Current Projects
In addition to his work on media industries of India, he created and has co-directs (with Patricia Vergara) the Gateway to Merced Project, a community-engaged oral history project that collects and archives the stories of Merced County residents belonging to diverse linguistic and geographical communities. Since 2016 he has been running Music Memory Hours in Merced in order to examine the relationships between music, autobiographical memory, and aging.These projects have been funded by the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Luce Family Foundation, California Arts Council, and UC Merced's Center for the Humanities. A number of student cohorts from UC Merced's UROC-H Program have participated in these programs alongside faculty and Interdisciplinary Humanities graduate students. In 2025, Profs. Beaster-Jones and Vergara are also recipients of a three year Multicampus Research Program Initiative (MRPI) grant for their project on the soundscapes of Merced County in an era of climate change.
He is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Music Industry Studies (with Kaleb Goldschmitt), The Routledge Handbook of Cinemas of South Asia (with Ajay Gehlawat), a co-producer of the What's Your Problem Podcast (with Paul Gibbons), and leads the G Street Revolution faculty ensemble.
Past Projects
His first book entitled Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song (2015, Oxford University Press) explores 70 years of Bollywood film songs and their musical and social meanings. Bollywood Sounds illustrates how the producers of Indian film songs have long mediated a variety of musical styles, instruments, and performance practices to create a uniquely cosmopolitan music genre that has been the dominant popular music genre of India.
His second book, Music Commodities, Markets, and Values: Music as Merchandise (2016, Routledge) examines music retail stores as sites of cultural production in contemporary India, focusing in particular upon the kinds of economic and social values that are produced as music is sold, as well as the meanings that accompany music commodities in retail contexts. The project also addresses the cultural and media histories of the Indian music industry, the discourses of piracy and intellectual property, and the social changes that have accompanied Indias economic liberalization reforms.
His third book, Dil Chahta Hai Soundtrack (2024, Bloomsbury) explores the production and rock band aesthetic of the soundtrack to the 2001 Hindi language film Dil Chahta Hai. In this book, Beaster-Jones argues that the music directors Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy were foundational in transforming the sound of Hindi cinema in the 21st century, creating an alternative, rock band approach to sound production that became a model for later music directors. The book features interviews with many of the people involved in the production of the soundtrack.
Beaster-Jones co-edited the volume Music in Contemporary Indian Film (2017, Routledge), and he has published in the journals Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, and South Asian Popular Culture, as well as book chapters in several edited volumes.
