How iTunes Changed Music
News@Northeastern (2019). Apple’s music platform, iTunes, changed the digital music landscape when it debuted in 2001. It “proved that digital music could be profitable,” says Andrew Mall, an assistant professor of music industry at Northeastern University. Now, 18 years later, Apple is retiring the music service in favor of three separate apps for music, video, and podcasts.
“Beer & Hymns” and Redemption: Reimagining and Reclaiming Religious Identity through Participatory Sing-alongs
Sound & Secularity symposium presentation (2019). Given the ambivalent (and sometimes antagonistic) relationship between houses of worship and houses of drink in the United States, the mere act of singing hymns in bars can be interpreted as resisting prescriptive religious norms. But in recontextualizing these songs in Wild Goose’s pub tent, beers in hand, participants—including current and former churchgoers—reimagine their theologies and reclaim their religious identities. In this paper, I analyze the sonic and social fabric of Beer and Hymns as a participatory space that enables resilience and redemption.
Subculture
The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, SAGE Publications (2019). Subculture is a theoretical perspective used to describe and analyze social groups that constitute some subset of a larger dominant, mainstream, or mass culture. Subculture theory has been most commonly applied to oppositional social groups and youth cultures by scholars in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, communications, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, media studies, popular music studies, sociology, and others.
Emo
The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, SAGE Publications (2019). Emo, short for “emocore” or “emotional hardcore,” refers both to a genre of rock music and to its subculture. The genre first emerged from punk rock and hardcore punk in the mid-1980s in local underground music scenes, most notably that of Washington, D.C. Throughout the 1990s, it gradually spread across the trans-local networks of underground music scenes in North America. In the early 2000s, several emo bands and the genre itself achieved mainstream success. Like punk rock and other subcultures in previous decades, emo became a popular trend and commodity at its commercial peak, especially among teenagers and young fans.
I am Still Living With Yr. Ghost: A ’90s Song Sing-Along
90s song sing-along, March 2, 2019
Ethnography in Creative Industries
In this course, we consider the various roles that ethnography can play in creative industries. What do we learn from ethnography? For what purposes is ethnographic research best suited? How might ethnography contribute to strategic decision-making? What unique methodological issues might ethnographic research in creative industries pose? In what ways could ethnography enrich creative practice and artmaking? How have the social sciences reacted to the ethnography of creative industries?
Introduction to Music Industry
This course introduces students to a wide array of standard business practices, roles, and norms in the music industries, with a focus on U.S. markets. We address a variety of content areas and business sectors: artist relationships and management, entrepreneurship, intellectual property, international markets, the live music industry, music and other forms of media or entertainment (radio, TV, film, video games, advertising, etc.), and the recorded music industry.
Worship Capital: On the Political Economy of Worship Music
American Music (2018). Scholars and scholar-practitioners from a wide variety of disciplinary and faith backgrounds have enriched our understandings of the ways in which music functions in worship contexts around the world. Yet, the political economy of worship music remains underexamined and undertheorized. In this article, I develop the theory of ‘worship capital’ as a corrective.
Archival Research Methods and Music Industry Pedagogy
Proceedings of the 2018 MEIEA International Summit (2018). In this article, I discuss the value of archival research and primary document sources to pedagogy in music industry education. I describe the archival methods I have employed in a research project documenting contemporaneous discourse about the corporate consolidation of Christian record labels within (secular) major record labels in the early 1990s.
Concentration, Diversity, and Consequences: Privileging Independent over Major Record Labels
Popular Music (2018). A meta-analysis of popular music literature on record labels reveals an ‘indie prejudice’: a preference for (and even a bias in favour of) independent labels coupled with a dismissive approach to the study of major labels and musical mainstreams that impacts our ability, as a scholarly field, to speak with authority about the largest segments of the commercial record industries. What larger implications for our scholarship might confronting this prejudice reveal? What master narratives have structured popular music studies’ preference of independent over major record labels?
Music Industry Research Methodology
This course introduces students to a number of research methodologies and analytical approaches used in music industry studies and the music industry itself. As an interdisciplinary area, music industry methods draw from disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and business. Success as a scholar of or professional in the music industry frequently depends upon one’s ability to collect, interpret, and analyze data from a variety of sources and perspectives.
Selling Out or Buying In? Archival Research of Consumer Discourse about Christian Record Label Consolidation
MEIEA conference presentation (2018). In this paper I consider the role of archival research in music industry studies to address fan discourse as a barometer of anxieties over corporate consolidation. As a result of MEIEA-funded research into CCM magazine (at Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Popular Music), I discuss methodological approaches for discerning the diverse range of opinions expressed by committed fans (as a kind of historical ethnography and reception study) and present my findings not only in light of their importance to the historical record but also in terms of their practical significance to music and entertainment industry decision-makers considering an acquisition today.
Tuning in to Locality: Participatory Musicking at a Community Radio Station
The Routledge Companion to the Study of Local Musicking, Routledge (2018). This chapter examines how marketplace factors affect programming decisions made within radio stations at the macro level, and illustrates their local impacts through a case study of the Chicago Independent Radio Project (or CHIRP). I argue that stations like CHIRP facilitate public intimacy and personal relationships in local spaces and places via imagined communities that are more social than they are imaginary. Through participatory musicking, their staff, volunteers, and listeners help construct musical locality together.
“As for me and my house”: Nashville, the Home of Christian Music
IASPM-US roundtable (2018). For this roundtable, current and former Christian music professionals who have worked in A&R, executive leadership, higher education, music ministry, publishing, and radio promotions, among other roles, address the unique challenges that face Christian music. With many combined decades of experience in organizations large and small, our panelists are well-attuned to the city’s centeredness to the Christian music industries. We consider how Christian music has impacted Nashville, address the difficulties of maintaining a profitable business while conducting a ministry, and consider the boundaries of Christian music—increasingly porous as they are—in the broader contexts of globalized entertainment.
Sound as Religion
AAR conference roundtable panelist (2017). While interdisciplinary interest in the phenomenon of sound has been growing apace, understanding the diverse ways in which sound is implicated in religious practice and spiritual experience remains under-researched in the field of religious studies. This lacuna can be attributed in part to the dominance of textual, visual, and liturgical paradigms in the field, but also the challenges of conducting research on sound (including music), noise, and silence. At this juncture, we feel the need to team up and share resources in order to promote more research and theoretical reflection on the auditory and acoustic dimensions of religion.
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