This presentation is about my doctoral project – a comparative study of music subcultures in Beijing and Stockholm. This year is my second year, so I wish to present the introduction, methodologies, overall framework and some ideas about my project in this conference. The purpose of this project is to figure out how “music subculture” is defined and practiced by participants in two different cities (countries), and explore the subcultural contrasts and similarities in terms of distinct social contexts. For this question, this study plans to firstly use media discourse analysis to quantitatively conclude the definition of “music subculture” from the perspective of mass media in Sweden and China. Then drawing upon this analysis, the mainstream discourse of the conceptions, genres, and activities related to music subculture will be generalized, which can therefore represent the definition from the public and mainstream of both two countries to some extent. Meanwhile, I will also use phenomenological interviewing and participant observation to engage in the local subcultural communities and activities and obtain the first-hand materials from the participants. Consequently by doing these fieldwork, this study hopes to investigate how music subcultures are made, for whom and mean what in two distinct cities, enriching subcultural theory and popular music study to include multiple set of meaning about music subculture.