Popular Music Industry Research Articles

Decades of Recorded Music for Children: Norwegian Children’s Phonograms from World War II to the Present

This article presents a study of Norwegian-recorded music for children from World War II to the present, combining a historical perspective with an ethnographic approach. The underlying research has employed both quantitative and qualitative approaches, producing various data sets. The results of the data analyses indicate that the evolution of children’s phonograms is characterized by some distinct genre- and style-related development features. This article describes and interprets such features in light of concepts and theories of children’s culture and music sociology. It also elaborates on the emergence of a music market aimed at children, with an emphasis on phonograms. The association with the popular music industry enables an apparent contradiction, addressed in this article, between pedagogical and commercial considerations and outcomes.

In Search of ‘Authentic’ Yugoslav Rock: The Life and Afterlife of Bijelo Dugme

In this article I address the ways in which rock band Bijelo Dugme (White Button) has become one of the symbols of the former Yugoslavia, by analyzing its activities and reception, both in the Yugoslav and the post-Yugoslav periods. Starting from 1974, when its first album was released, Bijelo Dugme gained high popularity and drew the attraction of the public due to its specific sound and image. Being between the East and the West, Yugoslavia’s popular music scene was constantly focused on searching for a kind of music that would epitomize the ‘authentic’ Yugoslav music. The folk-influenced hard rock sound (so-called shepherd rock) was recognized as such a feature and it soon became one of the symbols of Yugoslav culture itself, making Sarajevo one of its epicenters. I here argue that the band appears to be a Yugoslav symbol since (1) its active years coincide precisely with the period in Yugoslavia that was marked with relevant changes, beginning with its 1974 constitution and ending with its disintegration; (2) it is regarded as a feature representing one of the most important successes of the country’s popular music industry; and (3) it has had a specific ‘afterlife’ that sheds light on the ways culture in the Yugoslav era is perceived currently.

Creator or Integrator? Knowledge and Representation Types in Core Teams in the K-Pop Industry

Idea creation and integration are the two pillars of producing creative works, but prior studies have only examined their relationship with innovation performance from one side. This study combines the idea creation and integration perspectives for innovation activities. We distinguish between explicit and implicit ideas and investigate types of product representations as a bifurcation to draw a line between the creator and integrator roles of core teams. Our hypotheses are tested in the context of the Korean popular music industry. The analysis reveals that the core team plays an integrator role when dealing with explicit ideas. Further, a flexible representation shifts the core team’s balance to an integrator role, whereas an inflexible one shifts it to a creator role for generic ideas. This study contributes to our understanding of the tension between idea creation and integration and provides a practical implication for resolving the dilemma between them.

Shane Homan, Martin Cloonan and Jen Cattermole. 2016. <i>Popular Music Industries and the State: Policy Notes</i>

Shane Homan, Martin Cloonan and Jen Cattermole. 2016. Popular Music Industries and the State: Policy Notes. New York and London: Routledge. 249pp. ISBN 978-0-41582-4-514 (hbk)

Building a K-Pop knowledge graph using an entertainment ontology

Recently, the Korean popular (K-Pop) music industry has grown into a popular subculture among teenagers and young adults worldwide, which resulted in widespread interest in the fashion and style of idolised Korean singers and groups. Although English social media websites provide some content related to K-Pop, these websites lack diversity and rapid updating of information compared to local Korean websites. This study introduces a K-Pop knowledge graph, which is the basis for describing various objects and their relationships. All contents of the knowledge graph can be distributed and shared across various applications. To do so, this study proposes a semantic data model to represent a comprehensive profile for singers and groups, their activities, organisations and entertainment content. The knowledge graph is created by aggregating a set of relevant datasets from various data sources. In addition, Gnosis, which is a news application, demonstrates how this knowledge graph can be used in a real-world service.

