The music industry, technology and utopia – an exchange between Marcus Breen and Eamonn Forde

Popular Music ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARCUS BREEN
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
The State ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Multiple Characteristics

A new struggle has emerged within popular music. This struggle is about technology and access to music through computer-mediated technology. Somewhat typical of the state of cultural things being more complex in their multiple articulations, this struggle runs in tandem with the historical struggle by youth for ‘their music’ against that of previous generations. The multiple characteristics of the struggle over cultural production, ownership and circulation represents a change from earlier days when pop music was articulated to youth culture and social movements, offering relatively direct relationships from one to another. (For example, ‘The Sixties’ became the shorthand reference for these cultural formations.) That relationship still exists, albeit in a self-conscious historical sense that requires continuous examination as it changes with the new generations of youth and the available technologies.

Nordic Modernity and the Structure of the Musical Landscape

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Holt
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Global Modernity

This chapter outlines macro structural changes in the Nordic music landscape, drawing from sociological theory of modernity. The chapter identifies popular music in wider tensions in Nordic modernity, particularly in relation to shifting hegemonic cultures to uncover the underlying dynamics of tensions between shifting mainstream formations and their alternatives. Following this logic, musical style and taste involve positionings in relation to issues of capitalism, nationalism, and mass media. The chapter analyzes changes in the region’s music landscape within the region’s evolving modernity, particularly in the transition from a national to a more global modernity. This is illustrated by the declining status of Stockholm’s Anglo pop music industry as the region’s center into a more decentralized and networked transnational cultural geography.

Processes of institutionalisation and ‘symbolic struggles’ in the ‘independent music’ field in Italy

Modern Italy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Magaudda
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
National Level ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Independent Music ◽  
Field Of Cultural Production ◽  
National Music

Over the last fifteen years, independent rock music has become a wider field of cultural production and consumption in Italy. Indeed, while during the 1970s and 1990s the production of independent music was connected predominantly to political movements, alternative subcultures and the antagonistic attitude of the ‘centri sociali’, in the present decade, independent popular music has moved towards the centre of the national music industry and the mass media of the musical mainstream. This article describes the phases of this process of institutionalisation, showing how the politically based culture of independent music is today at the centre of a symbolic struggle occurring between the values of authenticity, rooted in political youth cultures, and the strategic and pragmatic tendency towards integration into the mainstream of the national music industry. This analysis is carried out applying the Bourdieian concepts of ‘field of cultural production’ and ‘cultural capital’, together with their evolutions into the notion of ‘subcultural capital’. This theoretical framework is applied in order to show both the process of institutionalisation this cultural field is undergoing, and the symbolic struggle taking place between the original values of the political and cultural autonomy of music and the commoditisation of musical objects in the mainstream mass media and national industrial sector. Finally, it is shown how new agents who represent the independent popular music industry at the national level need to deal with claims for authenticity raised by the alternative and extreme wings of the independent music scene.

Buck Owens, country music, and the struggle for discursive control

Popular Music ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Fenster
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Studio Musicians ◽  
Music Publishers ◽  
Music Genre ◽  
Recording Studios

In the early- and mid-1960s, as mainstream popular music began to reach and exploit the growing youth market, the country music genre was going through a number of important transformations (see Malone 1985; Hemphill 1970). During this period the country music industry, including record companies, recording studios, managing and booking agents, music publishers and musicians, was becoming more fully consolidated in Nashville. In addition, a different kind of dominant sound was beginning to coalesce, based on a more ‘uptown’ feel and intended for a more cosmopolitan audience accustomed to mainstream, adult pop music. The beat and whine of the honky-tonk song, as epitomised by the rural twang in the music of Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce, was being replaced as the dominant country music sound by the smooth and urbane ballad styles of Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. This shift was both caused by and helped to foster the development of a steady set of studio musicians who would appear on thousands of country recordings per year. The musical style that coalesced in Nashville studios through the regular collaboration of these musicians and the record label producers who loosely arranged them became known as the ‘Nashville Sound’, a marketable and identifiable name for a particular set of musical conventions. This sound, nearly as similar to Rosemary Clooney as it was to Hank Williams, called into question the generic boundaries between ‘country’ music and mainstream ‘pop’ music.

'Was ist aus uns geworden? – Ein Häufchen Sand am Meer: emotions of post-war Germany as extracted from examples of popular music

Popular Music ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Ritzel
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Political Identities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Masses

Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1923 in reference to an old ‘Fasching’ tune of that era that this song comprised the ‘most complete expression of the German “Volksseele” (“soul of people”) that one could imagine’ and that it ‘truly reveals the day and age we live in, how this age has evolved and how we ourselves come to terms with this age’ (Tucholsky 1975, p. 187). His argument can be compared to Kracauer's thesis on the effects of film (Kracauer 1979, p. 11). He suggested that the commercial character of mass cultural production was constantly affected by what was provided in a stream of feedback: only commodities which convincingly meet public expectations on either a latent or manifest level are successful with the public. If the masses are moved by a national rhythmic feeling, then the hits articulating that feeling can be seen as a kind of national expression. From this perspective, national and political identities are bound up in the daily emotional turbulence of the music industry.

