Community Custodians Of Popular Music S Past

This book examines do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches to the collection, preservation, and display of popular music heritage being undertaken by volunteers in community archives, museums and halls of fame globally. DIY institutions of popular music heritage are much more than ‘unofficial’ versions of ‘official’ institutions; rather, they invoke a complex network of affect and sociality, and are sites where interested people – often enthusiasts – are able to assemble around shared goals related to the preservation of and ownership over the material histories of popular music culture. Drawing on interviews and observations with founders, volunteers and heritage workers in 23 DIY institutions in Australasia, Europe and North America, the book highlights the potentialities of bottom-up, community-based interventions into the archiving and preservation of popular music’s material history. It reveals the kinds of collections being housed in these archives, how they are managed and maintained, and explores their relationship to mainstream heritage institutions. The study also considers the cultural labor of volunteers in the DIY institution, arguing that while these are places concerned with heritage management and the preservation of artefacts, they are also extensions of musical communities in the present in which activities around popular music preservation have personal, cultural, community and heritage benefits. By looking at volunteers’ everyday interventions in the archiving and curating of popular music’s material past, the book highlights how DIY institutions build upon national heritage strategies at the community level and have the capacity to contribute to the democratization of popular music heritage. This book will have a broad appeal to a range of scholars in the fields of popular music studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, archive studies and archival science, museum studies, critical heritage studies, cultural studies, cultural sociology and media studies.

Remembering Popular Music’s Past capitalizes on the growing interest, globally, in the preservation of popular music’s material past and on scholarly explorations of the ways in which popular music, as heritage, is produced, legitimized and conferred cultural and historical significance. The chapters in this collection consider the spaces, practices and representations that constitute popular music heritage to elucidate how popular music’s past is lived in the present. Thus the focus is on the transformation of popular music into heritage, and the role of history and memory in this process. The cultural studies framework adopted in Remembering Popular Music’s Past encompasses unique approaches to popular music historiography, sociology, film analysis, and archival and museal work. Broadly, the collection deals with the precarious nature of popular music heritage, history and memory.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy is the first thorough analysis of how policy frames the behavior of audiences, industries, and governments in the production and consumption of popular music. Covering a range of industrial and national contexts, this collection assesses how music policy has become an important arm of government, and a contentious arena of global debate across areas of cultural trade, intellectual property, and mediacultural content. It brings together a diverse range of researchers to reveal how histories of music policy development continue to inform contemporary policy and industry practice. The Handbook maps individual nation case studies with detailed assessment of music industry sectors. Drawing on international experts, the volume offers insight into global debates about popular music within broader social, economic, and geopolitical contexts.

Ray Oldenburg’s concept of third place is re-visited in this book through contemporary approaches and new examples of third places. Third place is not your home (first place), not your work (second place), but those informal public places in which we interact with the people. Readers will come to understand the importance of third places and how they can be incorporated into urban design to offer places of interaction – promoting togetherness in an urbanised world of mobility and rapid change.

The celebration of popular music can be an important mode of cultural expression and a source of pride for urban communities. This Element analyses the capacity for popular music heritage to enact cultural justice in the deindustrialising cities of Wollongong, Australia; Detroit, USA; and Birmingham, UK. The Element develops a critical approach to cultural justice for examining music and the city in a heritage context and outlines how the quest for cultural justice manifests in three key ways: collection, preservation and archiving; curation, storytelling and heritage interpretation; and mobilising communities for collective action.

Remastering Music and Cultural Heritage presents a detailed account of the culture and practice of remastering music recordings. By investigating the production processes and the social, nostalgic and technological components of remastering practice, the book demonstrates the application of these techniques to iconic recordings by artists including The Beatles, Elton John and Oasis. Through comprehensive interviews with music production professionals directly involved in both the original productions and remastered releases of these iconic recordings – and detailed digital audio analysis – this book offers an extensive insight into music production and remastering practice. Readers learn about the music production techniques behind creating some of the most well-recognised and loved albums of all time, as well as the processes used to create the remasters, to help guide their own projects. Remastering Music and Cultural Heritage is essential reading for students and teachers of music production, professional practitioners and musicians.

This book provides a critical academic evaluation of the ‘music city’ as a form of urban cultural policy that has been keenly adopted in policy circles across the globe, but which as yet has only been subject to limited empirical and conceptual interrogation. With a particular focus on heritage, planning, tourism and regulatory measures, this book explores how local geographical, social and economic contexts and particularities shape the nature of music city policies (or lack thereof) in particular cities. The book broadens academic interrogation of music cities to include cities as diverse as San Francisco, Liverpool, Chennai, Havana, San Juan, Birmingham and Southampton. Contributors include both academic and professional practitioners and, consequently, this book represents one of the most diverse attempts yet to critically engage with music cities as a global cultural policy concept.

There is a growing awareness around the world of the pressing need to archive the material remnants of popular music so as to safeguard the national and local histories of this cultural form. Current research suggests that in the past 20 or so years there has been an expansion of DIY heritage practice, with the founding of numerous DIY popular music institutions, archives and museums around the world. This edited collection seeks to explore the role of DIY or Pro-Am (Professional-Amateur) practitioners of popular music archiving and preservation. It looks critically at ideas around "DIY preservationism," "self-authorised" and "unauthorised" heritage practice and the "DIY institution," while also unpacking the potentialities of bottom-up, community-based interventions into the archiving and preservation of popular music’s material history. With an international scope and an interdisciplinary approach, this is an important reference for scholars of popular music, heritage studies and cultural studies.