Sour Melodies of Romance? A Critical Analysis of Adele’s Oeuvre

Adele’s rise to prominence in the popular music industry comes with the need to engage her music in an academic context for better understanding and appreciation. It is, perhaps, pertinent to note that the performance of a popular song tends to suggest several meanings which are often derived from the context of the performance. While the understanding of a popular song may vary according to cultural perspectives and influences, popular songs often have intrinsic musical workings and social-cultural identities. Drawing from existing theories and propositions on popular music analysis by several musicologists and sociologists, this article seeks to critically analyze three songs taken from Adele’s three Albums; putting into consideration some basic elements which work together to give her music meanings. In addition, this work attempts to find answers to what Adele’s music could mean in a generic socio-cultural context.

The Ethnic Component in the Russian Mass Music

The article is devoted to an actual problem of the mass musical culture — implementation of folklore material into the mass music fi eld of view. The process of commercialization and “massifi cation” of folklore is accompanied by disappearance of indigenous ethnic traditions and inclusion some of their means of expressiveness into the global, supranational cultural space. The phenomenon of ethnica is regarded as an important participant of the modern popular music industry. The author attempts to classify the ethnic segment, on the basis of a number of parameters: its closeness to/distance from the folklore original, its geographic and stylistic background (jazz, rock, pop). It is noted that the interest in ethnic style was a reaction to the growing integration trends in the world masscult practice and indicated the need to overcome the internal unilateralism and certain stylistic uniformity of the world pop scene. As a result, the Slavic, gypsy and oriental styles, native for the Russian mass music, were complemented by the celtica, latina, reggae, balkanism, and other “alien” styles. With all this, the most creative approach to the folk material is realized by jazz and rock musicians, while the eth-no-pop is limited to certain elements of folklore, used as an original colorful material. The article investigates the mechanisms of implementation of the “alien” traditions into the auditory experience of Russian listeners. There is put out a hypothesis about further dissolution of ethnicity in the popular music, which is adequate to the current multicultural processes.

HISTORY OF IBAN POPULAR MUSIC, AN ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS OF MODERNITY

The Iban make up one third of the Sarawakian population and are the largest indigenous ethnic group in Sarawak, Malaysia. As with other ethnicities in the nationstate, modernity has presented challenges for socio-cultural development and lifestyle of Iban people. The objective of this paper is to examine how modernity has historically shaped developments in the industry of Iban popular music. Historically, the Iban are a cultural group located geographically and politically on the periphery of the multi-cultural nation of Malaysia. Throughout much of the 20th century, the music industry has experienced a rapid embrace of modernity through the nation to the detriment of traditional practices in culture in order to adapt them in the era of modernization. Hence, the Iban society had gone through a state of flux where people have gone through the process of readapting themselves in meeting the demanding challenges of Malaysian nationalism. Drawing upon alternative conceptions of modernity to evaluate how the Iban reference both a national as well as a local music industry particularly through their use of language as an expression of Iban. Changes in Iban society through political and economic modernization had led to the emergence of Iban popular music industry because of relative exposure to agents of change such as the influence through Christian missionary and education. This reflects how the Iban react and reflect in adaptation of modern demands of change as a result of the effects of historical processes on the social, cultural and physical environments.

“Making Do in Ways That We Hadn't Done Before”: The Early Popular Music Industry in Perth

“Making Do in Ways That We Hadn't Done Before”: The Early Popular Music Industry in Perth

Drink, song and politics in early modern England

AbstractBetween about 1580 and 1690, early modern England experienced three interrelated developments: first, the growth of a successful commercial popular music industry, centred on London, which served a socially broad national market; secondly, the development of political parties, emerging from the political and religious turmoil of the period, which impinged significantly upon the newly burgeoning popular music industry and its markets; thirdly, a substantial increase in the per capita consumption of alcoholic drinks across all social classes, for reasons of sociability rather than health or nutrition. This article explores the unexpected effects of these changes on cultures of politics, drink and song across the whole period. In particular, it explores the way in which the Cavaliers of the 1650s and the new ‘Tory’ party of the 1680s used the medium of song to encourage excessive drinking and the political and social denigration of sobriety in order to promote loyal obedience.

Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South by Charles L. Hughes (review)

Reviewed by: Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South by Charles L. Hughes Paul Devlin Charles L. Hughes. Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2015. 280 pp. $29.95. Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South by Charles L. Hughes is a nuanced, elegant, and authoritative history of an important corner of the Southern popular music industry from the 1960s through the early 1980s. Hughes focuses on what he calls the “country-soul triangle” from Memphis to Nashville to Muscle Shoals, epicenters of creativity that helped create the soundtrack of the era. Stars who emerged from the triangle include Al Green, Wilson Pickett, Bobby Womack, the Staples Singers, Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MGs, Charley Pride, Dolly Parton, and Elvis Presley, while those who traveled to the triangle in search of a particular sound include James Brown, Liza Minnelli, and the Rolling Stones. Hughes successfully navigates many potential pitfalls as he tells (and revises) the intricate story of how country and soul music have been understood as political and social proxies. The hit-making studios (such as Stax, for instance) of the country-soul triangle during this period have long been considered extraordinary sites of progressive interracial harmony. For example, a black studio band created the music for the white Mar-Keys and a white band, the famous Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, played the music on some of the best-known tunes by the Staples Singers (at the very moment that the Staples Singers became more overtly political and aligned with a Black Power perspective). Country Soul is filled with a wide variety of similar examples. This narrative of interracial cooperation was cemented by music critic Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (Back Bay, 1986). Hughes’s goal is to both oppose and complicate the assumptions that have followed in the wake of Guralnick’s book, and from related anecdotes that have proliferated about the period. The fact that the Staples Singers used a white studio band is widely known. But what of the similarly talented black studio bands during the period who worked under difficult conditions? It may be fun to watch Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash perform together on YouTube, but Hughes argues that broad historical conclusions should not be drawn from such glorious moments: When knitted together, these stories of cooperation offer an alternative narrative of southern history, a tradition of racial interaction that complicates or even contradicts the conventional understanding of the South’s conflicted past. Interracial music collaborations from Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s to Nelly and Tim McGraw in the 2000s are offered as counterpoints to racial polarization. The interracial intermingling of 1850s string bands or 1950s rock ’n’ roll becomes evidence for the limits of segregation and white supremacy. . . . . . . But those who promote this narrative (and there are lots of us, from Barack Obama to me at some points in my career) have taken it further and exhibit a disquieting tendency to imply that the music existed outside of history. Statements like “racism did not exist in the studio” or “on the bandstand, everyone was the same” or “we saw no difference between black and white” are commonplace in this discourse. Southern musical spaces— both literal and figurative—have become a kind of ahistorical interracial dreamland. (190, 191) [End Page 63] Hughes successfully uses what he calls a “labor-based analysis” (6) to attempt to replace this ahistorical interracial dreamland with something closer to reality. Hughes does not claim that the dreamland was actually a nightmare-land, but his excavation of the in-between land discards sedimented layers of myth. There is an element of truth to the idea that many people looked to the Southern music industry as a site of change, or a space reflective of the vanguard of social change. Hughes writes that Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams, a black country-and-soul musician, “understood that his hybrid music offered a way out of [race-based genre divisions imposed by the music industry] by...

The Gnawa Lions: paths towards learning ritual music in contemporary Morocco

ABSTRACTThis article outlines the pressures on young gnawa musicians embarking on a career in contemporary Morocco. The influences of the popular music industry provide new options for those looking to learn and advance. They can choose to engage the traditional system of apprenticeship or navigate their career outside it. This article outlines the pathway and expectations built into an apprenticeship-based mode of learning and becoming gnawa. It then moves to explore the opportunities and pressures that affect those who chose to sidestep the established system. Young performers who do so adeptly respond to their audiences’ desires and can find success, though they may measure it differently. Even so, however, they struggle for respect from the larger gnawa community. I examine how these artists strategise their careers between traditional and novel educational systems. They prioritise skills that are important to their movement through the popular music industry. This does not preclude opportunities for ritual performance, though it does affect how and where they find work. While some fail due to a poor knowledge of repertoire or a lack of experience, others utilise a nuanced understanding of their changing audience's tastes to animate possession innovatively and effectively. Even when they are not as adept at moving spirits in ritual, they master moving bodies in concerts.

