List of Abstracts
Listed below in alphabetical order (by surname) are the abstracts accepted by the conference reviewers. At the end of this alphabetised list is a separate section, featuring the abstracts and details for three proposed and accepted panels:
A
Defining the Underground: The spaces, places and intentions within dance music scenes
Anderson, Richard (University of Liverpool)
One perhaps unintentional consequence of Liverpool's 2008 Capital of Culture year was a proliferation of independent grassroots venues and the use of abandoned spaces for dance music events emerging on the city's periphery. This paper arises from a thesis investigating this phenomenon and how so-called ‘underground’ cultures continue to evolve in the city, regardless of dance music’s wider mainstream appeal. The term underground is often used by journalists and scene participants to describe dance music and its associated events. Yet this descriptive label has received scant scholarly attention. This paper draws on the results of an online survey (n=200) and in-depth interviews (n=30) with promoters, venue owners, DJs and clubbers to unpack how the term is understood within dance communities in northwest England. The research findings acknowledge the term’s expected associations to characterise Avant-Garde genres or to express an antithesis to commercial mainstreams. However, they also reveal a more nuanced interpretation of the term’s meaning when referring to the nature of certain events, or ‘nights.’ Respondents describe underground moments emerging when practitioners and revellers share a purpose of ‘caring for’ a night’s atmospheric success, in preference to commercial goals. Such impulsions are agnostic of genre and can arise within any space, though research participants articulate a preference towards reappropriated environments. They describe the social reconstruction of these spaces into temporal physical and metaphorical places to party as the catalyst. It is this transformation of space with an intention that shapes the underground characteristics of a night, particularly when all aspects of a night’s delivery are catered for by the community it's serving. Beyond social dancing’s context, this study hopes its definition can contribute towards a broader understanding of the nature of cultural events termed as underground, and their value as expressions of a community’s sociality.
Playful Machinery: The case of Toni Basil’s ‘Mickey’
Anderson, Tim (Old Dominion University, USA)
Released on Toni Basil’s 1981 debut album, Word of Mouth (WOM), 'Mickey’ reached number one in the United States. Because Basil never had another hit, the single and artist alike is often remembered as little more than an eighties ‘one hit wonder.’ Yet the album and single are interesting as the two began as an experiment in audio-visual accompaniments: WOM was released as an audio recording and a ‘video album.’ The result is a multimedia product focused on popular music and dance, the most prominent being ‘Mickey.’ This paper argues that by understanding Basil’s lineage as a choreographer and visual artist, one begins to view and hear ‘Mickey’ as both a record and a video invested in what Kyra Gaunt labels 'kinetic orality.’ Explaining her employment of the term, Gaunt states that ‘The expressive realm of 'kinetic orality’ is the social training ground upon which girls create a background of relatedness to one another’ and where ‘performances of race, ethnicity, and gender are embodied through song, chant, and percussive movement’ to assist in ‘the transmission and appropriation of musical ideas and social memories passed on jointly by word of mouth and by embodied musical gestures and formulas’ (Gaunt 2006). Drawing from trade magazines and discussions regarding the connection between dance, records and video, I argue that we should consider ‘Mickey’ as an experiment in ‘kinectic orality’ dedicated to generating both mass gesture and collective performance. Both Basil’s video and record both display and celebrate the fantastic elements of coordinated, clapping and stomping routines of American cheerleading to produce a uniquely feminine form of mass gesture and synchronized activity that are investments in ‘kinetic’ media, media designed to produce movement.
Threats to the Talent Pipeline: Examining the post-pandemic third-tier cultural city
Anderton, Chris and James, Martin (Solent University, UK)
Primary cities, such as London, Paris, and New York, are global entities; urban environments that are linked via size, influence, branding, and impact, and with intense connectivity and mobility in common (Brabazon 2015). These global cities are ‘de-nationalised’ centres networked to other global cities and in some ways separate from national imaginings (Sassen 2014). Although global cities are natural hubs for the creative industries (absorbing attention, finance, and wider socio-economic benefits) it is in the second-tier cities that national creative industries’ identities become more clearly expressed. In the UK, second-tier cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Brighton, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, and Cardiff have all become self-defined and imaged in varying ways as music hubs; as ‘music cities.’ This has been achieved, in part, through the adoption of cultural regeneration and city imaging projects based around the distinctive qualities of their music heritage and hallmark events, or through the production, support, and marketing of young ‘scenes.’
In this presentation we focus on the under-investigated third-tier of cities, which we characterise as ‘platform,’ ‘springboard’ or ‘Cinderella’ cities. These cities (and towns) are considered to be part of the talent pipeline for the music industries, but are typified by a one-way flow of creative and business talent to the primary and secondary cities in their countries, making them problematic in terms of their sustainability. We argue that this is increasingly the case as second-tier cities have developed as regional hubs. Drawing on a number of research studies conducted by the authors, we explore the city of Southampton in order to develop a deeper understanding of the placement of, and issues facing, a ‘third-tier’ city in the talent pipeline of the UK.
Critical Artificial Intelligence Popular Music Studies: Postdigital labour and supernatural machines
Avdeeff, Melissa (Coventry University, UK)
While there is a longer history of computational methods within the art music tradition, they have only quite recently begun to be incorporated into popular music production, largely in the realm of novelty, experimentation, and as tools for human-AI collaboration, as opposed to holistic composition. With the continued rise of the use of AI in popular music production, we are not only on the edge of a new era of music production (analog, electric, digital, AI), but also a potential paradigm shift in the discourses surrounding artificial intelligence popular music (AIPM), in connection to socio-political assemblages.
As critical approaches to algorithms and AI are developing across other fields, often in attempts to acknowledge and counteract histories of bias and data colonialism, it’s important to begin considering how these issues affect AIPM before their mass integration into the popular music industries and audiovisual platforms. Because of the inherent connections between popular music and society, how computational music might disrupt those structures will become increasingly important, particularly in regards to how machine learning corpuses are created and how issues of intellectual property are addressed.
This paper is part of a wider agenda to develop new approaches to computational creativity and popular music under the designation of: critical artificial intelligence popular music studies. In this talk, I will explore how many of the myths and fears surrounding computational creativity tend to be encapsulated within issues of labour and the apparent value of highly visible forms of labour. By challenging established hierarchies, unmasking the outside influences necessary for creation, and disrupting historical perceptions of labour, postdigital production and AI-human collaboration connect the ‘supernatural’ and ‘magic’ connotations of intelligent technology to neoliberal notions of labour and production.
B
‘Travelin’ Thru, trying to find what feels like home’: Country music authenticity and trans equality
Barker, James (Newcastle University, UK)
In 2021 there were signs that the country music industry was beginning to acknowledge LGBTQ+ artists and audiences, with the largely positive response to Brothers Osborne’s T.J. Osborne coming out and the Country Music Association acknowledging Pride Month for the first time. Yet there has been little structural change within the industry (Williams 2021), and white cis LGBTQ+ artists have been the main individuals to materially benefit at all.
Trans people are still marginalised by the country music industry (Watson 2021), in the US more widely (with many US states enacting transphobic laws), and globally. Yet at the same time, as an aesthetic genre, country music holds potential for trans artists and audiences to reclaim authenticity and the genre’s storytelling narrative conventions (Goldin-Perschbacher 2015) to validate and affirm trans experiences.
The paper will explore this potential using the case study of Dolly Parton's 'Travelin' Thru' written for the film Transamerica (2005). This song is notable not only for Parton's LGBTQ+ allyship explicitly including trans people but also for the way in which trans experiences are represented as belonging seamlessly (Fortier 2001) within the genre of country music (Hubbs 2014). Through Parton's song and advocacy, the genre's invocations of authenticity (Shusterman 1999) elevate trans equality and the validation of trans identities beyond political debate to become a fundamental ethical principle.
This song analysis will be situated within the current context of the country music industry and the structural barriers facing trans artists. The paper will conclude by departing from Parton to consider the way trans artists such as Rae Spoon have engaged with country music’s aesthetic conventions (Goldin-Perschbacher 2015) and evaluate the extent trans belonging in country music can be actualised from the genre’s potential.
Live music and Covid-19 in Birmingham
Adam Behr (Newcastle University, UK), Craig Hamilton (Birmingham City University, UK), Patrycja Rozbicka (Aston University, UK)
This contribution discusses the context of, and presents findings from, a project examining the live music sector in Birmingham, UK. This research is set against the backdrop of the broader socio-political impact of the ongoing Covid19 pandemic, and links it to national and global contexts. We explore the live music ecology of Birmingham and highlight the interdependencies between the various musical and non-musical stakeholders in the context of the pandemic— including the venues where live music takes place—examining how these stakeholders are responding to the crisis as it unfolds. In doing so, this paper asks how an urban geographical area tied into national and international mechanisms of culture, commerce and policy, can work to sustain its musical ecology in the face of the uncertainty of a post-Covid19 era, and underlines the interconnectedness of live music ecologies and wider economies.
Gassing for Gear: Acquisition, fetishisation and technological exhibitionism in Gear Culture
Bennett, Samantha (The Australian National University, Australia) and Bates, Eliot (City University of New York, USA)
one more piece of gear
will help me cope with the world
in my solitude
Drawing on extensive research to be published in a forthcoming book, this paper examines aspects of gear (professional audio technology) fetishization as related to gear acquisition syndrome, or GAS. Through a broad theoretical framework grounded in commodity fetishism (Veblen 1899, Marx 1906, Baudrillard 1970) and historical anthropology (Pietz 1985), we traverse how themes of value, status and sexualization pervade gear discourse(s) and lead to what is now broadly termed GAS (Diiorio 2016, Herbst and Menze 2021). Focusing primarily on online gear discourses and GAS manifestations, we review the turn-based communications on message fora that produce sentiments of GAS. A key aspect involves the public displaying and concomitant voyeurism of individual technological objects, as well as collections, hoards or ‘racks’ of gear—an attribute of gear fetishization that we term technological exhibitionism. To illustrate this concept, we demonstrate how images of desirable technological objects are sexualized and incite ‘wanting’, ‘needing’ and ‘getting’ discussions among groups of young men, perpetuating culture-specific hegemonic masculine social formations. Gassing for gear often involves imagined barriers, hurdles and commendable bravery in its ultimate conquest as such challenges (debt, wives, scarcity) are finally overcome. We also look at how gassing for gear often employs metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) including objectification of the female body, militarization, and/or ludic themes. Finally, we consider how gassing for gear has broader implications on musical practice(s), individual-technological relations, as well as online sociability and performance.
Barriers of Entry: Exploring the relationship between online music distribution and the value of music
Bishop, Ben (Westminster University, UK)
This paper seeks to advance understandings of the relationship between online music distribution and the value of music by examining the effects of barriers to entry to established and new digital music marketplaces. One of the key affordances often cited for musicians in the current recorded music system is the ‘low barrier of entry’ to digital music marketplaces (Hesmondhalgh 2019), enabled by technology including platforms such as Tunecore, Soundcloud and Bandcamp. However, the accessibility of online distribution has increased levels of competition in an music ecosystem now characterised by overabundance (Negus 2019), and it seems that the, potential, democratising effects of new technologies are linked to a negative economic impact on musicians (Hesmondhalgh et al. 2019). This paper proposes that advances in the adoption of the ‘new internet’ of cryptocurrencies, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and blockchain technology by musicians in 2021 creates an opportunity to develop understandings of the relationship between digital technologies and the value of music. Although heralded as a way out from the centralised power of the established Web 2.0 platforms, the initial commercial opportunities available to musicians in this new space are characterised by a high barrier of entry in comparison, requiring a great level of technical know-how of emerging technological and financial systems.
The arrival of new technologies enlivens debates around value, independence and democracy in music which have historically framed discussion of its economics (see Hesmondhalgh and Meier 2014, 2018 and Tschmuck 2017). Using an action-based research method through workshops with self-releasing musicians enrolled on popular music courses at Falmouth University to understand how barriers of entry relate to their practises, this paper outlines how by exploring the different barriers of entry to online music marketplaces, we can better understand the effects of democratisation on marketplaces and progress existing socio-economic theories on the value of music.
To Be Announced: How Long Can German Live Music Venues Survive the Lockdown?
Niklas Blömeke (Paderborn University, Germany)
Live music venues and their operators continue to be affected by measures like social distancing and other strategies to fight the Covid 19 pandemic. In Germany, most venues are closed (again) even two years into the pandemic with little or no time periods of regular cultural, social, and economic activity. This situation has confronted operators with fundamental uncertainty about the prospects of their venues. Political and scholarly discourse revolve around the question of whether or when operators can recover during or after the crisis. Using data from the German live music survey, we scrutinize the factors influencing the operators’ expected duration until insolvency with a linear regression model. Our analysis shows that the continuous public support schemes extend the expected time until insolvency, as does the extent to which the venue is regularly used by external stakeholders. At the same time, leasing a music venue and/or running a venue in bigger cities makes operators less optimistic about their prospects. Our findings demonstrate the safeguarding function of state support and the benefits of strong live music networks in times of crisis. The results bear implications for the promotion of resilient live music ecologies.
The Hidden Music City: The role of music tourism imaginaries in the regeneration of Detroit
Bolderman, Leonieke (University of Groningen)
In this chapter, the potential for as well as the hindrances to a future for Detroit as music tourism city are explored through the conceptual lens of music city mythologies: globally circulating imaginaries that connect music to place. The case of Detroit offers interesting venues for analysis as an ethnically diverse city, with music heritage and music scenes relating to different roots: which stories are being told, who makes these choices, and how does it shape the story of the city? A discussion of the function of mythologies in music tourism development is complemented with an analysis of the role of music in Detroit’s current regeneration and applied to two case studies: the efforts to preserve the Grande Ballroom, where legends such as Iggy Pop and Pink Floyd performed, and the success of Movement festival, a yearly techno music festival. The case studies are based on media analysis and ethnographic fieldwork involving observations and interviews. By comparing policy developments in the city with these case studies, this chapter shows how music heritage and live music scenes shape the stories of the city, offering routes to both division and belonging for the local communities involved. Providing nuance to the current academic debate on the music cities framework, it is argued that who and what drives music tourism development, what policy instruments are effective, and what strategy is best (bottom up or top down), is influenced by the imaginaries and mythologies that shape the tourism geography of the contemporary music city.
What Covid-19 Changes (or not) to the ways of Learning Popular Music. Didactic analysis of learning modes in times of pandemic.
Bonzon, Catherine Grivet (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Context
‘Popular musics’ are for 40 years put in the middle of a process of institutionalization (XX 2011, Green 2017) with their entry in the music schools and in the ‘schoolish form’ (Vincent 1994). On the other hand, many young musicians still stay cut off from a school system they don’t recognize as a good way of learning and belonging to this specific ‘art word’ (Becker 1985, 1988). If the pandemic has changed the ways of learning with the closure of schools, has it changed the models of learning already informal practices?
Objective and theoretical framework
In this study, we take an interest in young musicians who develop their practices of ‘popular music’ out of formal schoolish educational surroundings (XX 2011) and we describe and analyse the cultural and didactic stakes of the type(s) (Chevallard 1994) through their interests and strategies out from the institutionalized and didactical form, specially through the use of new technologies which innovate new paradigms of self-learning (Brougère & Bézille 2007) out of specific curricula. We try to identify the specific didactic ‘milieux’ (Brousseau 2010), the learning methods and musical content from these autonomous practices, embracing digital and media technology through the changes and new skills of musical ways of learning of the 21th century accelerated by the pandemic. By the way, we seek to show part of the multimodal learning logic implemented by young musicians, based on benchmark social practices (Martinand 1986) and to show what they kept and what they had to give up.
Methodology and results
We try to find with a qualitative methodology through:
which types of (technical, interpretative, technological, interactional) knowledges, learning contents and practices are engaged or given up and what depends on new conjunctural specificities.
The Social Value of Online Music Participation during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Impacts of Berta Rojas’ Jeporeka 2021 Project
Bridge, Simone Krüger (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)
This paper considers the social value of online music participation during the Covid-19 pandemic to understand the differences music can make to people’s everyday lives, studied through the case example of Paraguayan classical guitarist Berta Rojas’ Jeporeka 2021 project. This focus is important, timely and necessary, since academic research on the social value of online music participation is critically absent in the arts and humanities, people's education, cultural engagement and general wellbeing has been adversely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, and academic literature on Paraguayan music is extremely limited. The paper presents a ground-breaking example of a contemporary online music participation project, Jeporeka 2021, which promotes Paraguayan music and artists through collaborative music composition, performance and recording. Using a combination of qualitative research methods, my research considers whether, why and how online music participation can make a difference to individuals and society, and thus why music matters in people’s everyday lives, and how we can capture the effects that online music participation can have. The research builds upon 12-months of empirical data collection during Jeporeka 2021, which entailed online participant observations, questionnaires and zoom interviews to understand whether music participation helped participants cope with the pandemic, what their online music participation meant to them, and how this meaning or value is understood by Paraguayan society and culture more generally. The research engages with a music-cultural theoretical framework to analyse and conceptualize social questions of value: what music participants think about what they value, and what is meaningful to them during online music making, whereby value is understood to encompass educational, social, cultural and wellbeing dimensions. In doing so, my research makes a unique academic contribution to the field of digital humanities, sheds new light on how online music participation provided the participants of Jeporeka with effective strategies for coping with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and contributes original knowledge to the modest body of academic literatures on Paraguayan music. Importantly, too, it provides the first detailed academic study of Paraguayan classical guitarist Berta Rojas’ music advocacy.
C
‘Kolkata turning Digital’: Popular Music in the COVID-19 era
Chakraborty, Arka (School of Oriental and African Studies, UK)
Since the mid-twentieth century, Kolkata has boasted a vibrant live music scene effectively earning the title, ‘entertainment capital of India.’ Urban locales in the city like Park Street is home to several venues hosting live musical performances, supporting the livelihood of independent musicians and creative artists. With the arrival of the pandemic, the subsequent imposition of multiple lockdowns and public gathering bans, countless musicians incurred massive losses and were forced to follow the ‘digital route.’ The popular music industry has ever since observed a significant upsurge in online content creation, streaming and social media interaction. Most musicians resorted to social media platforms like Facebook to engage with fans and often, just to stay relevant. Annual pop music festivals like ‘JazzFest Kolkata,’ for instance, have been conducted virtually in 2020 and 2021, selling tickets online and providing on-demand access to pre-recorded content. This paper focuses on understanding the response of the popular music scene in Kolkata to the challenges posited by COVID-19 and how social media platforms have become fundamental to contemporary music-making and fan interactions. While the cultural industries have collectively suffered major losses, a corresponding rise in digital consumption and viewership has reinvigorated these music scenes. Furthermore, a careful observation of online content through digital ethnography, identifies the triggering of nostalgia among virtual fanbases. For instance, Bengali musician, Kabir Suman has created a series of musical discussions on YouTube, titled Beje othā smr̥ti (literally, memories that ring a bell), where he reminisces his musical journey, often supported by short performances. These ‘digital soundscapes’ engage the audience with a deeper insight into the performer’s personality. This in turn triggers musical (and by extension, cultural) memory prompting the audience to engage in social media discussions, inevitably transforming the reception of the artist.
