Looking Towards the Future: Popular Music Studies and Music Scholarship

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
BRIAN F. WRIGHT ◽  
AMY CODDINGTON ◽  
ANDREW MALL

In the foreword to the first issue of Popular Music and Society, published in 1971, Ray B. Browne wrote that, ‘until very recently … academics, with a few notable exceptions, were by and large indifferent to the role of popular music in their world’; he then recounted a rejection he had received from an academic journal, whose editor had written that, ‘although this might be interesting, we both had to admit that popular songs really had no academic significance’. Today, exactly fifty years later, the position of popular music studies within the academy is far removed from Browne's experience: there are multiple academic journals and scholarly press book series devoted solely to popular music, scholars regularly present papers on popular music topics at academic conferences, and departments across colleges and universities offer an increasingly wide variety of popular music courses. Popular music has even become a viable area of interest within music scholarship.

Sci ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 76
Author(s):  
Jan R. Magnus ◽  
Michael McAleer

Many academics are critical of the current publishing system, but it is difficult to create a better alternative. This review relates to the Sciences and Social Sciences, and discusses the primary purpose of academic journals as providing a seal of approval for perceived quality, impact, significance, and importance. The key issues considered include the role of anonymous refereeing, continuous rather than discrete frequency of publications, avoidance of time wasting, and seeking adventure. Here we give recommendations about the organization of journal articles, the roles of associate editors and referees, measuring the time frame for refereeing submitted articles in days and weeks rather than months and years, encouraging open access internet publishing, emphasizing the continuity of publishing online, academic publishing as a continuous dynamic process, and how to improve research after publication. Citations and functions thereof, such as the journal impact factor and h-index, are the benchmark for evaluating the importance and impact of academic journals and published articles. Even in the very top journals, a high proportion of published articles are never cited, not even by the authors themselves. Top journal publications do not guarantee that published articles will make significant contributions, or that they will ever be highly cited. The COVID-19 world should encourage academics worldwide not only to rethink academic teaching, but also to re-evaluate key issues associated with academic journal publishing in the future.


Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Cloonan

Recent years have seen two noticeable trends in Popular Music Studies. These have been on the one hand a series of works which have tried to document the ‘local’ music scene and, on the other, accounts of processes of globalisation. While not uninterested in the intermediate Nation-State level, both trends have tended to regard it as an area of increasingly less importance. To state the matter more boldly, both trends have underplayed the continually important role of the Nation-State.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Collin Jerome

Gender has been an important area of research in the field of popular music studies. Numerous scholars have found that contemporary popular music functions as a locus of diverse constructions and expressions of gender. While most studies focus on content analyses of popular music, there is still a need for more research on audience’s perception of popular music’s messages. This study examined adult Malay listeners’ perceptions of gender messages in contemporary Malay songs. A total of 16 contemporary Malay songs were analysed using Fairclough’s (1992) method of text analysis. The content of the songs that conveyed messages about gender were the basis for analysis. The results showed that the messages revolve mainly around socially constructed gender roles and expectations in romantic relationships. Gender stereotypes are also used in the songs to reinforce men’s and women’s roles in romantic relationships. The results also showed that, while listeners acknowledge the songs’ messages about gender, their own perceptions of gender and what it means to be a gendered being in today’s world are neither represented nor discussed fully in the songs analysed. It is hoped the findings from this, particularly the mismatch between projected and perceived notions of gender, contribute to the field of popular Malay music studies in particular, and popular music studies in general where gender messages in popular songs and their influence on listeners’ perceptions of their own gender is concerned.


1999 ◽  
Vol 11-12 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINE GRENIER ◽  
ANAHID KASSABIAN ◽  
DAVID BRACKETT ◽  
WILL STRAW

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
SIMON FRITH

AbstractThis article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-194
Author(s):  
Aurelian Raţiu ◽  
Onisim Roşu

Abstract Among the emerging technologies, artificial intelligence represents nowadays an area of interest for all of the states around the world, making the technological progress a huge step in human evolution. The future role of the man in military actions will not be to fight in the field anymore, making decisions on how and when to use the weapons in order to stop the incoming enemy while also respecting the international laws. With the help of technology, humanity could provide its much needed security and put an end to conflicts regardless of their nature, because devices are not capable of emotions and subjectivism, making them transparent and objective and transforming the decision making process into a simpler, fairer and legal action. Technology represents the future and man should adapt to it as soon as possible in order to reach the best outcomes even when it comes to war.


Popular Music ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-274
Author(s):  
Peter Symon

For some reason, the working lives of music makers are not often given the attention in popular music studies which might be expected. The launch of the UK Year of the Artist – celebrating the role of artists in society – immediately before the 2000 conference of the UK branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), meant that it was especially timely, then, for the IASPM event to address this state of affairs. The conference, The Popular Musician: Performance, Poetics, Power, was held at the University of Surrey, 7–9 July 2000, and took as its central theme the position of musicians – in the music industry, in relation to fans and audiences and in the media, politics and society.


2020 ◽  
Vol 176 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-119
Author(s):  
John Tebbutt

This article explores the role played by radio broadcast technicians in the early period of the volunteer-run community radio station PBS-FM, in Melbourne. It covers the tenure of the broadcaster at the Prince of Wales (PoW) hotel in the city bayside suburb of St Kilda between 1980 and 1984. The article aims to assess the link between radio and music in the light of the problematic relationship these elements have had historically in popular music studies. The article specifically addresses the role of volunteer technicians in facilitating live music broadcasts at PBS, which became a signature format for PBS and helped establish it as an important community station in the new sector as well as a component of Melbourne’s emerging role in Australian and international music.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-343
Author(s):  
TOM PERCHARD

Popular music and society had been thought inseparable long before the union was made official, at first in the title of pop's original academic journal (1971), later in that of a much-taught textbook (1995). In many minds at late century, sociologies of music were sociologies of pop: Western art music's true believers could still easily imagine that repertoire existing on another plane – the historical literature was devoted to the minute detailing of its mucky creative contexts, but that didn't have to matter – and critically minded, social science-trained pop scholars usually didn't care enough to argue. Yet music sociology's first, halting steps had actually been taken in approaching the classical canon, and the movement of the 1980s and 1990s that was the New Musicology seemed radical precisely because it opened so many doors onto the social. That, then, was the situation twenty years ago, at least in the Anglophone countries: a popular music studies reaching maturity but still largely embedded in sociology and media/communications departments, and a musicology gradually transforming into a discipline in which music was much more openly reconciled with the worlds of its making.


Popular Music ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Susie Khamis ◽  
Brent Keogh

Abstract Sonic branding – the sonic expression of a brand's identity – is the audio equivalent of a brand's logo, a sound that is both distinct and adaptable to diverse contexts, and serves to communicate a brand's narrative. Sonic branding has been a feature of marketing strategies for the past two decades, but more recently there has been increased commercial interest in sonic branding, a move from the ‘visual turn’ to the ‘sonic turn’, as voice activation technologies such as Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant immerse the consumer in a personal encounter across diverse sensory touch points. While there has been significant scholarly discussion in popular music studies of the ways that sound is employed to increase capital in commercial contexts, little has been written to address the ways in which popular music is courted and implicated in brand strategy specific to sonic branding. In this paper, we consider the ways in which sounds are embedded in contemporary brand practice and detail the ways in which popular musicians and genres are complicit partners in ‘branding to the senses’. Here, we focus on two sonic branding case studies – Mastercard and HSBC – which highlight the key role of popular music in constructing the way we ‘hear’ brands.


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