Journal of Popular Music Studies (2021). At the turn of the twenty-first century, vinyl records had remained a steady if unsubstantial component of recorded music revenue in the United States. But sales of physical media started declining steadily in 2001 in a seemingly unstoppable slide the RIAA attributed to digital piracy. Then a funny thing happened: although CD sales continued to shrink, by the end of the decade vinyl record sales had started growing, reaching $88.9 million in 2010—a revenue level not seen in two decades. In this article I trace these trajectories in more detail, considering how the trajectory of vinyl record sales in the twenty-first century both confirm and frustrate concepts of revival.

Yale Journal of Music and Religion (2021). As a series of loosely-organized events, “Beer & Hymns” started at the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2006 and migrated to the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina in 2012. Local Beer & Hymns gatherings meet at bars, breweries, clubs, and pubs across the U.K., the U.S., and around the world. In this article, I analyze the sonic and social fabric of Beer & Hymns as a participatory space that promotes community, contextualized against white U.S. evangelicalism’s contested relationship with the secular.

Twentieth-Century Music (2021). In this forum, we have collected articles from participants in a recent symposium on the future of popular music studies to reflect more deeply on the challenges we all face in in an increasingly diverse and divided world -- challenges of teaching, studying, comprehending, and embodying pop music in all its richness. The field must reckon with these challenges if it is to remain relevant, and in doing so (we argue) it perhaps models a way forward for music scholarship as a whole.

Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture (2020). In 1992, EMI acquired Sparrow Records. At that time, EMI was one of the “Big Six” (secular) major record labels; Sparrow was the largest and most successful label in the Christian record industry. As in other sectors of the music and entertainment industries, reactions to corporate consolidations are mixed. CCM magazine and its sister publications, for decades the primary sources of information about and for the Christian market, provide a unique opportunity to observe and analyze these tensions leading up to these mergers and acquisitions.

Journal of Popular Music Studies (2020). In this article, we report on the two-day event, “The Future of Pop: Big Questions Facing Popular Music Studies in the 21st Century,” at Northeastern University in October 2019. The event was sponsored by the Popular Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society (AMS-PMSG), Northeastern University, and Amherst College as a pre-conference symposium tied to the AMS’s annual meeting in Boston.

Journal of Popular Music Studies (2020). At the 2018 IASPM-US conference in Nashville, I organized a roundtable of Christian music executives. This was a unique opportunity to hear Christian music executives discussing the unique challenges and issues they face in a popular music market for which religious identity is necessarily a core component. Roundtable participants have worked in A&R, executive leadership, higher education, music ministry, music super- vision, production, publishing, radio promotions, and recording, among other roles, and represent more than 100 years of cumulative experience as music industry professionals.

Journal of the Society for American Music (2020). Cornerstone was an annual four-day-long Christian rock festival in Illinois that ran from 1984 until 2012, first in Chicago’s northern suburbs and then on a former farm in the rural western part of the state. This article examines the production of space and place at Cornerstone. In doing so, it contributes a vital link between scene theory and the growing ethnomusicological literature on festivals.

Journal of the Society for American Music (2020). In this special issue of JSAM, my overarching goal has been to showcase the rich diversity of festival research, decentering popular music studies from it, and in doing so to demonstrate both that music scholars working in a variety of areas have much to contribute to contemporary popular and academic discourse on music festivals, and that festival studies has much to contribute to music scholarship beyond popular music studies. The articles collected here contribute to a broad interdisciplinary literature on music festivals. Each also illustrates the value of music festival research to the scholarship of music in the Americas.

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.

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?

Studying Congregational Music, Routledge (2021). Chapter 7, “Political Economy and Capital in Congregational Music Studies: Commodities, Worshipers, and Worship,” by Andrew Mall.

Studying Congregational Music, Routledge (2021). Introduction, “Interdisciplinarity and Epistemic Diversity in Congregational Music Studies,” by Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls.