Sounding Out Dystopia: Timbre and Ecological Recovery in Thom Yorke’s ANIMA (2019)
Cobb, Nathan (University of California, USA)
The short film accompanying Thom Yorke’s solo album, ANIMA (directed by Paul Thomas Anderson 2019), depicts a dystopian world in which humans have become dim reflections of the technology they consume. It also suggests a process of recovery from the machinic and environmentally catastrophic impact of this technocratic society. In this paper, I build on recent scholarship regarding timbre in popular music (Heidemann 2016, Lavengood 2020, Moore 2012) to develop an ecological interpretation of Yorke’s film. I first identify some common traits of ‘techno-dystopian’ music by surveying a selection of examples from both film and popular music, such as the blockbuster movies Blade Runner 2049 (2017), The Matrix (1999), and Tron (2010), as well as songs by Depeche Mode, and David Bowie, among others. I then show how Yorke, drawing on the psychoanalytical theory of Carl Jung, crafts a narrative of recovery throughout the film’s three songs––marking progress through both visual cues and moments of timbral salience. In particular, the selective foregrounding of timbres that the listener will associate with instrumental, rather than electronic sources––though a process called ‘source-bonding’ (Osborn 2017)—is used to depict crucial moments in the ‘humanization’ of the film’s protagonist (played by Yorke) and to position him in opposition to the machinic signification of electronic instruments. By highlighting the narrative function of timbre, I show that ANIMA goes beyond aesthetic fetishization of a dystopian future by emphasizing the importance of personal responsibility in an age of technological ascendancy and environmental collapse.
The Migration of the Lo-Fi Lens: Online Interpretations of 90s Memphis Rap Tapes
Coughlan-Allen, Joseph (University of Liverpool, UK)
Memphis rap originated in the late 1980s in the city of Memphis, Tennessee. It is characterised by its prominent use of electronic drums, Stax soul samples, chanted hooks, and its distinctive rap flows. A thriving cassette culture in the 1990s allowed for the production and dissemination of tape recordings in and around the city (Robinson 2009).
The internet and digital audio formats allowed digitised Memphis rap tapes to be accessed by a wider audience than when they existed as physical media. Online dissemination typically presents these recordings outside their original context. A misconstruction of Memphis and its rap has consequently been pieced together collectively through online discourse by outsider listeners (Sorcinelli 2021).
One factor in this misconstruction is the genre’s association with the cassette, which links it to the format’s imperfections. Digitised recordings are often referred to as lo-fi, a term popularised in reference to indie-rock production values (Harper 2014). Lo-fi music is typically apprehended through a listening mode that not only appreciates the music of recordings, but aestheticises amateurism and technological imperfection (Newton 2016). This paper posits that through the genre’s association with the cassette, recent interpretations of Memphis rap have been constructed through an unintended lo-fi lens.
Through an integrated methodology of qualitative induction and semiotic discourse analysis, this paper will interrogate journalistic reviews and articles concerning Memphis rap recordings published online between 2012-2022. These will be balanced against statements from published interviews with Memphis rap artists. Three questions will be interrogated: 1) How are the content and sound quality of these recordings associated in their interpretation? 2) How do these factors relate to judgements made about the artists these recordings feature, and 90s Memphis as a city and environment. 3) How do these interpretations and judgements relate to the lo-fi rock aesthetic and related listening modes?
D
Music Technology, Popular Music and Music: What Difference Does It Make?
Dale, Pete (University of York, UK)
‘Popular Music’ has always been a fraught category. Frith et al asked ‘Can We Get Rid of the “Popular” in Popular Music?’ in the crucible of Popular Music (2005). Van der Merwe remarked that ‘the term “popular” is an infernal nuisance’ (1989). Middleton perhaps has gone furthest with his paraphrase of Lacan (via Žižek): ‘(The) popular music does not exist’ (2006: 34). Perhaps ‘popular music’ is an inexcusably broad bracket, yet it has done much to diversify and thus improve music education in schools and universities for decades.
Meanwhile ‘Music,’ that category that once seemed so monolithic, has also become vulnerable in certain ways of late. A (self-)critical turn can be traced at least back to Kerman (1985) via Kramer (1995) and others within the ‘new musicology’ field (McClary, for example). ‘So-called classical music,’ as Dai Griffiths memorably described it (2010-11), has actually proved quite resilient to the auto-critique in question for much of the 21st century: for many, ‘business as usual’ has prevailed. Nonetheless, Music in the UK has faced risk of ‘extinction’ lately thanks to the Ebacc among other developments of the last decade (Daubney 2016).
What about (so-called) ‘Music Technology’? At present, this field would appear to be in rude health. Does that mean that music education, from the inner-city primary schools to the conservatoires, is at risk of ‘dumbing down’ and ‘throwing out the baby with the bath water’ by replacing traditional instruments with ‘tech’ alternatives? Based on research carried out in state-school music departments across the UK during 2019-20, as well as teaching experience in leading HE providers, this presentation suggests that such fears are not well-founded. Nonetheless, caution is encouraged: to speak of ‘musics’ demands diverse, plural and sensitive methods.
Technological change, visual creativities, and popular music higher education
Davies, Helen (Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, UK)
Focusing on the impact of technological change and popular music higher education, this paper will discuss the importance of the study of visual aspects of popular music, and its role in popular music higher education courses. It has been argued that the visual aspects of popular music have received relatively little scholarly attention. For example, Morrow (2020: p.3) notes, 'the omission of visual creativities and content' in music business research. Similarly, according to Auslander (2009: p.303) 'visual aspects of musical performance … have not received the attention due to them.' However, due to technological change, the importance of visual creativity is growing, as music consumption and mediation are becoming increasingly tied to visuals. As Sexton (2009: p.99) points out, ‘as the formats music is stored on become less material … such loss is compensated by music’s increased connection to other visual formats’. Holt (2011: p.52) argues that music ‘remains distinct as an art form defined primarily by audio, but ... the media distribution, presentation and sharing of music are becoming more visual’. With platforms such as Instagram and TikTok playing an increasingly important role in the mediation of musicians and their work, visual creativities are more crucial than ever in relation to popular music. Therefore, this paper will argue that higher education institutions offering vocational, practice-based popular music courses, of which there are an increasing number, need to take account of the role of visual creativities in their curricula.
Relocating the notion of independent musician to Mainland China: process of cultural and conceptional translation in popular music
Duan, Changbo (University of Liverpool, UK)
This research aims to examine the process of cultural and conceptual translation in popular music. It will focus on how those Chinese musicians who self-identify as 'independent' have adapted and perhaps altered the idea of 'independent music' through their practice. After decades of the process of translation, transformation and reconstruction, the notion of ‘independence’ in China changed dramatically, as is a highly problematic and subjective term. By combining international and domestic repertoires, the trajectories of its formation change from underground to mainstream. Although media organisation and cultural mediators turn their 'experimental' and 'artistic' value into commercial value, independent musicians may share different beliefs, which indicates tensions and conflicts. This research will be conducted through a qualitative strategy, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews. I have elected to study ‘indie’ as a phenomenon largely associated with Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities (such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Chengdu), to identify whether and what tensions exist between Chinese interpretations of Indie and the prevailing Western one, and what new mutations and formations are apparent. We can begin to understand where the boundaries between these different groups lie, and how these boundaries are shifting within popular music discursively and practically.
Towards a History of Popular Music Fandom and Disability
Duffett, Mark(University of Chester, UK)
The dedicated communities of fans that have emerged around recording artists have often contained disabled individuals. Those fans have also participated in live music events. When biographies, documentaries and histories consider popular music, however, their focus is almost always on artists and recordings, rather than audiences. Fans sometimes appear, often collectively, but rarely are disabled ones represented. One exception to this was Mission to Lars (Moore and Spice 2012) in which a heavy metal fan with a genetic condition called Fragile X syndrome met the drummer from Metallica. Drawing on research using online newspaper archives, along with an ongoing in interest the Elvis fan community, the paper will show that disabled fans have been a regular part of popular music history. It aims to make disabled fans with various challenges more visible as part of the last century of popular music appreciation.
‘Get Back’: Paralinguistic Personae in The Beatles’ Late Style
Duggan, Bláithín (Dublin City University, Ireland)
The Beatles no doubt progressed musically, but did so with their influences, old and new, and their own recordings to hand. This is heard explicitly in their harmonies, melodies, lyrics, and rhythms, but is amplified through paralanguage in their late style. Paralanguage, the nonverbal characteristics of speech which alter meaning and convey emotion (Poyatos 1993).
Using material from Peter Jackson’s 2021 Get Back, I examine selected songs from these recording sessions where The Beatles challenged themselves to write new songs without over-reliance on technology to reignite their early songwriting and performance style. Whilst they were established musicians, aspects of paralanguage learned through their cover song repertoire, are shown to have a long-ranging effect on their performance personae (Auslander, Moore, Hennion, and Hawkins). On reflection, they each demonstrate a nostalgia for the early days (Hamburg, Cavern etc.) and yet continued to challenge societal issues. ‘Get Back’, for instance, responded to British M.P. Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of blood’ speech. Through a comparative analysis, I provide insight into the song’s development, how it challenges constructions of identity, global nostalgia, and 1960s social inequality in a post-Brexit era. Perceptions of gendered identities are addressed in the ambiguity surrounding Loretta who ‘thought she was a woman’ and is critiqued in relation to overtly feminist
theory (Butler).
Using spectral graphs, I combine musicology and linguistics (Poyatos 1993) in a paralinguistic analysis to reveal the expressive nuances of McCartney’s vocal in ‘Get Back’ and Lennon’s in ‘Don’t Let Me Down.’ This offers insight into their songwriting, highlights their mainly Black music influences, and assesses their rooftop concert – an act of civil disobedience. Through consistency in function, within and across songs, I present what I term paralinguistic personae, which are evaluated through Meyer’s sound terms – a series of aural stimuli giving rise to affect (Meyer 1961).
E
The Musicians on Twitch: Economic Opportunities, Labour and Insecurity
Ehlinger, Arthur (University of Glasgow, Scotland)
At the time of writing, during the global COVID-19 pandemic, many stakeholders within the music industries have turned to live music streaming as the only way to showcase their work and the primary means of live interaction with their fans. The practice has particularly been seized on by independent artists who realised the positive impact live music streaming can have on their careers. Like other technological changes, live music streaming has considerable disruptive potential, allowing direct-to-fan access for artists and bypassing the conventional music industries’ intermediaries (labels, managers, promoters, agents, etc.) which have traditionally been the most effective way to access potential fans and generate revenues. However, far from being the eldorado, it is imperative to emphasise that Twitch, the most popular live streaming service, which I chose to study for this research, is owned by Amazon, one of the largest corporations in the world. This leads artists-streamers to evolve in a highly capitalist and competitive environment where they have to undertake substantial behind-the-scenes labour and have no healthcare, unions, or other social safety nets. As a result, they tend to suffer from mental and financial precarity. This relates to wider issues of platformisation where workers find it difficult to assert some level of control over platforms, change policies, or express an effective voice.
As live music streaming has not yet been well documented within the academy, conducting in-depth interviews with stakeholders was the main method to acquire relevant information regarding the praxis. Participants were chosen based on their involvement within the live streaming, music or technological industries.
‘All those Things That Don’t Change’: Evocative Objects, Transformation and Continuity in Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Lockdown Projects
Elliott, Richard (Newcastle University, UK)
Many accounts of the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on musical life have, not surprisingly, emphasised disruption and discontinuity: live music and touring on hold; venues and physical retail outlets closed; recording schedules postponed or cancelled. Accompanying these narratives have been others that emphasise resilience and adaptation: Zoom choirs, orchestras and bands; livestreamed events; lockdown projects; Bandcamp Fridays. Looking back over this period from the perspective of 2022, there is perhaps a clearer sense of what has worked and what has been less successful. There is also an extensive archive of pandemic/lockdown projects for audiences to revisit and popular music scholars to study. This paper explores the traces left behind by artists as they responded to the new circumstances and played creative roles in establishing ‘the new normal’ for their audiences.
As a case study, I focus on the work of the US singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter. I am interested in themes of continuity, resilience and life-writing in Carpenter’s songwriting, thinking both about how these have been a mainstay of her work since the 1980s and how she has used her pre-2020 songs to inform creative responses to the Covid pandemic. As examples, I will refer to: 1) the series of streamed performances Carpenter posted during 2020-21 on three platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram); 2) her ‘One Night Lonely’ streamed concert from November 2020; 3) a collaborative online singalong video created for the 2020 Edmonton Folk Festival; 4) a 40-minute interview and performance hosted by pbs.org. In each case I aim to explore how long-running themes of memory, experience and evocation in Carpenter’s work are connected to issues and feelings arising from the pandemic. My analytic framework will draw upon theories of evocative and transformative objects as well as considering songwriting as a form of life-writing.
Erraught, Stan (University of Leeds, UK)
The shifts in the means of production and dissemination of recorded music since the turn of the century have transformed the music industry, the working practices of musicians, and the ways in which audiences both consume music and understand their function within the wider musical ecology.
There is a growing body of research into how the new practices of consumption are re-shaping the industry, and often the music produced. (Nylund Hagen 2016, Pelly 2018, White and LeCornu 2016, Fleischer 2017). Less attention has been paid into understanding how those who listen to recorded music in the new environments afforded by streaming arrive at a sense of themselves as discerning listeners, as participants in conversations about taste, and as members of taste communities.
In this paper, I will firstly outline an account of the means by which notions of taste and judgement were sustained with regard to popular music through its ‘classical’ period, when the field, while not unified, was organised around certain common criterial constructs: genre, authenticity, expression and, of course, popularity and reception. (see for example, Frith 1983, Hamm 1985, Moore 2002 and many more)
Secondly, using original research, I look at how two distinct generations understand what it is they do when they organise their listening practices. The first group consists of people old enough to have formed a sense of themselves as fans – and often as practitioners – at a time when ‘physical formats’ were just ‘formats’ and who have adapted, or not adapted, to new listening technologies.
The second group consists of streaming natives – first- and second-year university students, for the most part – and will look at how they seek out new music - or how new music finds them.
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Songs in Orbit: Space, Circulation, and Satellite Radio
Fauteux, Brian (University of Alberta, USA)
In the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the United States and amid critiques that terrestrial radio was ‘over-consulted and over-consolidated.’ Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Radio launched competing satellite radio services that promised nationwide coverage and CD-quality sound. In its early days, both Sirius and XM would prioritize music in advertisements, annual reports, and in press coverage of the services. One way that these new services would distinguish themselves from terrestrial radio was through an association with space.
Through an examination of the early histories of Sirius and XM Radio, this paper considers the values that are attributed to satellites and the ways that these values shape ideas about ‘premium’ or ‘prestige’ radio. Further, it argues that a notion of orbits tells us much about satellite radio programming but also our experience of popular music over the past three decades. The satellite reinforces notions of authenticity and masculinity in histories of technology and music genres; it draws on our relationship to space and geography to communicate ideas of expanded radio coverage within (but not beyond) North America; and, it has us think about time in the way that technologies (and media industries) centralize and standardize the delivery of music and radio programming. The orbit indicates a music culture defined by nostalgia and repetition as well as the increasing value of legacy acts/older music (expensive anniversary reissues, tours of classic rock bands) and the connections these artists and music have to the satellite radio universe.
Roadies to Nowhere?
Ferreira, Pedro Miguel (University of Coimbra, Portugal)
Concerning the topic - Challenge and Change in Popular Music - I was immediately transported to my investigation, which is about the (in)visibility of the backstage. The generalized omission of the technical teams in the current discussion of popular music, makes the ecosystem behind the scenes even more pertinent. If the pandemic crisis challenges and changes popular music, we must include those workers. The insufficient existing literature on this social universe reinforces the exceptional research opportunity that this presentation wants to take advantage of.
In order to comprehend how and when the technical aspect in the musical world (Krueger 2020) became vital, a fundamental part of the framing questions of this proposal is related to the successive origin (Becker 2010), evolution (Taylor 2001) sociological (Bennet 2001) and historical (Judt 2007) transformations in the field of art.
It was behind the (musical) scenes that some technology was developed and became more portable and approachable. Used primarily by sound technicians, roadies and musicians, some became, afterwards, universal to the regular citizen. A greater openness in society and some social stability had contributed to the growth of leisure (Stevenson 2018).
What is (or was) like to be a roadie, a sound or light technician at the past, present, or even in the future? That reminds me the lyrics of Road to Nowhere, by Talking Heads, when the say: ‘Well, we know where we're goin' / But we don't know where we've been / And we know what we're knowin' / But we can't say what we've seen.’
In the field, the support technicians are the ones who are the first to arrive and the last ones to leave. With the pandemic, many workers went away, others organized better in unions. The ecosystem changed like never before. Let’s reflect about that.
Idol youth: adolescence in Japanese popular music
Finan, Dorothy (University of Sheffield, UK)
Popular music consumption and appreciation has long been associated with teenagers, and we know that the music from our teenage years is highly evocative of autobiographical memory. In Japan’s biggest-selling genre of popular music, idol music, the performers themselves are mostly teenagers, and adolescent life, including school life, is a frequent topic of songs. But how did adolescence become such a prominent motif in Japanese idol music, and what type of youth are these teenagers actually singing about?
This presentation draws on recent Japanese sociocultural history, interviews with working lyricists, and a corpus of lyrics, to trace the evolution of discourses of adolescence in Japanese idol lyrics from the Second World War to the present day; stories of adolescence as an idealised period of unsullied dreams and friendship, but also of valorised struggle, situated in a particular chronotope (canonical notion of place and time) that has no end, and transcends the classroom and the sports pitch.
With the omnipresence of teenagers, especially high-schoolers in Japanese popular cultural life often framed (sometimes xenophobically) as a sign of perversion or deviance, I will show how the continued relevance of stories of the ups and downs school life in Japanese idol music relates to the idea of effort as a ‘Japanese’ quality, a key component of social identity on personal and national levels. At the same time, I will consider how the burden of supporting this sense of ontological security continues to fall disproportionately on girl idol performers.
