As an art form, a symbol of the cultural or communal space, and a representation of self and identity, music has always been subjected to sociological and anthropological studies. Despite some minor differences in the methodology and the philosophical orientation of these two disciplines, there has been an increasing convergence concerning their main interest in the multifaceted relations between individuals and the society they inhabit. Thus, sociology and social anthropology have conceptually come much closer. The proximity between the two disciplines has especially grown from the second half of the 20th century, with the advent of new communication technologies and because of the irrevocable influence of globalization. Accordingly, the post-industrial mechanisms of musical production, as well as the postmodern approach to musical reception, have fundamentally altered the nature of the “unfamiliar other” within music cultures. The main focus of contemporary studies on music now seems to revolve around an undetermined other. The imperial and colonial roots of social anthropology aroused scholarly interest in the discovery of the components of newfound lands. From food and everyday life rituals to music and dances, there grew an interest in the culture of “native” people who were, most of the time, considered to be primitive and in need of a “civilizing process.” Ethnomusicology, as a sub-discipline of social anthropology, was inevitably influenced by this attitude at the beginning and gave birth to a series of studies including organology, taxonomy, and the classification of the music of the “far away other” that needed to be “discovered.” Early ethnomusicological works, therefore, adopted the methods of comparative musicology. Studies on music cultures acquired an interdisciplinary character during the 1950s after Kunst coined the term “ethnomusicology.” Yet, the emerging interest in non-western music, and in particular, in the music of the so-called primitive communities and that of Eastern civilizations, was still unable to create a clear understanding of the scope of this discipline. Benchmarks such as the collimating question of Blacking (1973) concerning the level of musicality of man, and the commonly held model of Merriam (1964) on the three analytical levels of anthropology of music, ensured that socially driven musical behavior has gradually become the main focus of the discipline in the decades that have followed the initial period of ethnomusicology. Along this path, the position of “the other” and music of external cultures became more ambiguous during the post-colonial era, as the social actors started to experience a deterritorialization and become more uprooted than ever before. Bhabha’s (1994) “mimicry man” and Spivak’s (2010) “subaltern” are the two key concepts which may help to understand the ambivalence, the hybridity and the vagueness of the concept of the other. To put it in a different way, the seemingly simple question, “whose music is it?” has now become a confusing challenge. Concomitantly, contemporary theories including symbolic and interpretative anthropology, rallied to the analysis of the actor’s socially driven musical behavior. For instance, Turner’s concept of “communitas,” “social and cultural drama,” and “liminoid” are of great help to music anthropologists who seek to interpret the portrayal of the other within the multiple meanings and representations of a particular music culture. The sociology of music, on the other hand, has long been interested in the study of music cultures within industrialized, urbanized, and modernized societies. The modus operandi of music sociologists features, first and foremost, the collectivity behind a musical performance. The mechanism of the production, distribution and consumption of music from the macro perspective has thus been a major research object. Yet, the interest in the analysis of the nature, the levels and the patterns of social interactions during a musical performance requires the adaptation of a micro perspective, akin to the anthropology of music. This extensive scope has allowed contemporary music sociologists to develop broader and more inclusive concepts, such as Small’s (1999) “musicking” or Bennett’s “music scene.” Likewise, audience analysis has been detailed another fundamental theme of this discipline. For instance, Adorno’s (1994) “typology of listeners” describes a range that includes the jazz expert and the culture consumer to the emotional listener. The list has been expanded by newer and more flexible typologies such as Peterson’s (1992) “omnivore listeners”. Popular music studies have also gained a more expandable character during the postAdorno period when a more nuanced critical standpoint was developed for the evaluation of highbrow and lowbrow musical preferences. Clear-cut groupings for the social stratification of taste in music have started to lose their integrity due to the allegedly unifying force of the popular music sphere where the notion of the other is “skillfully covered.” Nevertheless, the standardized musical forms, techniques, and songs designed particularly for consumption create a high level of alienation and reification, where the listener continuously oscillates between the I and the Other. Thus, musical pieces within the problematic categories of “world music” and “subcultural music” have now become a commodity for international music markets that know how to make use of their authenticity and the manner in which their marginality can be commercialized. Our world today is characterized by a high level of interconnectedness, where the driving mechanism of post-industrial production leaves almost no space for the autonomic existence of a local cultural fragment. It is getting harder to speak of a “far away music culture” in which the notion of a totally unfamiliar other exists. Consequently, the overlapping scope of the sociology and the anthropology of music have been enlarged especially on account of the increasing interest in transcultural music communities within complex urban soundscapes. Still, despite the one-click-away accessibility of millions of musical pieces by means of new communication technologies, the increasing impersonality and anonymity seems to bring about, this time, “the death of the other.”