Ethics and Christian Musicking, Routledge (2021). In this chapter, I consider the ways in which the business of music complicates the ethics and objectives of Christian music. I address some of the effects of yoking Christian music to the for-profit imperatives of entertainment conglomerates, but I quickly turn my attention to Christian festivals, which are unique places in which competing ethics find an equilibrium, albeit one that is always temporary and often uneasy.

Christian Punk, Bloomsbury (2020). This chapter focuses on the Chicago-based Christian Celtic-punk band Flatfoot 56, analyzing their performances in secular venues and at the Christian music festivals Cornerstone and AudioFeed. Arguing that Christianity and punk are inseparable to the band’s identity, the chapter analyzes their approach to religious communication in songs and from the stage. The chapter also addresses the evolution of Christian music festivals and the tensions around youth-focused niche forms of Christian music, such as punk.

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.

Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age, Ashgate (2015). Based on historical research and ethnographic fieldwork in 2009–2012, including two summers volunteering as festival staff, this chapter examines the ways in which Cornerstone’s imagined community was constructed, manifested, perpetuated, and mourned. This work participates in a growing literature on contemporary Christian congregational music practices and contributes to scholarship in ethnomusicology and popular music studies that address explicitly peripheral musical activities.

The Spirit of Praise, Penn State University Press (2015). Live music is integral to worship services, where aesthetics of charismatic worship and rock concerts often overlap. This chapter examines the ways in which the Anchor Fellowship’s theology, worship practices, and congregational music are co-constitutive. This work participates in a growing literature on contemporary Christian worship music practices and contributes to scholarship that addresses peripheral musical activities.

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.

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.

Encyclopedia of Popular Musics of the World, Continuum (2012). the emergence of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) in the early 1970s as the dominant category of popular music marketed to white evangelical Christians, there have been Christian recording artists whose music has failed to meet the aesthetic, contextual, economic, ideological, lyrical, stylistic or theological requirements of the US CCM recording industry. Early ‘Christian rock’ artists’ theological message located them on the periphery of the secular popular music recording industry, while their aggressive sound—heavily influenced by contemporary rock music—located them on the periphery of the existing Christian music recording industry, which focused primarily on sacred music and hymnody.

Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture (2024). In this review of Erika D. Gault's Networking the Black Church: Digital Black Christians and Hip Hop (NYU Press, 2022), I discuss Gault’s digital ethnographic approach to learning more about “digital Black Christians” (her chosen signifier for what others might call Black Millennials) and her findings about how those digital Black Christians — primarily “creatives” and “thought leaders” (or, to others, “influences”) — impact theological discourses and Christian communities outside of defined religious hierarchies and churches.

Leah Payne reviewed God Rock, Inc. for the Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture.

Adam Perez reviewed God Rock, Inc. for the Journal of the Society for American Music.

Daniel Thornton reviewed God Rock, Inc. for the Journal of World Popular Music.

Rosalind I. J. Hackett reviewed God Rock, Inc. for the journal Religion.

Jason Lee Guthrie reviewed God Rock, Inc. for the Journal of the Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association (MEIEA).

Robert M. Marovich reviewed God Rock, Inc. for the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal (ARSC).

Shannan Katherine Baker reviewed God Rock, Inc. for Reading Religion, the open book review website published by the American Academy of Religion (AAR).

Punk & Post-Punk (2021). In this review of Tom Mullen's Anthology of Emo (2 vols.) and Washed Up Emo (podcast), I explain how Mullen has contributed to a long trajectory of emo’s and reputational recovery. He is key to emo nostalgia in the 2010s and its resurgence and flourishing into the 2020s.

Yale Journal of Music and Religion (2020). In this review of Ari Y. Kelman's Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America (NYU Press, 2018), I describe the strengths and challenges of examining the cultural production of worship music thematically, as Kelman has chosen to focus on songwriting, worship leading, and the music industry in sequence.