Double Agent: Lessons from Liverpool on the limits of the Agent of Change principle in protecting small music venues
Flynn, Mat (University of Liverpool, UK)
Underlining its UNESCO City of Music status, in 2019 Liverpool was the first UK city outside of London to adopt the Agent of Change (AoC) principle into its local planning policy. AoC states that a person or business introducing a new land use is responsible for managing the impact of that change on existing residents/businesses in the surrounding area. Media reporting at the time hailed this as a progressive move toward protecting Liverpool’s existing small venues and clubs from the threat of new property developments. However, to date, enforcement of AoC on behalf of small venues has proven largely ineffective. Despite this, periodic mapping on the structure of Liverpool’s live music sector shows the total numbers of small clubs and venues have remained relatively stable between 2017 and 2021, but their concentration has shifted from one side of the city centre to the other. This transition exemplifies the short-term business cycle churn of small venues, as new venues open in under-developed areas or existing ones relocate from increasingly gentrified districts. As the next turnover of venues will occur in a post AoC environment, an emerging music sector concern is that AoC can be used by existing residents and developers to make it difficult for small venues to occupy new premises. As AoC is adopted more widely across the UK, this paper uses Liverpool as a case study to explore these issues, and calls into question initial assumptions that AoC is an effective policy for sustaining any city’s live music sector
Music-makers and Covid 19 in the Liverpool City Region (Mat Flynn and Richard Anderson, University of Liverpool, UK)
Liverpool City Region’s (LCR) pre-pandemic £200M/year music economy was considered vital to the region’s cultural heritage. Drawing on online surveys of music makers in August 2020 and August 2021, alongside industry practitioner focus group consultations, our research illustrates the devastating impact of eighteen months without full capacity live events on LCR’s music sector’s financial, musical, and social wellbeing. We observe that the extended loss of sociality illustrates a prior underestimation of its cultural and economic importance, and recommend a broader acknowledgement of sociality’s significance within music industries research. Whilst digital alternatives partially alleviated lockdown’s detrimental effects, overall, the sector viewed live-streaming as a ‘stop-gap’ incomparable to conventional concert experiences. Online engagement ineffectively substituted for ‘in the room’ creation and collaboration; and musicians were divided regarding the benefits of developing marketing skills to profit from social media exposure, despite being the only viable medium for engaging audiences. As full capacity events resumed in July 2021, the overall story of the LCR’s live music sector was one of survival. However, an underlying sense of uncertainty continues to affect operational and planning decisions; particularly if returning to ‘business as usual’ equates with pre-pandemic industry economics, which often functions to the detriment of musicians on whom the regional live sector’s operational and financial recovery depends.
Breaking the Olympics: Historical Consciousness and Global Performance in Hip Hop Dance
Fogarty, Mary (York University, Canada)
Dance has been foregrounded as central in the historical emergence and popularity of Hip Hop as a global phenomenon (Fogarty 2006), yet Breaking has all but disappeared from Hip Hop music scholarship. Breaking--a fundamental aspect of hip hop culture from the outset--has recently been announced as a competitive category at the Paris Olympics for 2024. (Breaking is being embraced as a lifestyle sport whose antiauthoritarian, rebellious spirit is hoped to engage waning youth interest in the Olympic project.). The modern Olympics (from the 1890s onward), have long been a racialized, gendered and classed event celebrating a Eurocentric mindset, even when the ‘colonies’ were represented, and claims of universal equality and international inclusiveness were trumpeted. The entry of Hip Hop into this space raises a number of questions about the place/placing of popular music, dance, and performing bodies in a global spectacle ostensibly dedicated to advancing humanist ideals, yet one too often invested in an Apollonian ideal of white supremacy (cf. Hitler's outrage at the medal triumphs of African-American Jessie Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics).
The history of the modern Olympics, and the decision to include Breaking in its multi-million-dollar concern, highlight a paradoxical intersection of humanist universalism, deeply racialized ideologies, and global capitalism's ever-expanding quest for new markets. A controversial aspect of Breaking's inclusion in the Olympics is the IOC's decision to exclude all canonical Hip Hop tracks from the competitions--instead, generic replicas of classic breakbeats will be played for the dancers (due, it is claimed, to intellectual property constraints; cf. Frith and Marshall 2013). This then means that, even as Hip Hop is ostensibly gaining global acknowledgment as a significant part of human culture, what Tricia Rose (1994) sees as the historical consciousness central to its practice will be institutionally effaced. This paper will examine the complex conjuncture of historical and cultural forces at play as a key Hip Hop dance enters a space governed by colonialist and corporate values.
Songwriters, Royalties and the Chinese Music Industry
Fosseli, Liucija (University of Agder, Norway)
Current Covid-19 pandemic has not only put a toll on the whole music industry but also increased attention to the situation of songwriters within the music industry. The issue of unfair remuneration for music through streaming services and frustration of needing to give royalty shares to artists who do not contribute to the songs are the two most discussed problems within this sector. Taking into consideration the recent pressure from the songwriters ́ community and technological advancements within Blockchain, AI, and Big Data, there is a believe that the music industry is moving towards another disruption that will change the industry and the business models within it.
However, there are some controversies on this idea and the scope of the changes it might bring. It seems that changes are difficult to implement in the West due to the strong influence and presence of the major players. Therefore, now more than ever, the music industry is looking into China and seeing the potential and power that this market has locally and internationally. China has international ambitions, power to implement quick changes and technological capabilities which allow them to innovate and reform the way the music business has been operating.
This paper will be based on qualitative interviews with intermediaries (publishers and A&Rs) and international songwriters (topliners, lyricist, and producers) who write songs for Chinese pop artists. I aim to identify current challenges and opportunities while working towards the Chinese music industry as well as new alternatives for songwriters and producers to manage their royalties in international market f.e. through blockchain based music companies such as Kobalt.
‘Why are you so tense - can’t you take a compliment?’: Musical and Visual Reactions to Misogyny
Fuernkranz, Magdalena (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria)
The song ‘Burger’ by the Viennese band DIVES revolves around the question ‘Can you really eat a whole burger?,’ dropped during a first date; a supposedly charming question that implies heteronormative body norms, prejudices, and sexism. The art project ‘Burger’ can be regarded as a statement against the still prevalent gender gap in multimedia arts. The single release was accompanied by an 80s-style video game created by the young, all-female programming collective Kinaya Studios. Another Viennese band that responds to misogyny is Шапка (‘Schapka’) founded in 2012 in an expression of solidarity with the feminist collective Pussy Riot. Шапка’s lyrics make reference to queer feminist ideas, for example addressing safe spaces, queerness, and gender quotas or singing about masturbation and female ejaculation.
Meanwhile, the American artists Lizzo and Cardi B focus on female empowerment as well as body positivity and deploy the visual imagery, fashion, art, and architecture of the classical era in the song ‘Rumors.’ The artists reclaim the classical tradition in their music video by wearing Grecian goddess-inspired dresses and headdresses that evoke caryatids while dancing in front of classically inspired statuary. When the two musicians touch their acrylics in a gesture reminiscent of Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’ the centrality of Black women to the classical tradition is no longer a rumour.
In this paper, I discuss musical and visual reactions to gender-based violence, hate speech, and disinformation in everyday life, the role of languages in the aforementioned artists’ concepts as well as the de-/construction of misogyny in popular music. Since the analysed songs and performances correspond to the clichés of masculinity prevalent in contemporary pop culture, I draw on work dealing with misogyny and empowerment in popular music to highlight how musicians deal with experienced threats and critique hegemonic power relations.
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Beats to Quarantine to: Lofi hip hop music and virtual community during the COVID-19 pandemic
Gamble, Steven (University College Cork, Ireland)
Lofi hip hop (or simply ‘lofi’), a longstanding staple of social and musical activity on YouTube (Winston and Saywood 2019), has been popularly regarded as ‘one of the kindest communities on the internet’ (Alemoru 2018). As everyday cultural practices rapidly migrated online during the COVID-19 pandemic, lofi saw an influx of new listeners. How has this period of growth affected lofi, understood both as a genre of popular music and a community of internet sociality? This paper investigates how lockdown affects lofi listening using methodologically innovative semantic data analysis. I compare thematic analysis of around 200 thousand YouTube comments with close readings of lofi’s music, visuals, and associated journalism. The findings provide crucial insight into the audience’s listening contexts, expressions of personal identity, and social connectivity. Significantly, the paper uncovers how people interact with music communities on the internet to experience feelings of communal belonging during a period marked by global challenge and change. Based on these findings, I consider the stability of musical practices that take place on corporate web platforms and query how easily they can be appropriated. While commercial and political interests have encroached upon lofi hip hop during this period of audience growth, I conclude that there remains a significant amount of communal expression that demonstrates the use of music to alleviate challenging sociopolitical contexts. The paper offers important interventions that will undoubtedly intersect with other presentations at the conference concerning the COVID-19 pandemic, the changing role of popular music technologies (especially the internet), and developments in how music communities interact within and without commercial constraints.
Working class identities and Heavy Metal in 1970s Britain and France
Garbaye, Romain and Guibert, Gérôme (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Today, Metal is one of the most enduring and popular genres of rock, and has undergone a long and deep movement of globalisation and diversification of its audiences in socio-economic terms since its first iterations in the early 1970s. This paper seeks contribute to our understanding of this unique musical phenomenon by placing the focus on the historical origins of the genre, in the rapidly changing working-class cultures of Britain and other Western countries in the 1970s, marked by changes in the labour market, mass unemployment in the context of early globalization, and fascination for the seemingly untouchable economic and political forces at play. It does this by focusing on two national scenes, the British one and the French one.
In the UK, the two seminal bands Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, as well as the NWOBHM bands, displayed a variety of musical, visual and symbolic markers of working-class angst in a fast-changing world. The Lyrics, the signifiers of power, evil and resistance, as well as the imagery inspired by the occult, mythology and science fiction all barely disguise an ambiguous nostalgia for lost power of the male working-class as well as despair and rebellion against an unjust and incomprehensible new world order.
In France, Heavy Metal was not considered by the specialised press and the record industry as a specific style compared to the rock scene until the mid-1970s. However, bands such as the Variation were viewed as loud and unsophisticated, while others like Magma were criticised because of their ambiguous use of totalitarian symbolism. At the end of the 1970s, Heavy Metal gained a little more prominence in the context of successful French tours by foreign bands such as Shakin Tree. The iconic French band Trust also claimed street credibility and viewed itself as close to the working- class. As they sang in 1980, ‘the sound of AC/DC reverberates on the walls of the Estate.’
After having dwelled on the structural homology between working-class lifestyles and Heavy Metal music in the 1970s, this paper will ponder the factors of the gradual unravelling since these early days of this homology between Metal subculture and the socio-economic characteristics of those who originally initiated it.
Gardner, Abigail (University of Gloucestershire, UK)
Listening to ‘erased and inaudible voices’ (Voeglein 2020, p.114) is the focus of this paper on listening to stories about the self, prompted by song. These stories emerged from a two-year Erasmus+ project called ‘Mapping the Music of Migration’, MaMuMI, 01/11/19 - 31/10/21. The project comprised partners from seven European countries and focused on storytelling inspired by and about a piece of music and its potential to enable intercultural exchange and counter negative stereotypes. The key activities of the project involved the collection of migrants’ ‘song stories’, which were made publicly available through an interactive app at www.mamumi.eu. These stories revolved around a song or a piece of music that held some personal significance for the participants, who had all experienced displacement and had migrated into and across Europe. They were recorded in 29 interviews held across Europe during 2021 by members of the project team, NGOs and academics, in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Spain, Norway and the UK. The range of narratives from the participants revealed stories that were both specific and common to many and hearing them facilitated conversations across cultures and borders in events held by the project team, who reported that the project had enhanced understanding of cultural diversity and awareness.
Previous research with NGOs across Europe had made it apparent that no-one was using talking about music as a method to open up such a space. Drawing on recent scholarly perspectives from music and migration (Western 2020) alongside identity, memory and inheritance (Cohen, Grenier and Jennings 2022) and, more broadly, the mobility and complexity of the numerous uses of popular music(s) (Braee and Hansen eds. 2019), this paper considers the project’s limits and efficacy and its potential transferability.
Sounds of Dissent: Popular Music and Politics in Brexit Britain
Gligorijevic, Jelena (Dublin City University, Ireland)
In this paper I explore sounds of dissent in Brexit-Britain in contexts of authoritarian populism and post-truth. I look specifically into the liberal and conservative poles of British dissent vis-à-vis the UK’s decision in 2016 to withdraw from the European Union. I do this through various music-related discourses that range from discussions on Brexit’s effects on British music industries and musicians, to its coverage in social media, albums, and collaborative music projects. I accordingly pose the following research questions: What specific kinds of musical and music-related forms of discourses does dissent take in contemporary Britain in relation to the Brexit debate and wider political concerns? How can these popular music discourses inform our understanding of the past, present and future of Brexit-Britain, and what are the wider global implications of this? I build an interdisciplinary framework that draws on prior studies of popular music and politics in combination with perspectives from musicology, sociology, human geography, and critical theory. Using the said approaches, I conduct a textual and discourse analysis with reference to eclectic sources. Ultimately, the paper aims to map out the discursive field of popular music and Brexit, and to point out to the complexities as well as paradoxes of political meaning-making, identities, and collectivities associated with it.
Listening to the ‘right to culture’ in Mexico City: governmentality, solidarity and (dis)trust in an independent music scene
Green, Andrew (University of Warsaw, UK)
The Mexico City Constitution, created in 2017 as part of wide-ranging administrative changes in the capital, guaranteed to the city’s residents a ‘right to culture,’ setting in motion a process to codify this right in law. This was not, however, an isolated political development; it responded to a long-standing campaign carried out in the capital by foros culturales (cultural forums) largely independent of the government. These foros, many of them music venues whose offering centres on rock, have often appealed to rock’s histories of marginalization and repression to argue for direct government support for their work, while simultaneously maintaining a posture of scepticism towards the mainstream party-political system.
This paper builds on ethnography carried out within foros culturales and with policymakers to highlight a series of paradoxes and challenges within the movement lobbying for cultural rights considered ‘inalienable’ (cf. Lomnitz 2001: 35-6). The contradictions of the ‘right to culture’ laws in Mexico City reflect the practical interests of the groups lobbying for it, and the long-standing demand for special recognition of ‘cultural’ venues. Trust presented a challenge: while foros culturales’ coalition-building has emerged around mistrust of government, lobbying for a legal right to culture required cultivating personal ties with policymakers, something complicated by a lack of continuity in government itself. Governmentality, as expressed through the desire to regulate, standardize, and collect information about cultural venues, came into conflict with these venues’ suspicion of official bureaucracy. This ethnography reveals the right to culture as simultaneously partial, relational, and universalistic.
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Emotional and practical responses to the global pandemic
Hall, Daphne (Iceland University of the Arts, Iceland)
The paper investigates the reaction of musicians to the global pandemic, the resulting prolonged restrictions and how this has impacted music making. The focus is on the local music scene in Iceland and on musicians working within the field of popular music. The personal development of musicians and individual reactions will be discussed. In the first Covid wave most concerts were cancelled or postponed, with a few exceptions of streamed concerts. The atmosphere among musicians was relatively optimistic, and some were even happy with getting a ‘short’ break from normalcy. However, as the pandemic dragged on, musicians became more anxious about their livelihood. Concerts have been postponed and rescheduled repeatedly without any change in sight. Some musicians even expressed concern that the concert experience in its current format might disappear altogether. Despite these apprehensions and uncertainties, musicians have used the time well. With regards to music releases, 2020 was a particularly good year, as there were unusually many high-quality releases. The paper seeks to shed light on how musicians spent their time during the pandemic and how they kept their (artistic) spirit alive during this difficult period and unpack their emotional and practical responses.
Camp Bestival 2021: When a Show Really Must go On
Hagan, Danny (University of West London, UK)
The music industries have long been balanced on the shifting relationship between the live and recorded music sectors. Whilst the sustained growth of the festival sector had led a move back towards the primacy of the live industry, structural changes around the production and consumption of music through new technologies of distribution had begun in recent years to create a swing back towards the prevalence of the recording industry. Moreover, concerns around the loss of grassroots venues, issues around personal safety and the rising costs of attending events, had all contributed to this shift in the music industries’ landscape. As the social and economic costs of COVID-19 fell unevenly across the UK and global economies – and under government policies of isolation and limitations on social gatherings - the live music sector was disproportionately disadvantaged by the effects of the pandemic. While the recorded music industry could continue to function through established networks of digital production and consumption, the live music industry’s limitations of place and space rendered the sector immobile and almost powerless to resist the succession of restrictions and prohibitions. Despite attempts to stage events online – although sometimes producing critical and commercial successes – these often served only to highlight the authenticity and necessity of staging live music in the presence of audiences. Those events which therefore took place within the pandemic demonstrated not only the resilience and creative responses of those who produced them, but reinforced the importance of live music as the forefront of social and musical expression. This paper investigates the staging of one of the largest UK festivals of 2021 – Camp Bestival, Dorset 29 July – 1 August – and details the opportunities and challenges faced by the producers in a period of such heightened precariousness, illuminating their working practices in the expenditure of their creative labour.
‘The Children Will Rise Up’: Nandi Bushell, Tween Rock, and Musical Environmentalism
Hansen, Kai Arne (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway)
Nandi Bushell (b. 2010) is a British-Zulu multi-instrumentalist who received international attention in 2020, after challenging Dave Grohl – the front man of the Foo Fighters and former drummer of Nirvana – to a drum-off. The ensuing drum battle played out through a series of online videos before Grohl conceded defeat, inviting Bushell to join the Foo Fighters live on stage during an arena show the following year and telling Rolling Stone that watching her play the drums is ‘the true meaning of rock & roll’ and ‘as inspiring as any Beatles record’ (Martoccio 2021). This paper investigates the case of Nandi Bushell as a point of entry for shedding further light on children’s participation in rock music, on the one hand, and young musicians’ environmental activism, on the other.
Building on Tyler Bickford’s work on ‘tween pop’ (Bickford 2021), I first contemplate whether the conspicuousness with which Grohl and others show support for a child musician might be taken to indicate the expanding boundaries of rock discourse or increased opportunities for child musicians to achieve recognition and success within traditionally ‘adult’ cultural spheres. This discussion leads to an analysis of Bushell’s environmentalist music video ‘The Children Will Rise Up’ (2021), which features 10-year-old guitarist Roman Morello and guest appearances from Jack Black, Tom Morello, and environmental activist Greta Thunberg. I extend existing scholarship on children’s musical environmentalism (e.g., Hansen 2020) by inquiring into the role of musical stylistic choices, visual aesthetics, and genre positioning in legitimating environmentalist messages vis-à-vis prevailing paradigms of authenticity in popular music.
Acknowledging the central role of children in contemporary debates about environmental crisis, the paper directs attention to children’s use of music as a political tool and argues for the necessity of understanding the distinctly musical ways in which children are involved in navigating environmental changes.
Music Climate Pact: The Music Industries Declare Emergency on Planet Earth – or do they?
Harkins, Paul (Edinburgh Napier University, UK)
In December last year, a number of record labels based in the UK signed the Music Climate Pact in which they committed to reducing the emission of greenhouse gases by 50% by 2030 and achieving net zero by 2050. Signatories of the pact included the three major labels – Sony, Univeral, and Warner – as well as indie labels such as Ninja Tune, Warp and members of the Beggars Banquet group. While its website spoke about the music industry acting collectively and with a unified voice and Paul Redding, Chief Executive of Beggars Banquet was quoted in The Guardian about the industry ‘pulling in the same direction on sustainability topics,’ no quotes or soundbites were forthcoming from any of the major labels. This raises the question about whether this is an initiative that is largely driven by smaller labels rather than the majors who are also, presumably, the major polluters. In this paper, I want to investigate recent music industry initiatives like the Music Climate Pact as well as more established campaigns like Music Declares Emergency to explore exactly which actors and sectors within the music industry are driving the attempts to make the industries more environmentally sustainable. What have record labels been doing to reduce their carbon footprint and have major labels been slow to contribute to these initiatives? What has the live music industry been doing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions since the return of live music after the pandemic and has live streaming become a more environmentally friendly alternative to large scale touring? These are some of the questions I want to address as well as asking what these initiatives can achieve without addressing some of the larger problems being created by the global music industries.
