The introduction presents the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and its application to music education as well as to sociology of music. The sociology of Bourdieu can be regarded as one of the most important contributions to the study of culture and education for more than half a century. In different social sciences Bourdieu’s work has proven fruitful in the analysis of music as a social phenomenon. Although Bourdieu did not analyze music itself (as Max Weber or Theodor Adorno did), his approach opened path breaking perspectives on music and on music related practices as embedded in social contexts. Bourdieu’s sociology offers a fundamentally new understanding of how music is taught and learned, produced and consumed, identified and valorized by a plurality of socially conditioned practices. The contribution introduces the main concepts of Bourdieu’s sociology (as habitus, the different forms of capital, and field) and relates the Bourdieusian approach to music to the alternative approaches of Howard S. Becker and Richard Peterson. Two main topics discussed in this contribution are (1) the interrelation of music education and sociology of music and the (2) perspectives for music sociology “after, against and with Bourdieu”. It is claimed that Bourdieu’s concepts and analytical strategies (as field analysis) are still of core relevance and that some of the criticism against Bourdieu’s positions fails. On the other hand, many scholars have provided fruitful perspectives to develop the Bourdieusian approach and to combine it with other approaches. In sum the introduction sketches the most important positions and perspectives in the social sciences’ analyses of music “after Bourdieu”.