Focusing on the music industry's response to crises, the book examines the struggles against piracy and the rise of the 'Idol' phenomenon. It highlights how these challenges create opportunities for the industry to redefine its relationship with consumers and monetize popular music. Through a detailed analysis, it explores the promotional cultures that emerge in response to these issues, illustrating the industry's efforts to control the circulation and consumption of music amidst the pressures of globalization and digitalization.
This book marks the tenth anniversary of The Grey Album. The online release and circulation of what Danger Mouse called his 'art project' was an unexpected watershed in the turn-of-the-century brawls over digital creative practice. The album's suppression inspired widespread digital civil disobedience and brought a series of contests and conflicts over creative autonomy in the online world to mainstream awareness. The Grey Album highlighted, by its very form, the profound changes wrought by the new technology and represented the struggle over the tectonic shifts in the production, distribution and consumption of music. But this is not why it matters. The Grey Album matters because it is more than just a clever, if legally ambiguous, amalgam. It is an important and compelling case study about the status of the album as a cultural form in an era when the album appears to be losing its coherence and power. Perhaps most importantly, The Grey Album matters because it changes how we think about the traditions of musical practice of which it is a part. Danger Mouse created a broad, inventive commentary on forms of musical creativity that have defined all kinds of music for centuries: borrowing, appropriation, homage, derivation, allusion and quotation. The struggle over this album wasn't just about who gets to use new technology and how. The battle over The Grey Album struck at the heart of the very legitimacy of a long recognised and valued form of musical expression: the interpretation of the work of one artist by another.--description provided by publisher
Challenging the conventional belief that popular music inherently opposes authority, this book presents a provocative argument that it often plays a role in reinforcing neoliberal capitalism. Through critical analysis, it explores how popular music can contribute to the social reproduction of dominant power structures rather than merely contesting them. The work includes 11 black-and-white illustrations to support its insights.
Exploring the role of radio as a key medium for musical meaning, the book combines critical analysis and interdisciplinary theory with ethnographic insights into community radio. It introduces a unique perspective on democratic aesthetics, highlighting its significance for understanding both traditional and contemporary media. The work offers a fresh theoretical framework that could reshape discussions in media studies and deepen appreciation for the cultural impact of radio.
In recent years, popular music museums have been established in high profile locations in many of the presumed “musical capitals” of the world, such as Los Angeles, Liverpool, Seattle, Memphis, and Nashville. Most of these are defined by expansive experiential infrastructures centered around spectacular, high-tech displays of varying sizes and types. Through over-the-top acts of display, these museums influence and reflect the values and priorities in the public life of popular music. This book examines the phenomenon of the popular music museum outside the typical and familiar frames of heritage and tourism. Instead, it looks at these institutions as markers of the broader entertainment industry in the era of its rise to global dominance. It highlights the multiple manifestations of power as read across a range of institutions and material forms and discusses how this contributes to shaping the experience of popular culture.
Marjorie's War tells the story of Marjorie Secretan and her two wartime romances which were divided by tragedy. Through letters and diaries we obtain an intimate view of both relationships. Letters which were sent from home and survived the trenches are rare, and those presented here give a female and Home Front perspective on the war and its impact on Edwardian England. However, it is not just her story. Marjorie is the central character who connects the lives of four families. Drawing on an archive of over 800 unpublished letters and 400 photographs, the book also gives insight into life and death in the British Army as seen through the eyes of nine young men from these families. They all volunteered in 1914 and served as infantry and artillery officers.
Sounds, Screens, Speakers provides a broadly comprehensive survey of the emerging field of music and media. Music has been present at the advent of nearly every new media form since the turn of the 20th century. Whether we look at the start of sound recording, film, television or the Internet, music has been a crucial participant in the social changes brought about by these new tools for making and listening to music. This book examines such changes starting in the late 19th century to the present. From the introduction of the microphone all the way through to music in reality television, the purpose of each section is not simply to move chronologically towards the present, but to focus especially on the tangible social relationships created through specific forms of mediation. With readings at the end of most chapters, key questions to facilitate additional discovery and research, and direction to additional readings and resources on popular websites and news sources, this text serves as the ideal introduction to popular music and media.