What does it mean for professional metal music performance and production to move entirely remotely online? A practice-based analysis of approaches, processes and workflow
Herbst, Jan and Mynett, Mark (University of Huddersfield, UK)
The Covid-19 pandemic has become a catalyst affecting many areas of human life, with social problems brought to the fore, subsequently accelerating the transformation of established practices. One such area is professional record production. Although remote collaboration is well established, particularly with session musicians (Herbst & Albrecht 2018) and mixing/mastering engineers (Thorley 2019), globally imposed lockdowns have suddenly forced music production to move entirely online and adopt asynchronous and synchronous methods of remote collaboration (Ferguson 2015, Anthony 2017, Koszolko 2017, Campelo 2020). Arguably, such collaboration is relatively easy to accomplish in popular music genres such as EDM and hip-hop that rely on sampling, synthesis and sequencing (Brett 2019, Shelvock 2020), but less so in genres based on a recording paradigm, for example, metal (Mynett 2017).
Shaped by numerous constraints imposed by Covid-19, this autographic research (Chang 2008) investigates the process of a professional metal music production from songwriting to final mastering. Based on an original project song, whose creation process is the focus of this presentation, the context is a funded research project exploring how heaviness is manipulated in metal production. In order to provide a cohesive result whilst optimising the song’s impact, skilful songwriting/arrangement, tightly synchronised ensemble performances, and effective engineering had to be aligned (Mynett 2017), requiring remote planning and execution at every stage of the production.
The presentation compares a pre-Covid metal production with selected elements of a Covid-19 remote collaboration. It determines 1) which elements of a metal production can be remotely engaged in an effective manner, enabling aspects of a budget to be better invested elsewhere, and 2) which elements are negatively affected by forced remote collaboration. Whilst considering metal’s central musical quality of heaviness, the presentation reflects on how a genre marked by precarious production budgets is impacted by remote collaboration.
Jazz, Covid-19 and Live Music
Elina Hytönen-Ng (University of Eastern Finland, Finland)
Jazz has been a marginal genre that relies heavily on live performances. It is therefore understandable that the Covid-19 related lockdown, has greatly affected jazz musicians. In this presentation, I reflect on London based jazz musicians’ stories of lockdown by using the idea of ‘liminal state’, as conceptualised by Arnold von Gennep (1960) and Victor Turner (1982). I will be examining how the musicians described the lockdown, in particular the financial and emotional impacts it has had on them. I examine the overall emotional and psychological effects that Covid-19 had on jazz musicians who participate in live music. After reflecting on the support that the musicians have received during the pandemic, the essay proceeds to outline the new skills that the musicians learned during lockdown. In between spring 2020 and spring 2021, ten structured theme interviews with professional jazz musicians were conducted, with participation being voluntary. The interviews have been analysed using discursive psychology, a form of discourse analysis. The musicians varied with age and stage of their career, but majority of them being men in their 50s.
Lost in Translation?: Methods for ‘Conscientization’ in Higher Education Popular Music Theory
Huxtable, Jason (Leeds Arts University, UK)
As modes of Musical Language connected to Western epistemology become increasingly exclusive and excluding, Popular Music educators in Higher Education (HE) are tasked with addressing the ‘codal-incompetence’ (Tagg 2013) of student’s socio-cultural language barriers, often in the name of ‘common-sense’ employability rhetoric. The intersectionality between race and class, in consort with the capitalist and racial connotations of traditionally accepted music theory language, conspire to create dangerous conditions for the marginalisation of those without access to sufficient reserves of cultural capital. As the Black Lives Matter movement has required academia to reflect on its own contribution to colonial narratives, and as the faux-meritocratic processes of neoliberal rationality continues to dismantle UK music education, ‘Music Theory’ increasingly represents the excluding language of the conjoined twins of racial-capitalism (Kendi 2019).
As a Popular Music Educator teaching music theory, I am increasingly challenged to reconcile the benefits in arming students with this language vs. the fear and suspicion raised through perceptions of sociolinguistic-illiteracy. As a pedagogue, how can I resolve this tension? Paulo Freire outlines his theory of conscientization (or conscientização) in ‘Education for Critical Consciousness’ (Freire 1965). In this text Freire describes the process towards conscientization when teaching Portuguese to the illiterate. Rather than dogmatic systems of rules, formulas, grammar and structure, Freire promotes critical pedagogic methods of ‘meaning making’; developing language acquisition through the connecting of words and communal meaning towards agency and critical citizenship. In this session I aim to apply and translate Freire’s methods, creating new frameworks for a more critically conscious acquisition of musical language; a praxis of unveiling the false barriers of social reality towards student agency and power.
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Patronage and the Nature of the Popular Music Economy in Equatorial Guinea
Infante-Amate, Pablo (University of Jaén, Spain)
In the last few years, a number of ethnographies have explored the transformations taking place in African music industries under the influence neoliberalism, the growth of entrepreneurialism, and the introduction of digital technologies and the internet. These works rightly emphasise how ‘uniquely African’ certain developments are, including the novel role of telecommunication companies in the music business. Yet in highlighting key differences between Africa and the so-called Western music industry, this literature risks downplaying Africa’s internal trajectories and giving the impression that all African music industries are being steadily (if unevenly) incorporated into global capitalism. This paper offers a contrasting case through an ethnography of the popular music economy in Equatorial Guinea—an oil-rich, long-standing authoritarian state presided over by one of the longest-serving heads of state in the world.
While the production, circulation, and consumption of music in Equatorial Guinea have evolved in the last few years, the mechanisms of value making through music remain intimately connected to the very centre of political power. In the Central African micro-state, music is rarely considered a commodity to be exchanged in an abstract ‘industry,’ but a medium used by the local political elites to boost their individual prestige and by musicians to enter networks of patronage and secure access to the spectacular revenues generated by the recent oil boom. Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, this paper argues that the local music economy is best understood not through theories of capitalism and market exchange, but through the longue durée of regional logics of wealth and power accumulation. The paper ultimately calls for a wider definition of the music industry: one that avoids teleologies and presuppositions about the impact of digital capitalism on music exchange across the world.
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Hacking the concert experience - exploring co-creative audience interaction at a chiptune live performance
Jung, Matthias and Kummen, Vegard (University of Agder, Norway)
With this pilot study we explore new ways of interaction between audience members and musical artists at a chiptune live concert. The central question is how the audience experiences the performance when actively participating in the show using their personal smartphones.
The concert experiment is conducted with the chiptune group ‘Kubbi’ that consists of Vegard Kummen on bass and synths and Tobias Øymo Solbakk on drums. Chiptune is a musical aesthetic and culture that celebrates the sounds of archaic computers and video game consoles in electronic music production with both obsolete and modern media. Hacking within this culture refers to creative programming and deep exploration of technology for knowledge creation and developing new ways of artistic expression. Inspired by this paradigm we invite audience members to become part of the live performance by interacting with the music technology that is used by the performing artists. These devices are connected to a publicly projected visual which gives access to audience members to change musical parameters during the concert. We are specifically interested in how audience members and music performers experience this novel type of interaction, what the limitations of this co-creative concert setting are, and what happens to the aesthetic experience given such a scenario.
We collect music-related data from the interaction experiment and conduct a survey with the audience after the performance. We also collect data from interviews with the music performers which, we hope, will contribute to a better understanding of the interaction processes between performing musicians and audience members when using participatory music technologies.
Put with any other paper on musician/audience interaction or on live performance technologies
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Record Production, Entrepreneurialism, Education
Kelman, Kristina and Pratt, Daniel (University of West London, UK)
Considering the changing nature of the music industry and the diversity of employment for musical entrepreneurs, young people seeking to operate as professionals will need to develop new approaches to adapt to future employment models. Entrepreneurial skills such as networking, opportunity recognition, risk-taking, and creativity are key to transition into careers beyond school and higher education. This research challenges traditional notions of classroom music to find a pedagogical approach that nurtures self-directed learners in authentic settings. Future Noise is an innovative, and real-world learning environment that brings together university music, recording production, and music business students, and connects them with schools in the community. For this project, school students across the UK submitted original music to have their song selected, mentored, recorded, produced, promoted, and digitally released through the university student-record label, London Noise Records (AWAL).
The project operates over a six-month arc, which includes a pre-production phase, a recording phase, and a final promotion and release phase. Future Noise is an opportunity for school musicians to be professionally recorded and promoted, and digitally released. The model exposes young musicians to new practices, new audiences and new knowledge, and the high-intensity ‘record-label’ environment provides university students with a real-world experience that will make them work-ready with experience in project management, relationship building, communication, and resilience. The significance of this research is that the ‘art’ of entrepreneurial practice is not developed in a heuristic educational setting; rather, it is learnt experientially in industry project-based environments. In this paper, we present the initial findings from the first iteration of the project through interview data, video footage of the project, and exemplars of the music produced in collaboration with the university and school students. Through this research we hope to build a bridge between the school and university experience that is driven by real world industry practice.
Musical heritage in Yekaterinburg, Russia: memory of the Sverdlovsk Rock Club
Kolesnik, Alexandra (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia)
The musical heritage of Yekaterinburg, a big Russian city near the Ural Mountains, is represented by a wide range of places that are associated with both contemporary music scenes and urban musical past. Among them, the real and symbolical ‘places of memory’ of the Sverdlovsk Rock Club are the most prominent. The Sverdlovsk Rock Club existed from 1986 to 1991 and became the cultural institution officially sanctioned rock music in the Urals. In the 1990s and 2000s, the history of the Club was not a subject of interest to musicians and citizens. Nonetheless over the last 6–7 years, the Club has become a common place for the construction of Yekaterinburg's musical history. First, history of the Club became a part of temporary and permanent exhibitions in different museums. There is a private museum of Ural rock music opened in 2015; several exhibitions held in 2015–2020 were devoted to the Ural rock music; three commemorative plaques connected to the Club’s members were installed; there is an idea to install a monument to the Club. Second, the history of the Club became an integral part of different cultural events in the city: festivals, holidays and commemorative events. In 2020, music tours were organized, and in 2021 an online map of the city’s rock places was created. The Club is represented as a significant component of not only cultural, but also social history of Yekaterinburg. Third, the history of the Club has become one of the main attributes of Yekaterinburg’s rebranding as a ‘musical city’ over the last several years.
The paper analyses heritagization of the Sverdlovsk Rock Club’s history in Yekaterinburg. The research is based on field materials from a sociological expedition to Yekaterinburg held in 2019, interviews and observations made in 2016–2017 and 2021.
The Bollywood Violin – opportunities and challenges of the field
Kubiak-Kenworthy, Agata (University of West London, UK)
This paper explores the vibrant popular music performance niche of Bollywood Violin. The use of the violin in both background and foreground is integral to the sound of Bollywood music. As stated by Morcom: ‘Violin-dominated and often intensely melodramatic sound is characteristic of the classic period of Hindi film music, from the late 1940s till the 1990s, and marks the inextricable link of this genre of popular music with the cinema’ (Morcom 2013). In this paper, the author, drawing from her own experience in the field, explores the potential behind this music specialism. Bollywood Violin performance is a rapidly growing field with many paid performing opportunities arising every day. Regardless of this, there seem to not be that many professional violinists engaging with it. The author argues that the reason for this lies within the specific set of skills that is required from the instrumentalist, many of which are not taught at all within a standard classical music curriculum.
Technical fluency connected with tone, vibrato and phrasing required in Bollywood Violin performance is analogues to that of a classical violinist. However, the use of technology, necessity of learning ‘by ear’ (no sheet music available) and basic improvisation skills go far beyond what an average classically trained violinist would feel comfortable with. These ‘extra-curricular’ skills would also increase employability of string department graduates in other spheres like recording studio work or folk and pop music session work (Ogrodny 2021).
This research features several interviews with current Bollywood Violin practitioners, in which the author looks into participants’ educational background and motivations behind being involved in this specific field of performance. This paper presentation will also involve live violin demonstration of a few most common Bollywood Violin themes.
Covid and Live Music Venues/Clubs in Germany
Robin Kuchar (Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany)
During the initial phase of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, music venues and clubs were the first to close—and often the last to re-open. This paper encompasses a variety of perspectives regarding the situation live music venues and clubs found themselves in during the pandemic. Firstly, it analyses, from a German perspective, the club related developments of the covid19-crisis from the first lockdown in March 2020 to the spring of 2021. Secondly, it considers the effect of ‘loss’ among audiences and thirdly, the discourse about cultural policy and emergency funds for music clubs and live music culture in Germany. The synopsis of the chapter will focus on the empirical data collected among club-owners and -operators, club-goers and audiences of live events under Covid-measures as well as ethnographic fieldwork. Confining on the results will enable discussion and comparisons of the findings provided in the special issue.
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‘Give Life Back to Music’: a challenge for electronic dance music
Lebray, Sébastien (University of Strasbourg, France)
With their last album Random Access Memories (2013), Daft Punk challenged the music industry to ‘give life back to music.’ They aimed to question the hegemony of digital technologies in music creation, accused of standardising electronic dance music around 2010. This project, considered backward-looking by some critics, has been connected to the retro fashion of the 2000s, theorised by Simon Reynolds in Retromania (2010). However, the criticisms do not take into account the band’s ambition to explore new ways forward. So how does Daft Punk propose to ‘give life back’ without denying electronic music?
Daft Punk's challenge is an invitation to think outside the box: the progress of electronic music was not necessarily synonymous with a stampede towards technological innovations. It's not so much a matter of choosing a side in the classic digital versus analog opposition, but rather of getting the most relevant from each by making them coexist in the studio. Above all, ‘give life back’ means mostly ‘giving humanity back,’ a recurrent topic for Daft Punk, for whom the human/machine duality is central to their music. This humanity lies in the micro-inaccuracies and subtle variations inherent in a human performance, far from the cold precision of electronic instruments such as the drum machines or sequenced synthesizers they use in their performances. It also appears through an interaction of human talents, an essential dimension of RAM's artistic project.
Through a poietic approach based on information provided by the artists as well as on critical listening and musical analysis, I will aim to demonstrate that although they favoured human performance and obsolete analogue hardware in the digital era, Daft Punk didn’t deny the heritage of electronic music, and even contributed singularly to invent new ways to engage with it.
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Music at the Margins: Mapping Prison Music from the Periphery
Mangaoang, Áine (University of Oslo, Norway)
Music is a vital part of human life in times of joy and triumph, as well as in times of crisis and exile. As news reports of quarantined communities in China, Italy and beyond turning to music-making during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic illustrated, in part at least, there is a widespread belief in the connection between music, health, and well-being, especially while in isolation or imprisoned. From apartment block sing-a-longs to YouTube parodies and virtual choirs, these videos document the power in music to help ease sorrows, build relationships and reinforce a sense of community between confined citizens in lockdown.
In this paper I reflect on the role of music in a different kind of isolation – incarceration – where music’s acoustic and social resonances have critical importance, and detail the circumstances surrounding music and imprisonment in the lives of people in custody in three jurisdictions: Norway, Iceland and the Republic of Ireland. As we tackle rising incarceration rates around the world, I discuss the relationship between prison music (including music education, music therapy, music-making and listening initiatives) and the sociocultural, political, ethical and aesthetic implications of this creative practice from multiple perspectives. Through mapping the ways music is used – and is useful – in prison, my paper questions whether it is possible to create a more humane, positively transformative, and genuinely reparative prison experience.
The Return to Craft: Taylor Swift, Meta-Nostalgia & Covid-19
McGrath, John (University of Surrey, UK)
What I term ‘the return to craft’ can be read as a distillation of the nostalgic, folkloric mode of contemporary western society, one that has arisen in response to the cultural issues raised in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, but also by neoliberalism, homogenisation, austerity and, in the UK, Brexit. Such a conception or re-conception of craft has often offered an escape, a sense of perspective, for those undergoing national and even international periods of uncertainty and difficulty. It arises as a reaction to turmoil, offering the comfort of an imagined past, a utopian nostalgia and a reconnection with the ‘old ways,’ with nature and the wild. In this paper, I explore the return to craft as a societal if not generational search for solid foundations via a case-study of its most commercially successful output, Taylor Swift’s lockdown record folklore (2020).
Creativity in response to Crisis: Remote music production in London’s fringe music communities
McGuinness, Sara (University of West London, UK)
My work with London-based Congolese and Latin musicians has allowed me access to wonderful music and musicians but highlighted the struggles faced by those living on the fringes of society. These difficulties were greatly compounded when Covid-19 shut down the world.
This paper reflects upon a project which came about as a response to the Covid-19 lockdown. With the help of a grant, we composed and recorded music remotely, bringing these musicians to the centre of the creative production process with the ambition of achieving retro-analogue studio sound created in home environments.
One of the challenges in recording and producing musical content remotely is the problematising of audio quality control as traditionally envisioned by a single, overseeing record producer. Therein, however, also lie profound educational, creative and cultural-exchange opportunities. By disseminating creative control to the musicians as recordists, makers become co-producers, assuming a shared sonic vision defining engineering decisions. This dismantling of the power structure empowers the creative team, breaking down historic divisions between producer and artist, allowing us to test new paths and democratise the cultural process. In this paper I discuss the realities of conducting this project and consider how it will inform our future collaborative work.
Unpacking the Vinyl record revival using Actor Network Theory
Meynell, Anthony (University of West London, UK)
The vinyl record, recently the provenance of re-issue labels and boutique independents focused on specialised genres, is now being usurped by major labels re-entering a market they once controlled to create premium artefacts seen as authentic and in-tune with the artists vision of a creative statement - the album. Whist streaming accounts for 80% of UK music consumption, the resurgence in vinyl LPs since 2007 accounts for nearly 1 in 5 of all albums purchased (BPI Dec 2020). While this phenomenon may be attributed to nostalgia for retro technology or an argument regarding superior vinyl audio quality, these notions mask an appreciation of the socio-technical network of relationships within vinyl manufacturing.
This paper investigates, as ethnographic case study, the manufacture of a series of vinyl 7-inch singles first released in 1982, comparing the process to their re-issue in 2022. Applying Actor Network Theory (Latour 1999) and the concept of translation (Law and Callon 1986) to unpack the complex technical elements reveals a modern vinyl record represents a facsimile of historic processes, promoted to satisfy a market assembled from a sub-culture of collectors and vinyl enthusiasts. Comparing old and new working practices uncovers vital skills that shaped not only the sound but also sleeve design, are now replaced by AI, creating challenges in reproducing an exact replica from original components.
