In 2016, Clayton published "Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture", described by the author as "a user manual for the world created by Mr MP3 and Ms Internet". Reviewing the book in "The Guardian", Sukhdev Sandhu described it as "a travelogue of sorts", which covers the music of Monterrey, north-east Mexico, capturing "emo kids and reggaeton fans on his way to hear thundering tribal guarachero played by a DJ behind whom is projected a Harry Potter movie". Clayton looks at the music culture of the Berbers in Morocco, who make showy use of Auto-Tune and "ponders the popularity of Whitney Houston-style melisma across the Maghreb." Sandhu writes, "When Clayton talks about techniques such as transcoding and compressing – the art of squeezing recorded music into easily exportable and copyable packets of data – he could almost be talking about the journeys of refugees and migrants. Clayton, like many club goers, embraces the idea of music as a zone of mutation and adaptation, of new rhythms as thrillingly contagious, of the dancefloor as a place of both affirming and redefining community."