Government agency interventions in Australia and New Zealand’s indigenous popular music industries and indigenous empowerment

As Wilson and Stewart (2008: 3) note, “industrialized, mass-produced messages and images – and accompanying technologies – in most cases have represented the perspectives, values and institutional structures of empire.” While radio broadcasting in post-colonial New Zealand exemplifies this global trend, Māori have challenged Pākehā dominance of the nation’s airwaves in recent decades, having successfully carved out a space for themselves within the New Zealand mediascape. Nevertheless, getting more Māori music (especially songs with te reo lyrics) on radio and other forms of broadcasting media remains a challenge – especially in the New Zealand commercial broadcasting sphere. It has been 30 years since a te reo song last topped the charts. This challenge has been addressed in various ways by the two organizations mandated to promote Māori language and Māori culture via broadcasting: Te Māngai Pāho (TMP) and New Zealand On Air (NZOA). This article will describe and evaluate TMP and NZOA’s responses to calls for more Māori music (especially songs with te reo lyrics) on air, and suggest further measures that could be implemented to increase the broadcasting of such music. It will also placeTMP and NZOA’s strategies in the context of broader NZ cultural-political shifts, and in the context of changes in the NZ broadcasting environment. It asks whether, or to what extent, cultural protectionism is needed today in NZ’s deregulated and diversifying broadcasting environment.

Value Co-creation in the Popular Music Industry

Cel – Celem artykulu jest analiza ewolucji modelu biznesowego organizacji w przemyslach kreatywnych, w celu podtrzymania konkurencyjności i rentowności. Metodologia badania – Artykul zostal przygotowany w oparciu o studia literaturowe Wynik – W przemyśle muzycznym widoczna jest zmiana modeli biznesowych zmieniająca w sposob fundamentalny relacje pomiedzy producentami a odbiorcami muzyki. Istotą tej zmiany jest coraz bardziej powszechne wspoltworzenie wartości. Oryginalnośc/wartośc – Artykul eksponuje problematyke procesow wspoltworzenia wartości w przemyśle muzycznym, rzadko bedącym przedmiotem analizy w kontekście wartości rozumianej jako kategoria ekonomiczna (a nie wylącznie emocjonalno-symboliczna).

Insistency: A New Methodology for Lyrical Analysis

IntroductionGermaine to the effort of integrating the study of the popular music industry into academia is a need for academic models and methods derived from supporting disciplines. The current triad of disciplines to which the study of the recording industry is appended includes mass communication, music, and business. Whereas the academic study of business is interested in effective models of management, marketing, and finance, schools of music offer a complementary viewpoint typically treating the creative aspect of the music business from a fine arts or arts administration perspective. Approaching the music business from the perspective of mass communication is an effective median given that it often focuses on both production and promotional skills-those required to capture the creative performance and package it for commercial exploitation. Mass communication also offers an effective lens for looking at the deliberate establishment of music business studies within the academy. It was only within the last fifty years that mass communication itself was forging the boundaries of its own academic territory.1 This process required the formulation of a theoretical corpus as well as a research methodology. Just as that discipline borrowed from established disciplines like literary criticism and sociology among others, the study of the popular music industry is likewise in need of research models. Unlike mass communication however, this emerging discipline requires a very wide set of such models and theories due to the breadth of its endeavor (including composition, performance, production, and promotion among others). The current paper responds to this need in part, by demonstrating how music industry scholars and students may perform lyrical analysis. The model we will reveal supplements traditional literary analysis with a quantitative component helpful for increasing accuracy and reducing speculative arguments.As an example of this research procedure, which I am calling insistency-based analysis, I will offer as an academic point of access the notoriously prolific and often slippery lyrical corpus of Tom Waits.Tom Waits' status among the upper echelon of American singer songwriters is evident on many levels of evaluation. His list of awards, major label contracts, sales figures, longevity, international appeal, and continued relevance are a few indicators used to fete his artistic prowess. Waits is also a deeply unique artist with a chameleon-like style that is as unpredictable as it is hard to define. In comparison to his fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, we might refer to Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, and still fall short in an effort to effectively describe Waits' style. Rock critics and scholars of contemporary popular music (cf. Steve Huey, Barney Hoskyns, and David Yaffe) use terms like experimental, avant-garde, and abstract to describe his relationship to convention, yet many of his other releases coincide beautifully with their record label billing as jazz, rock, blues, or other codified genres. There is something deeply puzzling about his work that compels listeners to pay attention in a way that few other artists can achieve. Perhaps this ability to move in and out of popular musical form speaks to Waits' longevity and relevance. As a result, the question of what fundamental messages lay at the heart of Tom Waits' oeuvre may seem like an intimidating one. This study will demonstrate an approach to this artistic body of work by way of lyrical analysis that enables researchers to locate core issues addressed by Waits and to assess his particular articulation and evaluation of those issues.The conceptual framework chosen for this study is based on the idea that artistic media, such as music or poetry, are media of communication. The ability to derive any message or messages from such media depends heavily on the level of specificity or vagueness endemic to its own signifying system. …