Thus, I demonstrate the resulting vinyl record artefact represents in translation a black box of assumed processes, invisible to the end consumers, of mainly digital approximations of previous analogue methods that cannot be re-created because much of the previous technology or skills no longer exist, while techniques based on previous affordances cannot be recreated within the modern homogenised manufacturing regime.
Perspectives from the World of Film & TV Music
James Moffatt (University of Liverpool, UK)
My research analyses the compositional strategies and commercial contexts of contemporary Film Scoring by exploring the Composer’s response to changes in technology.
Mainly due to transition towards digitisation, media convergence, and the growing on-demand culture of ‘content’, the music and film industries have radically transformed in recent years, resulting in an array of unique challenges and creative solutions to film music composition. This has only been reinforced during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Online streaming platforms such as Spotify and Netflix, have strengthened their position during these times, as live music venues and cinemas around the world lock down. Major studios of the Hollywood system have transitioned to the video-on-demand format to recoup box-office losses. While streaming sustains the industry, musicians and composers, whose work is now distributed in digital realms, can no longer rely on traditional royalty payments methods from theatrical release, or televised broadcast, to sustain their practice.
Moreover, transitions to package deal budget structures and the emerging models of ownership and sale of music rights by these new streaming giants destabilise the business models of film music composers further. My research, therefore, explores these recent transitions, revealing both the challenges and creative solitons to music making in an industry in flux.
The ‘Performable Recordings’ model: Bridging the gap between the ‘Human’ and ‘Non-Human’ in Live Electronic Music Performance
Moralis, Christos (University of West London, UK)
The emerging phenomenon of new types of bands, or individual performers, in popular electronic music, who try to bring a studio sound on stage created a gap between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ that requires them to work with technology in new ways. The ‘Performable Recordings’ model is, ‘a type of music production, that enables the artist(s) to perform a musical piece live, using, in real-time, the mixing and post-production processes that create the aesthetics of a studio produced version’.
This research builds upon Moore’s tripartition of authenticities and more specifically the two forms of authenticity that are most salient in this process of ‘musicking’. These are the 1st and the 3rd person as described in Moore’s (2002) model. First person authenticity relates to the extent to which the participants feel that the performers engage in authentic creative expression through their performance. Third person authenticity relates to the participants’ assessment of what constitutes an authentic example of a musical tradition or genre – in this case EDM. In addition to what it should sound like, third person authenticity is also concerned with the appropriate ‘tools’ that should be used and factors such as the coherence between the aural and the visual, the employment of skill, performativity and the constant awareness of a ‘standard of achievement’.
The production of EDM in the studio relies on machine accuracy of the timing and dynamics either through ‘performance’ by machines or post-production of human performances to achieve those kinds of machine accuracy. This practice research project explored ways of manipulating human performances in a real-time, live context to balance human and machine characteristics in a way which satisfactorily balances these two forms of authenticity. The negotiation between the research participants, the aesthetics of electronic music and the technical aspect of this model revealed that parameters such as the cognitive process, cultural differences, perception and creativity play a significant role in designing new production and performance practices resulting also into new methods of notation and score reading for technologies and audio processes, while the design itself cannot be a linear process but a cycle of design and feedback.
From Myspace to Spotify: The role of Portuguese Indie Labels in the New Musical Dematerialization
Moura, Luiz Alberto (University of Minho, Portugal)
This work raises questions and analyses the relationships between indie recording labels in the 21st-century phonographic market, deeply marked by musical dematerialization. We will focus on two Portuguese indie labels that are examples of innovation and vanguard in the country: Omnichord Records and Lovers & Lollypops. Both are intrinsically linked to the territory, being headquartered outside the capital Lisbon and with a strong local presence not only through albums but also through festivals, social and educational projects.
Amid the narrative forged by the majors, that took place in the 2000s, that the 'mp3 could kill the phonographic industry', this industry has found, in recent years, opportunities for renewal and financial growth through streaming platforms.
Apparently more democratic, this distribution mode started with Myspace and, synthesized today by Spotify, would allow indie labels to conquer more space in a new market share scheme. However, this initial assumption is debunked by alleged less egalitarian practices by platforms and major labels in how they share revenue and royalties. Thus, we found out that indie labels need to take advantage of musical prescription, proximity with niches, and develop professional methods in search of other forms of monetization, for example, Bandcamp.
This attitude shows that we cannot see indie as a genre with the romanticism from the past. As recent research shows, they are the main actors in an even more fiercely-disputed market in which professionalization is even more needed. Indie labels are more organized, have a longer lifespan, and employ proportionally more people than the big music industry. However, they have a new challenge: to keep up with the oligopoly of the majors in a dematerialized musical universe.
Finally, we will verify, through updated bibliography and interviews the positioning of indie labels in general - but with a keen eye on Omnichord and Lovers & Lollypops - how indie labels are positioning themselves in a platformed universe, to remain relevant and sustainable.
Analysing DJ performance: Theory, methods, and the importance of genre
Mouraviev, Ivan (University of Bristol, UK)
This paper responds to the surge in online DJ performance during the COVID-19 pandemic by asking: how do we analyse a DJ set? Increasingly, scholars recognise the centrality of DJing to multiple domains of popular music, but precise methods and theoretical frameworks for analysing performances are lacking. I begin by exploring the practical challenges of this research, from collecting and measuring data to visualisation and ethics, focusing on recorded DJ sets that use analogue or digital turntables and are uploaded to platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Literature in the field has so far focused on hip-hop turntablism and the canonical dance genres of house and techno, while other genres regarded as ‘bass music’ such dub-reggae, dubstep, or grime are largely ignored. In this discussion, I argue that genre tends to dictate the structure and content of any DJ set through the prioritisation of certain affective ‘technologies’ (Butler 2014), such as a sense of grooving in techno or ‘the drop’ in dubstep. I also present a descriptive framework for analysing DJ sets at micro, macro, and meta levels. The DJ’s vertical (micro) arrangement of sounds by mixing records in real time affects the horizontal (macro) structure of the set, which itself is shaped by sociocultural context (at the meta level) and genre. Finally, I apply these ideas and findings as a case study in my analysis of a Boiler Room performance by Bristol duo Gorgon Sound, visualising their set at micro and macro levels using tempo and spectrogram analysis. Ultimately, this paper aims to expand the scope and methodological rigor of DJ performance analysis in light of the post-COVID prominence of live streaming in popular music.
Using Participatory Formative Assessment to Create Communities of Practice in the teaching of Music Business and Arts Management
Murray, Sam (Middlesex University, UK)
As the employability agenda continues to grow in the higher education sector, students are also considering their choice of course and what it can unlock for a potential future career. Part of this process is seeking out institutions which can provide course that can offer transformative employability experiences through the delivery of curriculum. Part of that expectation from students is the sharing of tacit knowledge and an ability to test out and try the soft skills needed to enhance graduate employability (Succi and Canovi 2020).
This paper examine how formative assessment has been adapted in the teaching of music business and arts management, in particular the subject of music entrepreneurship, to simulate music industry practices. Drawing on the work of Partti, Westerlund, and Lebler (2015) interventions have been designed to explore how communities of practice (Wenger 1998) can be simulated, and students can not only experience industry practice, but also network and collaborate in creating a shared learning experience that forges beneficial connections. It also considers how such simulations can help students acquire tacit knowledge and level the playing field, particularly for students with protected characteristics that are not represented well within the hierarchy of music businesses.
The paper will also explore how the application of reflection-in-action and using the evaluative processes of the institution the interventions are trialled in can help define and refine the process of formative assessment proposed, to still enable space for student centred learning. It will also explore the motivations of students undertaking such courses, exploring the notion of students being driven by ‘Conscious valuing of activity and Self-endorsement of goals’ (Ryan and Deci, 2000) and undertaking a growth mindset approach (Dweck 2006, Popova 2021).
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The Changing Entry Points of DJ’ing
Ndazi, Edgar (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
In the world of electronic music, the role of the DJ remains vital, whether the protagonist remains as strictly a DJ, or becomes involved in creating their own music. Academic discourse has tended to focus on the exponents after they have acquired the necessary skills that enable them to begin to forge a career, (Katz 2006, Reitsamer 2011), at the stage where they are playing records to the public.
In my research paper I will discuss the evolving technology that is providing those who are interested in DJ’ing with greater accessibility to the mechanics of DJ’ing. These include DJ controllers, apps and software. These are trends that I observed in my time as the President of the DJ society at Goldsmiths, University of London, and my paper will include ethnographic research, conducted through observations and interviews with members of the society at Goldsmiths, in addition to other university DJ societies.
I will discuss the preponderance of students using cheaper priced DJ controllers, negating the need for more expensive CDJ’s. I will also consider the evolution from software such as Serato and Traktor into Rekordbox has changed how people have approached their initial start in DJ’ing. I will consider whether the greater accessibility has led to any significant impact in regards to re-addressing the gender imbalance of the male-dominated world of electronic music, with the male-dominated nature being prevalent even at the focus of my research, which is very much the embryonic stage of a potential career.
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Bridging Institutional and Experiential Knowledge in Popular Music Practice and Education
O’Flynn, John and Rush, Kayla (Dublin City University, Ireland)
This paper reports on some synergies that emerged between two separate research projects led by colleagues at the same university department between 2019-2021, one primarily a social anthropologist, the other with an interdisciplinary background in musicology, sociology and music education. Addressing ways that experiential and institutional knowledge in popular music practice and education are bridged—and raising issues pertinent to the IASPM UK & IRL conference thematic strand, ‘Structural Changes in Higher Education’—the paper discusses key questions and relevant findings from each project in turn, before a final consideration of emerging themes common to both.
The first project ‘Bridging Musical Knowledge’ (BMK) has to date built a conceptual and methodological framework that, among other musical ideas and practices, addresses articulations of experiential knowledge, including theory, among popular musicians. This framework developed in tandem with an online qualitative survey whose participants comprised various music practitioners in the greater Belfast area. Highlighted for this paper are data and findings pointing to the seeming contradictions between and across accounts by popular music producers with regard to reified and experiential conceptions of musical knowledge.
The second and longer-term study reported on here, ‘Rocking in the Midwest’, comprised an ethnographic examination of private rock music schools in the United States and Ireland, with a particular interest in the performance and transmission of social class. This research included in-depth pedagogical interviews with rock school instructors, the majority of whom have no formal training in music education. Key findings highlighted for this paper are rock school instructors’ clear conceptions of themselves as music educators and the interesting overlaps with and divergences from more formalised pedagogical approaches in academic music education and teacher training. This paper will also highlight how the research itself created vital spaces for the instructors to reflect upon and articulate their grassroots pedagogies.
To conclude, both presenters contemplate how their respective projects, albeit following independent research questions, and of contrasting scale and disciplinary orientation, led to more global discussions on the implications of shifting interrelations between popular music practice and education.
The Making of the Making Available Right
Osborne, Richard (Middlesex University, UK)
The standard narrative about record companies at the turn of the millennium is that they were so awash with profits from compact discs that they ignored the development of online music. This paper provides an alternative account, exploring the recording industry’s pro-active role in the genesis of the ‘making available’ right. First developed in the early 1990s, this right was designed so it would operate similarly to the reproduction right. It has enabled the recording industry to structure its online economy so it has its closest affinities with the market for physical sales, rather than broadcast licensing. This has proved beneficial to record companies in relation to divisions of revenue between recording rights and publishing rights, royalties paid to artists, and the avoidance of collecting society involvement. This orientation is being challenged. Hence, this paper also addresses contemporary campaigns for reform that are seeking to re-orient online revenues so the publishing sector gets higher shares, contractual agreements are adjusted, and equitable remuneration is implemented. In order to explore these themes, the paper draws upon historical documentation relating to WIPO’s Performances and Phonograms Treaty, and research conducted for the IPO-funded project Music Creators’ Earnings in the Digital Era.
Other Voices from the edge of Ireland: music worlds, digital mediation, and community building
O’Shea, Susan (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
Other Voices is an Irish music festival with a twenty-year history in Dingle, a remote peninsula on the Wild Atlantic Way tourist trail in Ireland. What began as a music showcase in a small Church with a TV series serving a niche audience, has since morphed into a multi-site high-tech series of cultural events. As a migration nation Ireland is undergoing rapid socio-cultural change with newly emerging migrant music cultures and identities. Today, the festival attempts to disrupt popular perceptions about Irish music, highlighting the emerging creative diversity of the country. The often-difficult winter pilgrimage to Dingle for musicians and music fans became so popular in pre-pandemic years that the town was struggling to accommodate visitors. It has expanded over the years to make translocal links with regional cities and international music cities, like Berlin, London, and New York, yet the music trails of Dingle and Ballina appear to be where the most meaningful connections for musicians are still made. As a festival, Other Voices was an early adopter of streaming technology, staging hybrid music events long before the pandemic necessitated it. However, the streamed performances displayed an acute aware of an Irish diaspora prevented from travel seeking connections to home through music. A network database was created consisting of over 140 Other Voices labelled events over a twenty-one-year period, including more than 1,400 musical performances with attribute data. Social network analysis and visualisations are used to investigate the structure of the networks and to understand the relationships between regional place-based events and performers, and the impact on community building between affiliated musicians in the music worlds of Other Voices before and since the pandemic.
Clubbing curtailed – the future of Irish Music Culture post
O’Sullivan, Caroline (Technological University Dublin, Ireland)
Ireland went into its first lockdown on the 12th of March 2020. At 120 days this lockdown was recognised as the longest in Europe, however for the music industry the lockdown was even more restrictive, many venues and nightclubs closed their doors entirely until the 22nd of October 2021 a total 589 days, and those venues that could open during that time were prohibited from having live music including DJ’s. Nightclubs and venues were only open for three weeks in November when they had their opening hours reduced before being shut again entirely from the 7th of December 2021. As of January 2022, they remain closed with no roadmap for reopening. This paper will assess the impact that Covid 19 has had on Ireland’s already contracting music culture and will examine the strategies that musicians and DJs have had to adopt to survive. Prior to the pandemic the physical spaces that music has thrived in over the past 40 years had greatly diminished, many being demolished to make way for student accommodation and hotels, Ireland also has some of the most restrictive licensing laws in the EU which result in the some of the earliest club closing times. Post the onset of the pandemic this contraction has intensified and 2021 saw the permanent closure of a number of high profile and pivotal venues around Ireland. As we emerge out the other side it remains to be seen what remaining music venues and nightclubs will survive the lengthy lockdown and after 2 years of cancellations, streaming live gigs and DJ sets from bedrooms and empty venues I interrogate what that will be the long-term consequences for the country’s musicians, DJs and promoters.
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Disruptions to Spatiality in the Music of Radiohead
Pearlmutter, Gittit (Bar Ilan University, Israel)
The paper is about a particular DAW based creative practice and the way it disrupts the listener’s perception of space. I shall discuss basic terms on the subject of spatiality in songs; the idea of space, performance space and fabricated space in recorded popular music as explored by scholars in the field (Doyle 2005, Moylan 2007, Dockwray and Moore 2010, Moore and Dockwray 2010). In light of a prevailing aesthetic that strives for realism thorough a transparency of the recording process, I shall present anomalies in Radiohead’s music and address the way the band embraces a different approach.
Eric Clarke (2005) applied ecological approach to perception (Gibson 1979), to explore perception of musical meaning. I shall rely on Clarke to explore the Radiohead cases. Additionally, following Simon Zagorski-Thomas (2014) I employ ecological approach and embodied cognition (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, and 2003) to look at recorded popular music from another angle; the creative environment and its properties. I shall demonstrate how the technological tools originally developed to create a realistic sense of performance which enhance and support the narrative are utilized in some of Radiohead tracks to achieve a strikingly different impact. Rather than intensifying the realism of the implied performance space, the band disintegrate it through a particular use of effect processing. The analysis will focus on two examples from Radiohead’s most recent album, ‘Identikit’ and ‘Present Tense’ (2016) and will briefly relate to other precedents by the band from previous albums, Amnesiac (2001) and In Rainbows (2007). Additional scholars to illuminate the analysis are Serge Lacasse (2005), Denis Smalley (2008), and Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen (2013).
The findings are part of a wider research on DAW based disruptions to songwriting. The way these disruptions stem from particular technological affordances, I argue, has a profound impact on the listening experience. I shall demonstrate in what way and will also discuss briefly, the potential of thinking about these findings as a reflection of a wider cultural and socio-technological change.
Experiencing Pop Music in the Postwar British Home: Private pleasures and social change
Perchard, Tom (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
In this presentation I will describe some of the early findings from my Leverhulme Trust-funded research on popular music in the British home between 1945-90.
By situating musical history in a domestic environment, the study aims to provide a new historical account of British pop. It de-emphasises pop’s mythologised creators, canonical styles, famous recordings and habitual youth-culture focus, to explore instead the ways that home audiences – in all their generational and cultural variety – heard, enjoyed and reflected upon a broad range of musical forms. This history of a changing ‘musical home’ makes much use of source types so-far underexplored in pop histories, including broadcaster and music industry audience research, private diaries, and fan writing.
I will use some of these sources to illustrate two contrasting layers of the study. The first comprises a detailed examination of the ways pop became intertwined with everyday experience and domestic ‘ambiance’. The second is more theoretical and suggests some new ways of thinking about the ways pop figured in much broader changes in the British experience of class.
Apologies to the future: Renegotiating environmental responsibility through pop music
Philipp, Thorsten (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)
The debate on liability and responsibility roles is a core element of crisis dynamics. To discern accountability, ethical obligation and guilt is considered a precondition for a balanced societal change, in which historical lessons are learned and adequate measures to encounter future challenges are taken. Especially emergencies such as environmental conflicts and ecological disasters demand accountability and an out- right confession of failure by weighing sanctions and rewards.
To what extent is the recognition of ecology-related guilt and the processing of environmental shame, accusation and retribution a topic of pop music? Who is the accuser, and who is the judge? While Michael Jackson’s messianic Earth Song (1995) is among the economically most successful attempts to renegotiate ethical duty across generations and continents, Judeo-Christian promises of spiritual renewal (Marvin Gaye, Mercy, Mercy Me) contrast with irreconcilable Manichaean dualism (Billie Eilish, all the good girls go to hell) and the public need for confession rituals (Linkin Park, What I Have Done), ardent excuses (Prince Ea, Dear Future Generations: Sorry) and apocalyptic reckoning (grandson, blood // water) by reminiscing even Hieroni-mus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross, A Minute To Breathe).
The ethical indictment about ecological consequences of an action addresses the core postulate of sustainability for global and intergenerational justice (Jonas 1984). Pop music popularizes this process of anger, allegation, defense, reconciliation, and consensus, shortens it to stereotypes and complements it with aesthetic stimulus. Nevertheless, the analysis of textual and sound regimes not only offers a hybrid mirror of political communication on sustainable development through entertainment (Dörner 2001); it additionally permits to discover latent structures of social systems (Luhmann Social Systems 2005) by unveiling societal dynamics which are mostly ignored in the public discourse.
