This article describes Chinese settler colonialism in Tibet through the lens of Tibetan music and performing arts. It offers glimpses of indigenous Tibetan musical lifeworlds and how these were transformed into minority ones through the cultural as well as military annexation of the Tibetan lands from the 1950s. Focusing on pop music, it then explores how Tibetans negotiate and counter the colonial thinning and diminution of their culture in both confrontational and non-confrontational ways, and, through the figure of Tsewang Norbu (a Tibetan pop musician who self-immolated in political protest in 2021), probes the ways in which the colonial space suffocates, even for those who achieve success within it. Finally, it addresses the immense stifling and restricting of research on Tibetan music and looks at what can be done to decolonize intellectual spaces relating to Tibetans and their music, and those of other still-colonized and minoritized peoples. The article emphasizes the need to establish the study of colonialism as a truly global phenomenon in the academy, and the importance for this of a politics of position and identity that is layered, multiplicitous, and compassionate rather than binary and Western-centric. This article also looks to nurture the nascent threads of a decolonial consciousness with regards to Tibetans and other minoritized peoples in China and beyond.