DEVELOPMENTS IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA'S POPULAR MUSIC INDUSTRY

Malcolm Philpott's article surveys the principal· factors determining the establishment and current direction of the PNG music industry.

The creative process of The Beatles revisited

Much of both popular and academic writing about creativity in popular music has been characterized by a conflict between commercial production and artistic creativity. On the one hand, creativity has been explored with reference to the large-scale structure of the popular music industry. On the other hand, much of the writing has been based on a Romantic or individualist notion of creativity, explicit for example in the auteur theory. This line of writing has certainly been popular with respect to The Beatles. Drawing on recent research on creativity in popular music and organizational research, the article challenges this dichotomy by focusing on the interaction between individual creativity and different forms of collaborative creativity in the production of The Beatles’ records.

English

The Bachelor of Popular Music (BPM) program operates in purpose built facilities on the Gold Coast campus of Griffith University (Queensland, Australia). The degree design replicates how musicians progress outside formal learning contexts in an enhanced higher education environment, including self-directed and collaborative learning, participatory assessment, and critical listening as core activities. Graduates are independent musicians, having studied popular music history and analysis, audio production, songwriting and performance, ensuring competence in a broad range of popular music activities. While the structure of the degree remains constant, the content and processes remain fluid in response to the rapid changes in the music industry. Reflecting the increasingly artist-driven nature of the industry itself, student consultation has provided the impetus for many of these changes. The primary goal of the program was, and still is, to produce graduates who are multi-skilled and able to engage effectively with the popular music industry, prepared to adapt to the changes that are characteristic of this dynamic field. This paper documents this process of change over a fifteen-year period, showing how pedagogy can respond to continually changing industry demands.

When Nationalism Goes to the Market

To understand the role of the market in the promotion of nationalism, this article focuses on Chinese popular music and examines how nationalism is promoted in China through patriotic songs. It applies Althusser's theory of “Ideological State Apparatus” and argues that China has a long history of nationalist mobilization through patriotic songs, which claims both Chinese artists and consumers as subjects of nationalism. As the Chinese popular music industry is now marketized, the market becomes the primary platform where the state, the artist, and the consumer interact, collaborate, and negotiate in the production and consumption of patriotic songs. In implementing their marketing strategies, artists help enhance the reach and effectiveness of Chinese patriotic education by tailoring their songs to well-defined, diverse market segments.

Ethnicity and the brokerage of Kenyan popular music: categorizing ‘Riziki’ by Ja-Mnazi Afrika

This article extends the description of the popular music industries as sites in which ethnic identities were constructed and consolidated in early twenty-first century Kenya. The interest is in the brokerage of the music. The focus is on the categorization of the song ‘Riziki’ by the Kenyan popular music band Ja-Mnazi Afrika. ‘Riziki’ was first recorded in 2005 and continued to be a ‘hit’ through 2008. Over year 2008, a number of institutions that were engaged in popular music brokerage variously classified ‘Riziki’ as a western benga song, a Luo song, a Zilizopendwa (Golden Oldies) song, a rumba song, etc. On his part, the song's composer, Awillo Mike, described ‘Riziki’ as a rumba with a muffled zouk beat. The paper argues that the differing categorizations of ‘Riziki’ by brokers arose as a result of the factoring in of ethnicity as an element in the identification of the group in which to place the song, and that such ethnicity-sensitive classifications in turn served to (re)produce and/or normalize ethnic perceptions – and, by extension, helped to construct and consolidate ethnic identities – in early twenty-first century Kenya.