Free to be (you or) me?: appropriation or appreciation in popular music performance.
Pipe, Liz (University of West London, UK)
As a discipline, popular music is rooted in an eclectic interdisciplinarity; the fusion of an amalgam of musical, social, political, historical, and societal understandings and influences. It could be argued that this blend is part of its diverse appeal and the wide-reaching commerciality of the discipline. That said, at a moment in time where it is vital that an appropriate understanding and recognition of the legacy of different styles is portrayed, how do the intricacies of historic appreciation manifest when a particular popular music genre may afford the use of specific culturally created gestures, but the performing artist is not rooted in that heritage themselves?
This paper examines the impact of cultural understanding on the physical delivery of popular music performance and draws on work by Auslander (2006), Cano (2006), Clarke (2005), Cox (2016), Gibson (1979), Leman (2016), and Zagorski-Thomas (2014). Through case-study examples, focus is given to the multi-modal nature of music performance, and challenges that might arise when the behavioural responses from performers, created by the affordances produced by the sonic properties of the song, result in a physical delivery which may not be considered to be culturally aware, respectful or appropriate. Findings from interviews with practitioners, and student musicians, are then applied to existing pedagogical theories to demonstrate how, in a discipline where conscious and unconscious imitation are well-established educational tools, higher education performance teachers can foster a learning environment where students feel able and empowered to experiment with creativity and performance styles, whilst balancing the juxtaposed areas of respectful emulation and appreciation, and individuality.
Mental Health in Higher Education: A qualitative interview study promoting the health of students of popular music
Ptatscheck, Melanie (Cologne University of Music and Dance, Germany)
The profession of a musician is connected to several health risks that inform not only individual careers, but also artistic output and narratives of popular culture. Despite a trend toward the destigmatisation of mental health issues and the institutionalization of health promotion both popular music studies and musical education are still lacking differentiated observations and studies when it comes to the subject of mental health.
This paper focuses on mental health within the context of higher education, exemplifying the potentials for health promotion. Based on narrative-biographical interviews with 20 freshman students of Popakademie Baden-Württemberg (BA Pop Music Design) the paper elaborates on a) the self-concepts of these students, b) the everyday (pandemic-related) challenges and burdens the students are facing during their education, and c) the students’ individual resources and coping strategies. Additionally, in reference to 10 semi-structured interviews with teaching- and leading staff, the paper discusses in how far the academic training is/should be aligned with the individual needs of students and the challenges of their prospective job market.
I argue that students need to be recognized within their individual life worlds in order to derive specific indicators for required action and specific offers. Besides the practical education and the transfer of knowledge, the educational institution provides norms and values that are decisive for the self-concepts of students in the phase of identity formation during their early studies and will be significant regarding a healthy lifestyle as workers in the music business. This means that aside from individual offers, structural and curricular requirements need to be adapted to the promotion of a healthy educational culture. I contend that teaching and leading staff discussing the subject of mental health – serving as role models for students – will encourage the removal of taboos and promote attention to mental health issues.
‘Corona-Vinyl’: Consumption of physical music media in the era of streaming and global crisis: Creativity, Technology, Business and Sustainability
Purple, Tyrian (London College of Music, UK)
It is no secret that sales of vinyl records have experienced a year-on-year growth for now more than a decade, despite the ever-decreasing relevance of physical media during this period. In 2020, vinyl sales finally surpassed that of the compact disc - its own technological successor - however both of these formats had already been outmoded years earlier, first by the MP3 player and later by digital streaming services.
The time of pandemic has of course had a hugely detrimental impact to the live music industry, putting countless professionals out of work practically overnight. The physical media market however, perhaps paradoxically, experienced an inverse dilemma. Following a brief dip at the outset of the pandemic, demand for vinyl production then skyrocketed during the latter half of 2020 and throughout 2021, to a level an order of magnitude higher than its previous pre-pandemic peak, revealing the upper limit of global capacity for vinyl manufacturing, and pushing lead times out to six months or longer. This is turn has imposed a dramatic rethink of marketing strategies for new releases, both for independent artists and major labels. By delving into the Actor-Network of the modern-day music industry, as well as the culture of record collecting, this paper aims to explore some of the mechanisms which drive the continuing physical media bubble. Will the bubble eventually burst? And if so, when? And what will this mean for the independent artist?
Vinyl is often sold as an ‘audiophile’ format offering a superior listening experience, though from a technical standpoint vinyl performs extremely poorly with respect to noise floor, frequency response and dynamic range, when compared with newer digital formats; we look at detailed aspects of audio engineering to uncover the truths and the myths of the vinyl hype. Perhaps ‘fidelity’ is not the ultimate concern, however, so much as some tangible connection with the music or a sense of ‘ownership’; some statistics suggest that as many as 20% of vinyl record consumers do not even own a record player.
The vinyl manufacturing industry is currently still reliant on machinery which is often more than 40 or 50 years old, many years past their rated end-of-life, all working examples of which being the only surviving remnants of an obsolete process. The vinyl ‘resurgence’ has begun to trigger new technological innovation, or rather re-innovation, necessitating the backwards-engineering and cloning of old designs. We look at some of the endangered knowledge of vinyl technology, and provide an overview of the current research and development being undertaken around the world. Meanwhile attention turns to the environmental impact of the vinyl industry – can this plastics manufacturing process truly be made environmentally sustainable?
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Still We Rise: Racial Discriminatory Resilience and Black American Musicians
Randolph, Clarke (Howard University, USA)
‘What does it mean for descendants of enslaved people to create a music embraced by the world and still be treated as second-class citizens, exploited, dehumanised, and subject to premature death?’ thus asked author Robin Kelley. According to Chou et al, Black Americans are exposed to more racial discrimination than any other ethno-racial group (Chou et al. 2012). Although racial discrimination plagues the lives of many Black American in the United States, the experiences of resilient Black Americans, especially in the music industry, are very much understudied (Barbarin 1993). Primary research has linked music performance with an increase in resilience across many clinical and community settings (Fraser 2015, Schafer et al. 2013). While historical research has proven music to be a major tool in the liberation of Black America and in building community resilience, examinations of the racial experiences of resilient Black American musicians are sparse. Musicologist Sherrie Tucker of the University of Kansas states, ‘Moments of justice for Black American musicians and their communities are few and far between.’ This study examines the effects of racial discrimination on Black American musicians. This paper begins to fill the gap in research regarding resilient Black American musicians and provides data for future research in similar areas including, but not limited to, higher education, the music industry, and mental health. Method: Four participants were assessed via semi-structured interviews to determine the impact of racial discrimination on their lives as Black American musicians. Data were analysed using IPA. Results and Conclusion: The impacts of racial discrimination on Black American musicians accounted for four themes including: (1) compromised cultural inclusive formal education, (2) obscured and marginalised cultural identity, (3) abbreviated success due to cultural appropriation, (themes 2 and 3 account for an overarching theme of racial capitalism), and (4) compulsory resilience.
Americana: Music, DIY Culture and Millennial Cool
Robinson, Dave (Leeds Beckett University, UK)
The subject of a forthcoming monograph (Liverpool University Press), this paper examines the emergence of Americana as a musical expression of alternative millennial culture. Americana is here considered as a site of contestation between ‘DIY’ culture and ‘cool capitalism.’ Approaching the cultural politics of Americana from a ‘music scenes’ perspective, the paper discusses how scene participants experience Americana as part of an alternative – anti-corporate – taste community, and the extent to which scene practices serve merely to create the illusion of alternative meaning. In doing so, the paper contributes to contemporary debates about postmodern identity and resistance to globalization. It explores an emergent musical world – part of a ‘street level’ culture – in which meaning is articulated around ideas of the local, the artisanal, the independent and the cosmopolitan, but also one in which racialised and class-specific codes and signifying practices can form barriers to entry, and where the instrumentality of urban gentrification projects threaten the integrity of the ‘authentic’ urban spaces that the scene inhabits.
In exploring the ever-contingent nature of music scene practices and alliances, the paper draws on neo-Gramscian, Habermasian and geographical perspectives in order to understand how cultural meaning is negotiated amongst members of a translocal and predominantly trans-Atlantic music scene. It examines the paradox of postmodern identity and ‘retro’ culture; revival as symbolic resistance; the imaginative refiguring of musical heritage to create new cultural narratives, or ‘maps of meaning’, and the sometimes conflicting – progressive/reactionary; inclusive/exclusive – messages they connote. At a situational level, the paper considers Americana’s possibilities as a site of freely-chosen leisure in a Habermasian sense, as evident in the recent house concert phenomenon, whilst also considering how events such as lifestyle festivals threaten to undermine the scene’s grassroots organisational integrity.
Pop Music for Now People: Aesthetics in the Age of Excess
Roessner, Jeffrey (Mercyhurst University, USA)
Given 21st century technological advances in its production and distribution, popular music has become unthinkable. What I mean is that we can no longer pretend to conceive of popular music as a totality. While we might listen to individual songs or artists and follow various trends or styles, we should not deceive ourselves into believing that we can construct a coherent map of the phenomenon. Every day, over 60,000 new tracks are added to Spotify—nearly one every second—and the rate of uploads continues to increase, with the prediction that there will be over 50 million content creators on the platform by 2025. Given these circumstances, I argue that popular music has taken on characteristics of what Timothy Morton has termed a hyperobject, one whose vast scope and ubiquitous dissemination help it defy categorical distinctions. In my paper, I first establish the context of this excess in production, and then outline key aesthetic consequences that follow from it. Contrary to some critics, I argue that this abundance of music does not signal the end of genres. Rather, we have instead seen the staggering proliferation of microgenres—stylistic variations in music that are not mappable in a hierarchical structure with a clear order of subgenres, but rather expand rhizomatically in a constantly evolving web of hybridized influences. Ultimately, I suggest that 21st century technology has transformed traditional notions of music’s qualitative value. The overwhelming volume and ease of access have obliterated barriers which previously secured aesthetic value, undermining traditional cultural hierarchies based on scarcity.
‘Whatever we did get, we fought tooth and nail for’: Irish Independent and DIY Music Scenes in the Pandemic
Ryan, Ciarán (Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland)
Media and entertainment industries are amongst those most visibly economically effected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with numerous reports (for example, UK Music 2020) demonstrating substantial revenue drops. In Ireland, high profile musicians quickly formed the Music and Entertainment Association of Ireland (MEAI), a quasi-lobbying body with an emphasis on the financial well-being of its members. This, in part, has led to high profile State responses such as the Music Industry Stimulus Package (MISP). Nonetheless, there are many practitioners that tend to exist outside such government policies around ‘creative industries.’ Even the term ‘industry’ has connotations of standardisation, monetisation and commercialisation; indeed, Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1947) scathing representation of the ‘culture industry’ suggests true creativity is stymied by capitalism.
This proposed paper examines what are loosely termed DIY (or ‘do-it-yourself’) music-makers. These networks or ‘scenes’ tend to be musically and/or politically influenced by movements like punk and hardcore from the 1970s and 80s. The ideals of DIY extend to the promotion, recording and distribution of music, eschewing engagement with major media companies in the process, thus retaining independence. This study builds on existing research (Ryan 2022) conducted on contemporary Irish DIY scenes, which tend to be bonded through shared taste and collective action. This is perhaps most visible in the live field but key aspects of the State’s preventative measures against the pandemic – closure of licenced venues, social distancing requirements, and travel restrictions – have ensured this outlet for creative expression and sociability is at a standstill.
Drawing on qualitative interview data with key players – musicians, promoters and independent record label owners – this paper examines responses to the pandemic in these scenes. Novel methods such as livestreaming gigs, bedroom recordings, and online collaborations have emerged. Finally, it ponders what the future might look like for DIY scenes in a post-pandemic landscape.
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Tourism-dependent Local Music Ecosystems under Covid-19: The Case of Lisbon’s Fado Music Scene
Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros (Incipit CSIC, Spain)
Tourism-dependent music ecosystems have been affected by Covid-19 in two ways. On the one hand, the pandemic has conditioned tourism flows globally, causing traditional tourist destinations to stagnate, with the consequent disappearance of their primary tourist audience. On the other hand, these music scenes also suffered from the limitations imposed on the night-time economy and the hospitality industry in general: social distancing, curfews, limited seating capacity, time restrictions, etc. This paper focuses on Portugal’s best-known music export, fado, and its prime tourist destination, Lisbon, to explore the changing atmosphere of this particular music ecosystem during the Covid-19 crisis. In particular, it focuses on the effects of the lockdown measures and other restrictions on the casas de fado, a distinctive type of local institution where music, tourism and the quest for experiences of authenticity intersect. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork during the pandemic, this presentation argues that the pandemic has revealed the fragility of a local music ecosystem overly dependent on foreign tourism and institutional support for its survival. It also aims at discussing how some of the changes brought about by the pandemic have impacted fado practice itself and whether they will become permanent in the so-called ‘new normality.’
Electronic dance music and gentrification in Amsterdam in the (post-)COVID era
Schelvis, Sydney (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
In this research project, I investigate the relationship between electronic dance music and gentrification in Amsterdam in the (post-)COVID era. Pre-COVID, the city’s nightlife has come to be an international locus for electronic dance music culture with an abundance of clubs, most of which settled in vacant spaces on the city’s periphery. At first sight, this seems to be the result of the gentrification’s centrifugal force that renders downtown unaffordable to non-mainstream venues. However, the capability of clubs to attract large crowds to desolate and previously unpopular parts of town may itself play a role in the process of gentrification. To investigate the relation of electronic dance music to gentrification, I map how their sound moves through the city. I do so by studying the ways in which the music incites dancers to move, and how differentiation in sound accounts for the development and diffusion of specific scenes. Clubs filled to capacity in the brief periods that the COVID-measures allowed them to reveal the persistent popularity of the music in Amsterdam. This raises the question as to how nightlife will instigate considerable movement to, on, and beyond the dance floor when it opens up again. By mapping how the sounds of electronic dance music move through the city, I aim to reveal previously concealed patterns of distribution of cultural and financial capital in Amsterdam.
Historical Revisionism and the Return of the Marcoses: Popular Music and the Contested Memory of the Philippine Dictatorship
Schoop, Monica (Leuphana University, Germany)
Focusing on the Philippines, this paper addresses the challenge of remembering violent pasts in the face of the seemingly global rise of authoritarianism. In recent years, the country has seen an increasing promotion of a public amnesia concerning the rule (1965-1986) of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, a development that has been reinforced by the authoritarian Duterte regime. Today, portrayals of the period as the ‘golden age’ of Philippine history and an era of economic prosperity are widely embraced, cutting across social classes and political constituencies. Historical revisionism goes hand in hand with the de facto return of the Marcoses to national politics, most notably Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr.’s narrow defeat in the 2016 vice presidential elections and his bid for the presidency in 2022. Popular music is one of the arenas in which historical revisionist narratives and the return of the Marcoses are most vigorously opposed: in new compositions of artists like BLKD, Calix, and Plagpul as well as in the revival of historical protest songs from the Martial Law era. Drawing on participant observation including online ethnography as well as semi-structured interviews with selected musicians, this paper enquires into popular music’s role in providing counter-narratives to historical revisionism and in opposing the return of the Marcoses. It does so focusing on two key events: first, the re-burial of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga bayani (heroes’ cemetery) in 2016 and second, the 2022 elections and Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr.’s bid to the presidency. Setting itself in dialogue with popular music studies, memory studies, and political sciences the paper highlights music’s role in negotiating contested memories of violent pasts and shows how these are employed to fight continuing threats of a new dictatorship.
Lost in Digitalization: Tracing Punjabi Folk Music Tradition in the Context of Temporality and Timelessness
Sethi, Gurusha (Independent Scholar)
Punjabi folk music has strived to exist in the global domain. Driven by the ebb and flow of migration, which was essentially perpetuated by the shifting idea of space and modernity, it emerged as an expression of separation and longingness. Traditionally, these were songs and short verses (bōliān) sung by women that later entered the commercial space during the early twentieth century.
As this vernacular art form was exposed to the commercial milieu, it experienced a shift in performance style and form of dissemination, to attend to the demands of the audience. The audience sought short recordings instead of traditional ballads, which was maintained by film songs. However, it was by the mid-1970s that the folk sentiments in the industry began to dissipate and became popular in its approach.
It was with the intervention of social media that Punjabi folk music tradition witnessed an unprecedented flux. What was otherwise pushed on the periphery, entered the scope of revival, thereby redefining the ‘vernacular.’
This discourse of reinvention of the folk-art form is anything but linear as it charts a fluid space between its cultural expression and the risk of being reduced to an ephemeral trend. This paper aims to navigate the grey areas explored by Punjabi folk music tradition vis-a-vis claiming its position among the urban and cosmopolitan audience.
Audiovisual Déjà Vu: Technological Pastiche in Olivia Rodrigo’s Music Videos
Skjerseth, Amy (University of Liverpool, UK)
How does the use of pastiche in music videos widen a pop star’s audience, especially when videos modernize older media formats for younger viewers? The music video imagery of Disney Channel star and teenage pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo teems with technological pastiche. Two 2021 videos, ‘déjà vu’ (Allie Avital) and ‘good 4 u’ (Petra Collins), make previous technologies and media new again. But they mine pop culture’s visual archive for paradoxical ends—to show the eighteen-year-old’s maturity while also courting her fans from High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. In this paper, I explore how Rodrigo and her production team remediate twentieth-century and avant-garde visual technologies to reach a surprisingly wide audience.
To ground my analysis in pop audience and audiovisual remix studies, I draw from scholarship on popular music fandom and tastemaking (Hopper 2021) and on the music video as a hybrid form (Korsgaard 2017) that borrows from experimental film (Rogers and Barham 2017). I closely examine how Rodrigo’s videos remix hits with high-art imagery and consequently affect the public perception of her music and her persona. First, ‘good 4 u’ uses an elliptical narrative to portray Rodrigo’s revenge on an ex-boyfriend, plays with flip phones and mirrors to comment on the surveillance and mediation of the star’s image, and acknowledges her High School Musical role through cheerleading scenes. Then, ‘déjà vu’ homages the doppelgängers of Hitchcock films like Rebecca and Psycho, as well as the 1960s TV art of Nam June Paik. These forms of audiovisual déjà vu, I argue, complicate notions of authorship and personas in popular music because they combine disparate archives and create nostalgia for technologies that Rodrigo’s contemporaries have never experienced. Today’s social media ecology allows young singers to tap into technological pastiche to appeal to broader taste cultures, from Gen-Z to Gen-X.
Interdisciplinarity, evolutionary psychology, and popular music: The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Bubblegum Pop
Stewart, Jon (BIMM, UK)
Human evolution was once a controversial topic, but today it is widely accepted that there is no meaningful biology other than evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychology, however, remains a provocative subject area. When E. O. Wilson (1975) first suggested that contemporary human behaviours carry adaptations from our ancient ancestral environment, his work met with such fierce resistance that it was almost thirty years before evolutionary psychology coalesced into a coherent discipline. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin’s (1979) withering critique, that the field merely offers a collection of ‘just-so stories’, is still often cited today. Nonetheless, over the last two decades evolutionary psychology has finally matured into a robust subject area with a raft of established journals, handbooks, and anthologies. Here, a plethora of evidence demonstrates deep-rooted universal characteristics in human disgust responses, cultural taboos, acts of violence, sexual behaviours, and even musical preferences (Mehr 2019).
