Really Popular? – Criteria of the Popularity of Music

Yearbook “Lied und Populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture” of the Center for Popular Culture and Music, Vol. 67 (2022), ed. by Knut Holtsträter

When is music truly popular? Which criteria apply to different subject areas like classic pop, popular song or popular music? When is popular music not popular (any more)? Which historical, social, economic, and aesthetic conditions must be fulfilled for music to be considered popular? How can popularity be measured? The term “popular” is always associated with a quantitative and qualitative evaluation. This yearbook seeks to question the “popular” in music resp. the popularity of music as a claim to reality, though the discussion is not limited to so-called pop music alone but comprises all kinds of popular music, entertainment music, film and video game music and music on the (theatre) stage, as well as any kind of music that is not covered by the genre discourse of popular music, such as (Western) art music or concert music, folk music and folk song, and others – for these, too, raise the question of the “right” popularity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 

Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture is now accepting submissions for volume 26 (2022). The journal is particularly interested in work that provides a critical perspective on music and/or sound, and in work that considers the role of gender, sexuality, race, citizenship, class, or other cultural and social factors in the production, circulation, historicization, or consumption of music. Women & Music is an annual publication, published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Read the rest of this entry »

Global Hip Hop Studies Special Issue

Global Hip Hop Studies Special Issue: ‘It’s Where You’re @: Hip Hop and the Internet’

Guest coedited by Raquel Campos and Steven Gamble

[email protected]

Deadlines

Abstracts: 12 July 2021
Full articles: 22 October 2021

Read the rest of this entry »

IASPM Early Career Researcher Conference

IASPM Early Career Researcher Conference, October 21st 2021

IASPM warmly welcomes papers from emerging academics* for a day-long conference that will take place this coming Autumn. This event aims to bring together scholars with new and exciting ideas to discuss and share their work at the vanguard of popular music studies. There is no restriction on topic area, however applications prioritising new work are strongly encouraged. In particular, we are seeking papers that address current concerns in popular music, such as:

• gender equity in the music business
• music and social justice
• music education and decolonising the curriculum
• popular music in the digital age
• music and wellbeing
• live music and night-time economies post-COVID 19
• income streams and business models in the music industries
• popular music and the environment

Read the rest of this entry »

Innovation in Music Conference 2022

Innovation in Music Conference 2022
Royal College of Music, Stockholm
24 – 26 March 2022

Music Production: International Perspectives

​Innovation in Music 2022 will be held at the Royal College of Music, Stockholm, Sweden on 24 – 26 March 2022. A Routledge conference proceedings book will be published after the event. The theme remains wide for contributions, but with a titled theme of “Music Production: International Perspectives” Innovation in Music welcomes academics, creatives, producers, artists, industry professionals, technology developers and equipment manufacturers to come together and submit abstracts for consideration on a wide range of topics including:

• Innovative music creation and performance
• Music production: past, present and future
• Music technology innovation
• Innovation in music business
• Innovation in music in the Nordic countries and the relationship to International innovation.
• Cross-disciplinary topics around music and innovation

Read the rest of this entry »

Special Issue of Global Hip Hop Studies Journal

“Knowledge Reigns Supreme”: The Fifth Element in Hip Hop Culture (2022)
Co-edited by Justin A. Williams, Sina A. Nitzsche, and Darren Chetty

The Journal
Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS) is a peer-reviewed, rigorous and community-responsive academic journal that publishes research on contemporary as well as historical issues and debates that surround hip hop music and culture around the world.

Read the rest of this entry »

Special Issue in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

Special Issue in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education
‘In the name of employability: faculties and futures for the arts and humanities in higher education’

Guest Editors
Dr Daniel Ashton (University of Southampton, UK)
Professor Dawn Bennett (Bond University, Australia)
Dr Zoe Hope Bulaitis (University of Birmingham, UK)
Dr Michael Tomlinson (University of Southampton, UK)

Read the rest of this entry »

DJ Cultures in Canada

Proposed Title: We Can Dance If We Want To: Canadian DJ Culture Turns Up
Edited by Dr. Charity Marsh and Dr. Maren Hancock

“As a creative performance, the DJ set has the potential to communicate new ways of being, of feeling, producing musical discourses that are nevertheless embedded in the real-world, material, politics. In this way, DJ practices enable the immediate reconstitution of local cultural identity.” (Rietveld, 2013, 7)

The rousing success of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s “Nightclubbing” panel discussion focusing on the history of Toronto club culture is one of many recent events that illustrates a growing desire to celebrate Canadian DJ culture. Facebook and other social media sites are rife with archival material relative to DJ culture in Canada from the 1980s until the present. And although the first DJ was technically a Canadian (Reginald Fessenden gave the first radio broadcast of music and speech in 1906), Canada’s unique contributions to DJ culture are mainly absent from academic and public discourse.

Read the rest of this entry »

Staging popular music: sustainable music ecologies for artists, industries and cities

Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 3-4-5 November 2021

AIMS
This conference focuses on the intersection between key transformations in the popular music industries. Music represents and generates value on various levels from the individual to the global, and in many different spheres from the cultural and social to the economic and political. Popular music is staged through multiple platforms, actors, businesses, intermediaries and policies. The current COVID-19-crisis both challenges the music industries and acts as a catalyst of new digital innovations. This is a vital moment to (re)consider the future directions of the music industries. While the music industries are characterized by continuous change and transformation, significant disruptions have always impacted its resilience. Such disruptions can be external shocks, including the current crisis, new technologies, political change or aesthetic-cultural innovations. From an ecological perspective, all transformations force the industry to reshape and rethink itself. This will likely result in both positive as negative consequences. We need to critically reflect on what the immediate and long-term future of music ecologies entails, who benefits and who suffers from such disruptions.

Focusing on a select number of interrelated themes, this conference aims to bring together scholars and professionals from various countries and disciplines. Participants bring their own perspective to the stage in an international exchange of ideas and current research insights about the contemporary music industries.

THEMES
The Music Business Research Days offer an interdisciplinary forum at the intersection of economic, artistic, cultural, social, legal, technological and further developments which contribute to the creation/production, dissemination/ distribution and reception/consumption of music. This interdisciplinary nature calls for methodological multiplicity and is open to scholars from all scientific areas. We invite submission of papers on – but not strictly limited to – the themes and example questions below:

Read the rest of this entry »

Music and Racism in Europe

Online Symposium, 21—22 October 2021

Race is among the most significant social categories that informs and organises understandings of music. Although there is an abundance of music research that deals with BIPOC minorities and, at least implicitly, also with race, few studies explicitly address how processes of for example racialisation, essentialisation, appropriation and exclusion in music and music research can effectively be categorised as racist. However, recently there has been an increasing interest also in the issue of racism in the field of music and music scholarship and this international online symposium
seeks to bring together researchers across disciplines to discuss music and racism particularly as it relates to Europe.

Read the rest of this entry »