Welcome

Northeastern Global News (2024). Dynamic pricing was meant to stabilize the market; instead, fans have been hit with spiking ticket costs. How do we fix concert ticketing? A Northeastern music industry expert weighs in.

Northeastern Global News (2024). The disgraced founder behind the original Fyre Festival is out of prison and announced his plans to run a second iteration of the failed music festival in April 2025. His intentions to bring back the festival, which led to him doing jail time for wire fraud charges, was shocking to people in the music world.

Punk rock is simultaneously a music genre and a lifestyle, an attitude and a philosophy, a political orientation and a commodified fashion. Insiders, outsiders, in-betweeners—everyone’s perspective on punk is different, distinct, and necessarily individuated. Punk is what you make of it, yes—but it also has rules, boundaries, and its own self-appointed border police: punk is always already what others make of it. In this course, we explore the ideological, musical, and social characteristics of punk rock, its precedents, and its descendants.

Newsweek (2024). Music festivals like AstroWorld, Route 91 in Las Vegas, and Woodstock '99 have turned from parties to tragedies over the years, raising serious concerns about safety and security. These deadly stampedes, shootings, and riots, leave festival goers continuing to question if there are enough safety measures in place to protect attendees.

Northeastern Global News (2024). The trial of Jeffery Lamar Williams, better known as Young Thug, has made headlines not just because the defendant is a celebrity rapper. It is already the longest trial in Georgia history, with no end in sight. But Northeastern University law and music experts say the case also raises legal and ethical concerns based on the prosecution’s use of the state’s RICO Act, as well as its strategy of using the defendant’s rap lyrics to implicate him in an alleged crime.

Northeastern Global News (2024). Safety has always been an issue when it comes to music performances, according to Andrew Mall, an associate music professor at Northeastern University. Whether it be an outdoor concert, a traveling event like Lilith Fair in the ’90s, or the destination festivals of today, organizers have had to contend with issues like crowd crush, equipment collapse, fires, interpersonal violence and shootings.

Northeastern Global News (2024). A new music streaming service –– Musi –– is turning heads with its free, silent ad-based platform that runs on audio from millions and millions of YouTube videos. Musi isn’t like major streamers like Spotify or Apple Music, but its entry into the streaming wars begs the question: Can anything compete with the likes of Spotify, or is the music streaming landscape set in stone?