Interdisciplinary approaches between science and popular music have inspired useful research clusters in music education, music technology, psychoacoustics, and copyright administration. Regrettably evolutionary psychology still carries a great deal of unwelcome political baggage, in part because it does not align with the dominant constructivist paradigm in cultural and social studies. Some corners of the discipline certainly remain sequestered by reactionary figures, but others have already produced scholarship in progressive subfields such as literary Darwinism and feminist evolutionary psychology. Popular music is often concerned with our most intense affective states, so it would seem a natural home for a methodology that focuses on tacit or visceral motivations. This paper analysis familiar song lyrics from The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Bubblegum Pop era that articulate three fundamental human pre-occupations: faith, food, and love. It shows how evolutionary psychology offers new and profound insights for popular music scholars (Stewart 2021, 2022).
Maintaining a Creative Practice in Lockdown
Storr, Gemma (University of West London, UK)
‘Xxx Xxx’ is a PhD student at the University of West London, looking at how original music comes into being through different processes. Combining Practice as Research with an Auto-ethnographic approach, she uses her status as a knowledgeable insider to re-evaluate the lexicon of games and systems. She aims to facilitate a musician-informed development of new making methods for a feminist, anti-racist, post-digital now.
She is an established facilitator of ensemble composition and creative play for theatre, multi-disciplinary installation, and orchestral works, with clients including Theatre de Complicite, Fender Guitar, Royal Shakespeare Company, and Red Bull.
For the 2022 IASPM ‘Challenge and Change’ Conference, I propose a music-focused creative response to the theme of crisis and resilience, exploring the challenges of maintaining and nurturing a creative practice through the pandemic. The piece demonstrates an artist’s struggle to adapt to challenging circumstances, and how the artist self is found anew amid the rubble.
‘Sometimes I only get ten minutes a day to play. But I take those ten minutes a day, religiously. I shut myself out on the balcony, I press record, and I play whatever comes to mind, trying my best to ignore the kids getting ready for school, the crises around me, the sirens, and the rest. That is my creative practice now, for better or for worse’
I aim to provoke questions and emotional responses by using multiple tracks from my audio diaries to demonstrate challenges and inequalities faced by those with caring responsibilities, those living in poverty, and those managing other systemic uncertainties during this ongoing pandemic and recession.
The resulting stereo mix will be accompanied by video and visuals, diaries, and multiple speakers / devices to be triggered by audience, representing the instability and mess, both sonic and personal, of my recent creative practice.
Collective spheres: scenius as a participatory model for reconfiguring creative higher popular music education
Strange, Simon (Bath Spa University, UK)
Popular music relies on group dynamics, with collaborations reaching peak moments in time known as scenius, or eco-system of genius (Eno 1996, Fisher 2018). This research will examine popular music through the interrelationships which existed between people, in certain places, at certain points in time, to support creative development. The challenge and opportunity is to see how the findings could be implemented in the development of higher popular music education (HPME) curriculum.
Scenii interconnections, equating to the rhizome of theorists Deleuze and Guattari (1987) or systems art and cybernetic principles, display non-hierarchical, horizontally aligned development (Shanken et al. 2015). Art and music worlds (Becker 1982, Crossley 2015) act as theoretical diving boards. Artists inhabited art worlds, artistic genres, and evolved through the patronage of viewers, blurring boundaries between artist and viewer, encouraging non-hierarchical interactions which reflect an art school spirit. Bands, like cohorts, existed as natural homes defined by relationships: between members, management, record companies, subcultures, and audience. Group responses catalysed further actions as concepts of serendipity and chance drove scenes in natural directions.
A mixture of personal and research led accounts will inform this presentation. Within contemporary popular music, case studies of scenii include bands such as Massive Attack/ Portishead through music interrelationships in Bristol and the emergent Jungle, Grime and New-Jazz scenes in London. Connections to the Glasgow indie and Parisian punk music scenes in the 1990s will be analysed. Taking global examples, I explore with members of these scenii the essential elements which supported individual and collective creative growth, helping to inform an inclusive and scenius led pedagogical approach to HPME.
Speaking words of protest: lessons from the long history of the protest song
Street, John (University of East Anglia, UK) and Worley, Matthew (University of Reading, UK)
This paper reports on the findings of a two-year AHRC research project entitled ‘Our Subversive Voice: The history and the politics of the English protest song.’ In this project we trace the history of the protest song from 1600 to the present day, revealing the dramatic differences and surprising continuities in the use of song to register protest and in the institutions and agents that make it possible to protest in song.
In conducting our research, we have had to confront familiar criticisms of the protest song (most obviously as propaganda that preaches to the converted), but in response we argue that the protest song has been, and remains, an important form of political communication. Seeing it as such allows for the fact that it - like all forms of political communication - often fails in its objective. To this extent, protest songs are like political speeches: often ignored or dismissed, but also part of the language in which citizens come to articulate their political desires and their judgements.
Using examples from the long history of the protest song, we will illustrate how the protest song has become part of political dissent and political expression by becoming part of the language of politics. To this extent, we aim to provide further substance to Simon Frith’s suggestion in Performing Rites (1996: 169) that ‘the most significant political effect of a pop song is not on how people vote or organize, but on how they speak.’
Music as entangled empathy: the affective ecopolitics of Wolfgang Buttress’ the Hive
Szarecki, Artur (University of Toruń, Poland)
Musicking as entangled empathy: the affective ecopolitics of Wolfgang Buttress’ the Hive
The Hive is a unique installation that traverses and integrates the fields of art, science, and popular music. Conceived by Nottingham-based artist, Wolfgang Buttress, it comprises a large, hexagonal sculpture which pulsates with lights and sounds according to signals livestreamed from a real beehive. The main idea behind the artwork is to create an immersive experience that would make people feel connected to the bees, facilitating a sense of empathy that could lead to social and political change.
Acknowledging the decline of the honeybee population throughout the world, the Hive, then, aims to alter modes of awareness and conduct towards more ecological ways of living. As such, it carries a powerful environmental message of co-existence, co-dependence, and sustainability, but conveys it primarily not via discursively articulated meanings, but corporeal sensations. Music plays a vital part in this. Arranged by Kev Bales and Doggen Foster of Spiritualized, it features both human- and nonhuman-produced sounds. Musicians play along the visceral hum of the bees, as well as incorporate some of their vibratory communication signals into the soundtrack. Within the installation, music’s playback is controlled by signals from the beehive, affording corporeal entrainment with apian rhythms and thrusting bodies into felt connectivity with nonhuman others.
In this paper, therefore, I will approach the Hive as a musicking assemblage, in which the intermingling of material bodies and sonic forces maps out an acoustic diagram of empathetic co-existence with nonhuman others. On these grounds, music’s impact within the Hive can be understood not in terms of political ecology, with its focus on conveying ideological messages, but in terms of affective ecopolitics that involves modulating the fabric of lived experience.
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Changing the Record: Using Archaeological Approaches to Study Popular Music History
Thompson, Paul (Leeds Beckett University, UK)
Popular Music history has been explored through an analysis of manuscripts, instruments, technologies and, more recently, through online and digital materials. In the case of recordings, analyses usually work backwards from the finished product in order to identify its ‘ingredients’ such as the instrumentation used, the way it was composed, arranged and performed. This can give us some useful information about the music but other elements are less obvious – the use of particular technologies and techniques used to create the recordings are sometimes ‘hidden’ or ‘integrated’ into the final recording and, so, researchers conducting a reverse-analysis only have a partial picture of the creative process. Researchers in other disciplines however, such as Archaeology, are finding new ways to explore historical events, practices and processes that can be applied in the study Popular Music and its production.
A particularly potent method is experimental archaeology that treats the recording as ‘archaeological data’ and is used as the starting point for developing a series of experiments that can help to answer questions about a recording’s production process. By recreating some of the conditions of a recording session as closely as possible for example, an additional direction of analysis is available as the creative process can be examined forwards (Ingold 2009). The following paper explores some of the methods of experimental archaeology and introduces the ways in which archaeological methods can be used to further mine the history of popular music and its production and offer a fresh perspective and gain new insights into the historical context of recorded music.
Solo Artists’ Entrepreneurial Strategies
Timonen, Sini and Nelson, Phil (BIMM, UK)
As the challenges and opportunities within the music industries have changed, the day-to-day activities of emerging popular musicians have as well. As they strive to build a financially sustainable career in music, they are also – at least if they are studying at an HEI – being told that they need to become entrepreneurs. While there is evidence that music students recognise the importance of entrepreneurial skills and accept that they are now part of their essential toolkit (Toscher and Morris Bjørnø 2019), it is also clear that some participate reluctantly.
The democratisation of music technology and digital tools have resulted in a dramatic increase of music ready to be consumed anytime, anywhere. For those working at HEIs focusing on popular music, this means that students often start their respective courses as budding solo artists with an online presence but little experience in working with others. If a new band needs to become a ‘small business together’ (Malm 2020: 585), solo artists at the beginning of their careers need to do this on their own. The expectation is that they ‘build their own audience’ (Page 2021: 287) prior to industry involvement.
Deriving from ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores how emerging solo artists – chiefly students on a postgraduate Popular Music course – navigate issues surrounding independence, self- management and collaboration. Examples of strategies employed include collaborating with a peer who wants to pursue artist management as well as the establishment of an artist-led management collective. In partnership with emerging artists, we seek to create a model for successfully instigating and maintaining such initiatives, resulting in recommendations for HEIs and funding bodies.
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Music in the Age of Streaming: Listening, Learning, and Mentoring during COVID-19
Vaizman, Tal (The University of Haifa, Israel)
Covid-19 lockdowns worldwide have affected daily approach to music consumption and studies. The decrease in concerts, commute to work, social leisure time, and popular activities have placed the responsibility for musical engagement of all sorts on the individual. The study explores the seizing of opportunities to expand individual taste and musical influences via algorithmic or human mentoring.
Thirty-eight Israeli teenagers and fourteen Israeli instrument and vocal teachers were interviewed between April 2020, post first Israeli lockdown and April 2021, post third lockdown. The teenage participants were avid music consumers, half being music students and half having no musical background. Topics discussed included music consumption during times of social distancing, exposure to new content, and lessons going online. The change in routine led to lacking daily listening-time (bus-shuttle to school, gym, gathering events), lack of band practices, and occasionally created emotional distance between students and their teachers.
Most teenagers reported using the lockdown to explore the internet for music and artists little known to them, relying mostly on the algorithmic music mentor (music apps). The music mentor is what I refer to as the one responsible for new recommendations and exposure. Most teenagers found themselves separated from their most influential mentors – their peers. However, many reported an enhanced influence of family mentors due to increased family-time, allowing the exploration and acquisition of different tastes – a unique opportunity in times of multiple private listening options.
Students and teachers alike reported the low significance of teachers' mentoring, claiming that in popular music studies, students are highly involved in choosing the repertoire. However, distant learning has boosted the use of methodic listening and exposure. Teachers also addressed struggles, technical difficulties, and creative leveraging in structuring lessons online. Comparing expansion and exploration of popular music taste during social distancing and post Corona times is recommended.
Reissues of dead Yugoslavian musicians, social responsibility and lessons from the past crises in the music industry
Vukobratović, Jelka (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
The locally-based record industry in Croatia started in 1927 and was from its beginnings partly supported by reissues, which continued in all of the subsequent periods. The local industry during the last 100 years went through dramatic structural changes, those internal, including new models of ownership, sale and music rights, as well as external, including different crises, global or local, economic or political. In the meantime, the attitudes towards the popular music heritage of former Yugoslavia(s) may be socially and politically ambiguous, but regarding their economic potential, the agenda is clear. They represent a resource, which was, in the case of Croatian record industry, almost freely available for exploitation.
Drawing from a several examples of dead and alive musicians from both the interwar and socialist Yugoslavia, this paper will try to illustrate who were the people who have been reissued, why and how their music was chosen to outlive them as well as how they themselves lived and profited from the industry during their life and career. Extending from the question of these musicians' historical status, record reissues point to the question of how record reissues relate to the living contemporary musicians and their position on the music market.
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Cinema, Music and ‘Homing’ in the Care of Older Citizens
Waldock, Jacqueline and Shaw, Lisa (University of Liverpool, UK)
This paper will explore the role of music and film in third-age care and how it can be improved. It will apply Boccagni’s (2021) notion of ‘home’ as practice and Blunt and Dowling’s critical geography of home as ‘multi-scalar’ to map how film and music activities with older adults can be included in home-making practice in domestic, semi-public and public space. It will draw on the work of the University of Liverpool-based ‘Cinema, Memory and Wellbeing’ project, which considered how, over the life course, moving images and music knit together into the formation and production of memories and identities and can be used to engage with older individuals and groups, including those living with a dementia diagnosis, via the past. The project worked with different care settings in the UK and Brazil, including residential nursing homes specialising in dementia care, community groups for the third age and GP practices.
Embracing more expansive ideas of home, this paper moves beyond the notion of home as a dwelling or geographical location to consider how home may be understood as a ‘process of creating and understanding forms of dwelling and belonging’ (Blunt and Dowiling 2006). We explore how thinking about homing – ‘a verb – pointing to the social process of constructing and making home’ (Boccagni 2021) - allows us to reframe and potentialize the use of cinema and music as reminiscence tools for older citizens to improve their sense of well-being and improve the quality of their care.
The Role Played by Fans in China’s Popular Music Idol Industry
Wang, Yafei and Zhao, Luqian (University of Leeds, UK)
This article intends to introduce fostered idol production in China’s popular music industry, which are profoundly affected by the counterpart system formulated through the Japanese pop culture and the K-pop (Korean popular music). Fostered idol introduces the idea of education simulation into idol production system, underlying the importance of fans engagement in the production (including ‘cultivating’ and ‘accompanying’) and promotion of idols. With the expansion of digital economy, the recorded music industry has been reconfigured to represent a structural change in the business model from basic production-to-consumption towards an emerging circuit of culturally and economically valuable content integrating active audiences and the industry (Zhang & Negus 2020). Such active audiences are considered as fans. This research aims to explore the roles these fans play in the popular music idol industry in China, illustrating how fans’ engagement level is enhanced through these activities. To this end, this article utilizes the case study of Chinese fans vis- à-vis Time Fengjun Entertainment, the first to adopt the fostered idol training model in China. The findings will contribute to studies on Chinese popular music industry and fandom.
“Make me a success”: The need for Artist Management in the music industries
Yiyi Wang (University of Liverpool, UK)
My research addresses the almost complete absence of study of Artist Management in academic literature. It builds up a detailed yet transparent account to theorise Artist Management as a sui generis form of management.
With the tendency of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) in the digital era, the role of the artist manager might seem to have been obviated, yet musicians go on seeking out someone to represent them to music companies that might be able to help them consolidate their self-started and self-managed careers in order to generate market success in the intensely competitive and profit-driven music industries.
However, what needs to be managed here is a human being(s) and a product made of this human being(s), which is fundamentally different from launching a product in the straight industries. Indeed, there is no tested formula for effective management as it much depends on musicians and their different expectations and requirements. This introduces different and substantial orders of complexity to the role of managers and to the practice of management. Thus, my research identifies the nature of the role of the artist manager and the need for a combinatory style of management represented by the term and practice of Artist Management.
Tracing the Analogue Promise in 21st Century Electronic Dance Music: An uneasy reconciliation of tradition and technology
Weatherill-Hunt, Jonathan (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)
Mention electronic dance music and perhaps one of the first thoughts that springs to mind is a DJ performing with vinyl records or a musician playing a synthesizer. Although these might be somewhat anachronistic, stereotypical tropes by modern standards, they are nerveless still considered iconic concepts and practices amongst many fans and practitioners of electronic dance music alike, stubbornly persisting even in the face of significant advances in music technology. Vinyl records remain prized, scarce resources that seamlessly accrue financial and subcultural value, while certain items of music production hardware are lionised: their sonic output considered desirable and the distinct creative practices they facilitate deemed traditional and thus authentic. This paper asserts that while such ideas are often reliant upon the rhetoric of tradition and ritual, they are also facilitated by digital, internet-based communications platforms, and so ironically could not exist and flourish in their current form without much of the technology they position themselves against. Furthermore, discourse surrounding these concepts and practices is not without issue, and over the previous decade has contributed to increasing fractures within the larger, underground electronic dance music community. By combining textual analysis, virtual and traditional ethnography, the following paper attempts to trace the roots of this phenomenon which, for the sake of discussion, is here referred to as the analogue promise: an emergent and problematic strand of discourse exhibited by certain electronic dance music practitioners wherein nostalgia is employed as a forge for notions of subcultural identity, authenticity and exclusivity.
‘If this lasts six more months, we're f**ked’: Distance, desperation, and independent music under duress in COVID-era Brazil
Wolbert, Jacob (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Carne Doce is an alternative rock band from Goiânia, Brazil. Over its ten-plus years in existence, the band has weathered a vertiginous trajectory of—at varying frequency and degree—financial and critical success, precarity, fanbase expansion and contraction, social media vilification, and musical growth. As it did for musicians around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic ushered in a new era of uncertainty and desperation for the members of Carne Doce. Most significantly, a sensation of distance, with multiple facets and impacts, characterized the way that the band experienced the first year of the pandemic.
Based on six months of what I characterize as distanced participation-observation (in the same city, but respecting local and national health guidelines), this paper explores the experiences of a band coping with a worldwide health crisis that threatens and/or precludes most of the practices on which they have built their career up to this point. Within my presentation, I connect the experiences of Carne Doce to a larger constellation of independent music and music makers in Goiânia and throughout the rest of Brazil. Discussing the band's live streamed performances, I dialogue with recent literature about the connective role of video platforms during the pandemic (Janotti and Pires 2021). Additionally, I consider Carne Doce members' own reactions to those performances in order to analyse the way that the current pandemic has created, compounded, and exacerbated senses of remoteness from musical infrastructures in Brazil.
This paper centres around a case study to ask more broadly what is at stake for Brazilian music makers during a pandemic, paying special attention to the desires, decisions, and tactics that such a crisis engenders. In doing so, it contributes to the ever-increasing knowledge about the reconfiguration of musical life in the Covid era.
Cultural Entrepreneurship in the Postdigital Music Industries: Towards a cultural political economy of musicianship.
Woods, Christopher (University of Liverpool, UK)
This paper extends the analysis of musicianship, incorporating a deeper understanding of cultural production to provide conceptual clarity to the convoluted notion of cultural entrepreneurship. Furthermore, this study contributes to the conceptual toolbox available to researchers examining the institutional hybridity of postdigital musical production.