FROM FOLKLORE TO POP MUSIC. DAGESTAN SONG: STATE, PROBLEMS, ADAPTATION IN MODERN TIMES

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-80
Author(s):  
Elmira Bashirovna Abdullaeva
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
The State ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Positive Experience ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Musical Context

The article considers the forms of existence and adaptation of a folk song in the modern musical context of Dagestan. The author shows the positive experience of the development of pop songs in the works of Dagestan composers, critically assesses the state and problems of Dagestan popular music and its stage forms.

scholarly journals East Asian pop music idol production and the emergence of data fandom in China

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-511
Author(s):  
Qian Zhang ◽  
Keith Negus
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Chain Model ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Supply Chain Model ◽  
Social Media Platforms

This article traces the formation of popular music idol industries in China and the emergence of data fandom. It charts the growth of digital platforms and historicizes the commercial and geopolitical itinerations linking cultural production in Japan, South Korea, and China. It locates data fandom as an integral part of the popular music industries reconfigured by digital social media platforms; a structural change from the production-to-consumption ‘supply chain’ model of the recording era towards emergent circuits of content that integrate industries and audiences. Data fans understand how their online activities are tracked, and adopt individual and collective strategies to influence metric and semantic information reported on digital platforms and social media. This article analyses how the practices of data fans impact upon charts, media and content traffic, illustrating how this activity benefits the idols they are following, and enhances a fan’s sense of achievement and agency.

Campus Rock

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
James Carter
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
College Campus ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Acid Rock ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Relationship

During 1967-8, The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Animals, The Who, Richie Havens, Jefferson Airplane and the Iron Butterfly, performed in the gymnasium at the small, liberal arts Drew University in suburban New Jersey. Turns out, this experience was not unique to Drew. College campuses across the country were essential for the growth of popular music, and of rock music in particular in the mid- to late-sixties. The music industry took notice as booking agents, record shops, pop music promoters, radio stations, and industry magazines and newspapers all began to place more emphasis on the opportunities provided by the nation’s colleges. While we know a great deal about activism on college campuses during the sixties, we know little about that same environment and its relationship to the growth and development of rock culture. This essay will explore the relationship between the growth of rock culture, the college campus, and the broader sixties experience. The college campus proved crucial in the development of rock music as student tastes determined “rock culture.” Folk, pop, soul/R&B, folk rock, hard rock, and psychedelic/acid rock, thrived simultaneously on the college campus from 1967 to 1970, precisely the period of significant change in popular music.

The promotional state ‘after neo-liberalism’: ideologies of governance and New Zealand's pop renaissance

Popular Music ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Scott ◽  
David Craig
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
The State ◽  
Institutional Policy ◽  
Supply Side ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
Liberal Ideology ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article responds to Frith and Cloonan's (2008) call for researchers considering the relationship between the state and popular music to analyse more closely the ideologies of governance that undergird music policy. Building on Cloonan's ‘promotional state’ and drawing on recent New Zealand experience, this paper shows how New Zealand's Labour government (1999–2008) developed policies to support the export of ‘Kiwi’ pop which requires a reconsideration of state music policy as interventions in the market. The work of the New Zealand Music Commission in generating and coordinating working partnerships with diverse music industry actors illustrates emerging forms of ‘after neo-liberal’ ideology and governance, wherein state-related actors and musicians each and together adapt to market arrangements through supply side, social inclusion and new institutional policy settings and modalities. This article offers points of comparison to types of ideological and governing/institutional formations we can expect to see emerging in promotional states elsewhere.

Islam as Social Movement

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-84
Author(s):  
Mohammed A. Bamyeh
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Government Ideology

The chapter identifies five common features of modern Islamic social movements: 1) They tend to begin as mutual aid societies rather than as clearly defined political entities; 2) they offer themselves up as ways for society at large to organize itself outside the state; 3) they signify the increasing politicization of society itself; 4) they are only partially oriented to capturing state power; and 5) they tend to transform when they capture the state or become part of it. The jihadist movements are treated as a sub-case of Islamic mobilization, and the chapter considers five theses concerned specifically with jihadism: 1) jihadism as generic radicalism camouflaged in religious language; 2) jihadism as fusion of two previously distinct theaters (local wars and global youth culture); 3) jihadism as Islamized traces of former, secular regimes; 4) jihadism as nihilism borne out of a sense of impasse; and 5) jihadism as critical mimicry of government ideology.

Reflecting surfaces: the use of elements from Indian music in popular music and jazz

Popular Music ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerry Farrell
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
North India ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
The World ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Indian Music ◽  
Reflecting Surfaces

In this article I explore the manner in which elements from a non-Western music appear in pop music and jazz. The music under discussion is that of the Indian subcontinent and the classical music of North India in particular. The essay covers references to Indian music in pop, rock and jazz from the sixties to the present day but concentrates mainly on the sixties and seventies, and, in the world of pop, on the music of the Beatles. The influence of orientalism on Western music is not a recent phenomena, as Reck (1985) notes, but its appearance in pop during the sixties meant that it reached a larger audience than ever before.

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