Abstract Ethnomusicology and music sociology should be obvious sister disciplines, but they are not. Ethnomusicologists and sociologists of music should be joined in conversation, but they rarely talk with each other. Because both have embraced ‘text and context’, ethnomusicology and music sociology might well have forged common methodologies for determining the interrelationships between musical and social practices, but they have rarely done so. As ethnomusicology has in recent decades concerned itself increasingly with modernity and music in urban contexts, it might well have drawn on sociology’s historical concern for the structure and institutions of the city. Again, it did so only exceptionally. As music sociology increasingly sought to broaden its understanding of what music really could be by intensifying its concern for popular musics, it might well have drawn on ethnomusicology for the broadest possible ontology of music. Instead, it persists in defining ‘popular music’ in much narrower terms than ethnomusicology.