Divergent understandings of culture open-up a cross-disciplinary schism concerning theories of cultural entrepreneurship. Within popular music studies, the cultural entrepreneur appears metaphorically, attempting to supplant the false dichotomy between art and commerce. However, the understanding of culture in this regard is contextual; limited to the cultural sector as a set of industries. The tradition of cultural entrepreneurship represented in management-organisation studies draws upon a broader understanding of culture: recognising the presence and consequence of culture in any entrepreneurial domain. This tradition studies the cultural resources deployed by entrepreneurs in the process of legitimation and further resource acquisition.
The musician is perhaps unique in entrepreneurial capacity, acting in a multiplicity of institutional settings and codes. Thus performing, in simultaneity, the roles of producer, retailer and embodied product; experiencing varying degrees of autonomy at different times and across multiple (media) contexts. Navigating this complex, changeable web of interdependency, the artist exhibits entrepreneurship not only in commerce but equally in creative practice.
Drawing upon a hybrid-ethnography, this paper sees analytic use in pursuing a combined approach to the study of musical production; drawing upon the rich contextual tradition of popular music studies to subject management theories of cultural entrepreneurship to grounded reappraisal. While popular music studies would undoubtedly benefit from a broader view of culture in understanding entrepreneurial processes (i.e., the development of a musical career), this paper finds constructivist approaches remain divorced from their political-economic context; naïve to the structural power imbalances which affect the nature and availability of affordance and opportunity for entrepreneurial actors.
From the Californian Ideology to the Cult of the Entrepreneur: Exploring the dark side of DIY (Christopher Woods, University of Liverpool, UK)
My research examines the nature of musicianship (as both creative and entrepreneurial practice) from within the context of digitalising cultural industries. Approaching grassroots music making from a cultural political economy perspective, this methodology seeks to uncover the hidden politics of affordances.
My thesis seeks to refresh extant cultural entrepreneurship theory through an empirically grounded critique, drawing upon a hybrid dataset; collating autoethnography (from over a decade’s experience as a practicing musician) with interviews and netnography.
Popular cognition of entrepreneurship (i.e., the valorisation of the great men of capitalism) betrays a misreading of Schumpeterian economic theory which, it is found, confuses common instances of innovation with more impactful cases of evolutionary mutation. Entrepreneurship therefore refers to longer term, barely perceptible evolutionary processes (more akin to Toynbee’s social authorship approach to creative composition than isolated cases of quasi-divine inspiration).
Such theoretical reformulation necessarily impacts existing music policy design which maintains a status quo that is not supporting musicians but is, rather, supported by them. A devastating paradox within a system which continually overstates music’s cultural value while assigning only the pittance necessary in its continued functioning as an avenue for surplus extraction.
What do you get when Zappa, Stockhausen and Prince visit The Orange Mound? MonoNeon and post-hip-hop fusion.
Worth, Richard (University of Liverpool)
Over the last ten years the composer and bassist MonoNeon (Dwayne Thomas Jr.) has been a prominent figure amongst a cohort of musicians infiltrating the internet with new music justifying the term ‘experimental’. Largely autonomous from the mainstream industry (primarily using YouTube and Bandcamp platforms), brandishing impressive chops with ‘advanced’ harmonic, rhythmic and melodic concepts, these musicians challenge notions of what is “accessible” within popular music. This is often seen through videos that stress virtuosity and complexity, foregrounding musicianship as a spectator experience, yet their savvy awareness of contemporary culture means they undermine accusations of pretentiousness with an iconoclasm that is humorous, satirical, even nihilistic.
Even within this collection of musicians (including Thundercat, Jacob Collier, and Domi and JD Beck) MononNeon is notable for the heady diversity of styles he has at his disposal: post-Darmstadt (he models ‘Gesang der Jünglinge’, Xannakis ‘Mikka’ and more), jostles with his jazz and fusion facility, through micro-tonalism and ‘live’ hip-hop all the way to the deep funk, gospel and blues that he grew up with in the Orange Mound - America’s oldest African American community where he still lives with his Grandmother.
Taking his lead from Cage, MonoNeon also has an enormous output of musique concrète reworkings of YouTube videos, transcribing and playing with rants and outbursts – musicalizing bizarre and shocking content, taking Lester Bangs’ “gutter pure” to another level - but in 1966 Adorno appeared to accept Cage’s use of found sound and recordings, (Adorno 2003: 373). Where does MonoNeon sit between these poles? His radically eccentric musical output and encompassing philosophy, (itemised in his Dada-style manifesto), offers a genuine challenge to the norms of what popular music can be and is worthy of analysis - but would Adorno have danced to it?
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Zagorski-Thomas, Simon (University of West London, UK)
If Practical Musicology is about how to ‘do music better’ rather than musicology that explores how, when, where and why it is being, or has been done, then it needs to get to grips with aesthetics: with what ‘better’ means to all the various people involved. Within popular music, the quality judgments about what constitutes good performance or song writing practice in punk is entirely different to RnB… or grime… or heavy metal. Indeed, the differences between aesthetics and quality judgments are not just community-based differences. They work on the individual level as well. How then should we theorise this notion of ‘better’ in practice research and what are the implications for teaching practice?
This paper proposes the idea that quality judgments are only tentatively established before any instance of creative practice begins and that a key part of effective creativity is the gradual development of these judgments throughout the creative process. Tim Ingold has applied his anthropological notion of wayfaring or dwelling to drawing – saying that the aesthetic of what looks or feels right emerges out of the process of doing or making. In the same way, I am applying this ecological approach using the perception-action feedback loop to musical creativity. I know what is right when I do it. Further, I would also argue that you have to experience something being wrong in order to know when it is right.
The presentation will employ examples from my current practice research album, Failing Upwards, to explore the documentation, analysis and representation of this process of aesthetic development through action and experience. What was the detailed narrative of decision making through which the aesthetic emerged? It will also discuss how this process can be used in the presentation and assessment of practical student work at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Autoethnographic analysis of recording process and implications for practice-based teaching
PROPOSED & ACCEPTED PANELS
The Impacts of Covid 19 on the Music Industries of the World: Special Edition Launch of the Journal of World Popular Music
Carr, Paul (University of South Wales, UK)
On March 17th 2021, Paul Carr organised and chaired an online symposium for the UK branch of IASPM, entitled ‘The Impacts of Covid 19 on the European Music Industries: A Sample of Academic Projects Taking Place Across Europe.’ The Symposium featured six speakers from across Europe, who presented a variety of research projects that were taking place in the wake of Covid. This initiative subsequently led to an invitation to document a double edition of the Journal of World Popular Music —which will be published just prior to the 2022 IASPM conference in Liverpool. This proposed ‘group session’, would effectively act as a launch for the 11-chapter special edition, featuring six presentations and twelve contributors (from the UK, Germany, Finland, Portugal and Spain).
The session will commence with an introduction from Paul Carr, who will then introduce a series of 10-minute presentations, with each speaker/group of speakers providing a synopsis of their chapter. This will be followed by a group discussion, chaired by Paul Carr, which will focus on how the various projects have developed since the chapters were submitted. All presentations consider issues the music industries have faced during the pandemic, including reflections on working with Welsh government on recommending and actioning policy; analysing German policy discourse; lockdown reflections of London jazz musicians; the impact of Covid-19 on the live music ecology of Birmingham; forecasting expected insolvency durations of German music venues; the impacts of covid on Lisbon’s Fado ecosystem, and the impacts of reduced capacity events on Liverpool City Region’s financial, musical and social wellbeing.
Introduction (Paul Carr, University of South Wales, UK)
Music-makers and Covid 19 in the Liverpool City Region (Mat Flynn and Richard Anderson, University of Liverpool, UK)
Liverpool City Region’s (LCR) pre-pandemic £200M/year music economy was considered vital to the region’s cultural heritage. Drawing on online surveys of music makers in August 2020 and August 2021, alongside industry practitioner focus group consultations, our research illustrates the devastating impact of eighteen months without full capacity live events on LCR’s music sector’s financial, musical, and social wellbeing. We observe that the extended loss of sociality illustrates a prior underestimation of its cultural and economic importance, and recommend a broader acknowledgement of sociality’s significance within music industries research. Whilst digital alternatives partially alleviated lockdown’s detrimental effects, overall, the sector viewed live-streaming as a ‘stop-gap’ incomparable to conventional concert experiences. Online engagement ineffectively substituted for ‘in the room’ creation and collaboration; and musicians were divided regarding the benefits of developing marketing skills to profit from social media exposure, despite being the only viable medium for engaging audiences. As full capacity events resumed in July 2021, the overall story of the LCR’s live music sector was one of survival. However, an underlying sense of uncertainty continues to affect operational and planning decisions; particularly if returning to ‘business as usual’ equates with pre-pandemic industry economics, which often functions to the detriment of musicians on whom the regional live sector’s operational and financial recovery depends.
To Be Announced: How Long Can German Live Music Venues Survive the Lockdown? (Niklas Blömeke, Paderborn University, Germany)
Live music venues and their operators continue to be affected by measures like social distancing and other strategies to fight the Covid 19 pandemic. In Germany, most venues are closed (again) even two years into the pandemic with little or no time periods of regular cultural, social, and economic activity. This situation has confronted operators with fundamental uncertainty about the prospects of their venues. Political and scholarly discourse revolve around the question of whether or when operators can recover during or after the crisis. Using data from the German live music survey, we scrutinize the factors influencing the operators’ expected duration until insolvency with a linear regression model. Our analysis shows that the continuous public support schemes extend the expected time until insolvency, as does the extent to which the venue is regularly used by external stakeholders. At the same time, leasing a music venue and/or running a venue in bigger cities makes operators less optimistic about their prospects. Our findings demonstrate the safeguarding function of state support and the benefits of strong live music networks in times of crisis. The results bear implications for the promotion of resilient live music ecologies.
Tourism-dependent Local Music Ecosystems under Covid-19: The Case of Lisbon’s Fado Music Scene (Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros. Incipit CSIC, Spain)
Tourism-dependent music ecosystems have been affected by Covid-19 in two ways. On the one hand, the pandemic has conditioned tourism flows globally, causing traditional tourist destinations to stagnate, with the consequent disappearance of their primary tourist audience. On the other hand, these music scenes also suffered from the limitations imposed on the night-time economy and the hospitality industry in general: social distancing, curfews, limited seating capacity, time restrictions, etc. This paper focuses on Portugal’s best-known music export, fado, and its prime tourist destination, Lisbon, to explore the changing atmosphere of this particular music ecosystem during the Covid-19 crisis. In particular, it focuses on the effects of the lockdown measures and other restrictions on the casas de fado, a distinctive type of local institution where music, tourism and the quest for experiences of authenticity intersect. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork during the pandemic, this presentation argues that the pandemic has revealed the fragility of a local music ecosystem overly dependent on foreign tourism and institutional support for its survival. It also aims at discussing how some of the changes brought about by the pandemic have impacted fado practice itself and whether they will become permanent in the so-called ‘new normality.’
Live music and Covid-19 in Birmingham (Adam Behr, Newcastle University, UK; Craig Hamilton, Birmingham City University, UK; Patrycja Rozbicka, Aston University, UK)
This contribution discusses the context of, and presents findings from, a project examining the live music sector in Birmingham, UK. This research is set against the backdrop of the broader socio-political impact of the ongoing Covid19 pandemic, and links it to national and global contexts. We explore the live music ecology of Birmingham and highlight the interdependencies between the various musical and non-musical stakeholders in the context of the pandemic— including the venues where live music takes place—examining how these stakeholders are responding to the crisis as it unfolds. In doing so, this paper asks how an urban geographical area tied into national and international mechanisms of culture, commerce and policy, can work to sustain its musical ecology in the face of the uncertainty of a post-Covid19 era, and underlines the interconnectedness of live music ecologies and wider economies.
Jazz, Covid-19 and Live Music (Elina Hytönen-Ng, University of Eastern Finland, Finland)
Jazz has been a marginal genre that relies heavily on live performances. It is therefore understandable that the Covid-19 related lockdown, has greatly affected jazz musicians. In this presentation, I reflect on London based jazz musicians’ stories of lockdown by using the idea of ‘liminal state’, as conceptualised by Arnold von Gennep (1960) and Victor Turner (1982). I will be examining how the musicians described the lockdown, in particular the financial and emotional impacts it has had on them. I examine the overall emotional and psychological effects that Covid-19 had on jazz musicians who participate in live music. After reflecting on the support that the musicians have received during the pandemic, the essay proceeds to outline the new skills that the musicians learned during lockdown. In between spring 2020 and spring 2021, ten structured theme interviews with professional jazz musicians were conducted, with participation being voluntary. The interviews have been analysed using discursive psychology, a form of discourse analysis. The musicians varied with age and stage of their career, but majority of them being men in their 50s.
Covid and Live Music Venues/Clubs in Germany (Robin Kuchar, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany)
During the initial phase of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, music venues and clubs were the first to close—and often the last to re-open. This paper encompasses a variety of perspectives regarding the situation live music venues and clubs found themselves in during the pandemic. Firstly, it analyses, from a German perspective, the club related developments of the covid19-crisis from the first lockdown in March 2020 to the spring of 2021. Secondly, it considers the effect of ‘loss’ among audiences and thirdly, the discourse about cultural policy and emergency funds for music clubs and live music culture in Germany. The synopsis of the chapter will focus on the empirical data collected among club-owners and -operators, club-goers and audiences of live events under Covid-measures as well as ethnographic fieldwork. Confining on the results will enable discussion and comparisons of the findings provided in the special issue.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in UK Music Higher Education: A Presentation and Discussion of the Findings of a Report Published by the EDIMS Network
EDIMS - Participants to include Diljeet Bhachu (report lead author, EDIMS), Amy Blier-Carruthers (KCL) or Tom Perchard (Goldsmiths), and two student members of the EDIMS working groups.
This panel presents the findings of a report into equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in UK music Higher Education (HE) published by the EDIMS network. EDIMS (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Music Studies) is a cross-organisational network which aims to promote, support and share good practice in relation to EDI in Music Higher Education in the UK. The report was jointly funded by EDIMS’ affiliate organisations: Royal Musical Association, Society for Music Analysis, SEMPRE, IASPM-UK, MusicHE and British Forum for Ethnomusicology.
The research had two main aims. The first was to form an accurate picture of the diversity of staff and student participants in UK music HE. To do this, EDIMS purchased and carried out analysis on Higher Education Statistics Agency Data on staff and students in music HE from 2016-20. The second aim was to document ongoing work around, and challenges in, EDI initiatives in music HE. This was achieved by carrying out a scoping survey across music departments and institutions across the country.
The resultant report describes equality, diversity and inclusion as it currently exists across all levels of music HE, including staffing, curriculum, learning and teaching, admissions and retention. It describes EDI initiatives across the sector, showing both where good practice is occurring and where gaps exist. Interspersed are testimonies about the experience of living as a student or staff member who is part of a marginalised group within a music department or institution in UK HE.
In this panel, two members of the report working group will present the work’s main findings. There will then follow responses from two students who currently act as student representatives at Under- and Postgraduate levels. The last part of the session will comprise an open discussion that will aim to establish future direction for EDI initiatives in music
The purpose of this discussion is to begin deconstructing the ideological fallacy of DIY-by-default in the digital age in an effort towards more fully understanding the deep-rooted interdependence which defines music-making in the digital age.
We see music (as both socio-cultural and economic phenomena) being uniquely placed amongst the arts in revealing behavioural patterns, social attitudes and commercial practices which allow us to better understand our present condition. The supposition that advancements in digital and communications technologies have accelerated the fragmentation of postmodern culture stands in stark contrast to the homogenisation of cultural production practices today.
Combining insights from a panel representing a diversity of music industry experiences (grassroots musicianship, artist management & cross-media composition) this discussion will begin to tease out the practical and theoretical implications which arise out of the contradictions implicit in digital independence discourse.
From the Californian Ideology to the Cult of the Entrepreneur: Exploring the dark side of DIY (Christopher Woods, University of Liverpool, UK)
My research examines the nature of musicianship (as both creative and entrepreneurial practice) from within the context of digitalising cultural industries. Approaching grassroots music making from a cultural political economy perspective, this methodology seeks to uncover the hidden politics of affordances.
My thesis seeks to refresh extant cultural entrepreneurship theory through an empirically grounded critique, drawing upon a hybrid dataset; collating autoethnography (from over a decade’s experience as a practicing musician) with interviews and netnography.
Popular cognition of entrepreneurship (i.e., the valorisation of the great men of capitalism) betrays a misreading of Schumpeterian economic theory which, it is found, confuses common instances of innovation with more impactful cases of evolutionary mutation. Entrepreneurship therefore refers to longer term, barely perceptible evolutionary processes (more akin to Toynbee’s social authorship approach to creative composition than isolated cases of quasi-divine inspiration).
Such theoretical reformulation necessarily impacts existing music policy design which maintains a status quo that is not supporting musicians but is, rather, supported by them. A devastating paradox within a system which continually overstates music’s cultural value while assigning only the pittance necessary in its continued functioning as an avenue for surplus extraction.
Perspectives from the World of Film & TV Music (James Moffatt, University of Liverpool, UK)
My research analyses the compositional strategies and commercial contexts of contemporary Film Scoring by exploring the Composer’s response to changes in technology.
Mainly due to transition towards digitisation, media convergence, and the growing on-demand culture of ‘content’, the music and film industries have radically transformed in recent years, resulting in an array of unique challenges and creative solutions to film music composition. This has only been reinforced during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Online streaming platforms such as Spotify and Netflix, have strengthened their position during these times, as live music venues and cinemas around the world lock down. Major studios of the Hollywood system have transitioned to the video-on-demand format to recoup box-office losses. While streaming sustains the industry, musicians and composers, whose work is now distributed in digital realms, can no longer rely on traditional royalty payments methods from theatrical release, or televised broadcast, to sustain their practice.
Moreover, transitions to package deal budget structures and the emerging models of ownership and sale of music rights by these new streaming giants destabilise the business models of film music composers further. My research, therefore, explores these recent transitions, revealing both the challenges and creative solitons to music making in an industry in flux.
“Make me a success”: The need for Artist Management in the music industries (Yiyi Wang, University of Liverpool, UK)
My research addresses the almost complete absence of study of Artist Management in academic literature. It builds up a detailed yet transparent account to theorise Artist Management as a sui generis form of management.
With the tendency of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) in the digital era, the role of the artist manager might seem to have been obviated, yet musicians go on seeking out someone to represent them to music companies that might be able to help them consolidate their self-started and self-managed careers in order to generate market success in the intensely competitive and profit-driven music industries.
However, what needs to be managed here is a human being(s) and a product made of this human being(s), which is fundamentally different from launching a product in the straight industries. Indeed, there is no tested formula for effective management as it much depends on musicians and their different expectations and requirements. This introduces different and substantial orders of complexity to the role of managers and to the practice of management. Thus, my research identifies the nature of the role of the artist manager and the need for a combinatory style of management represented by the term and practice of Artist Management.
Source: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/schoolofthearts/documents/IASPM,Liverpool,2022,Abstracts.docx
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