Research Convention for the Night Time Economy Summit 2025

Convened by the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA)

From Wednesday 5th to Thursday 6th February the NTIA, in conjunction with other sector stakeholders, will be convening the fourth major Night Time Economy summit at Hockley Social Club, Birmingham. The event will discuss the important role that the Night Time Economy plays in economic and cultural recovery both across the UK and internationally. It will consider challenges, opportunities, and what the future holds for the sector.

As part of the Summit, we will be holding a research convention. This presents an opportunity for scholars to share research and to connect with industry.

Context
The Night Time Economy (NTE) is comprised of a diverse range of businesses that operate between 6pm and 6am. Consumer spend in the UK Night-time Economy was £136.5bn in 2022, up from £95.7bn in 2021, showing a strong post-Covid desire to socialise. However, adjusted for inflation, there has been no real growth in turnover over the last three years, despite the significant rise from £121.3bn in 2019. Rather, due to the pandemic and inflation, the UK NTE lost approximately £95bn, impacting investments in customer experiences, marketing, programming and sector resilience (NTIA 2024).

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2025 PopCon/IASPM-US Joint Conference

March 13-16, 2025
University of Southern California

BABY, IT’S A LOOK
Pop Music, Fashion, and Style at the Edge
Proposals Due: Friday, November 15th, 2024

There’s an enduring relationship between popular music, style, and fashion. As an example, in the past five years, the cowboy hat has once again gone viral, after figures like Gene Autry and Herb Jeffries helped make it a country music staple many decades ago. Iconic album covers, visual albums, music videos, and platform visualizers use looks to tell the story of the music, while fashion runways from Paris to Rio de Janeiro to Johannesburg embrace pop music to stage the fantasy of a designer’s vision. Earlier connections between pop music, fashion, and style range from the likes of Josephine Baker and her banana skirt to Billie Holiday’s gardenia hair pin, to the Beatles’ mop-top haircuts, to the 70s glitter and glam of groups like Queen and Labelle, to the activist traditional attire and make up of Nigeria’s Fela Kuti and Lagos 70. Pop musicians design fashion and streetwear collections, and pop music genres produce all kinds of subcultural media and other alternative means of expression through street style and beyond.

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The Platformization of Music Production

Symposium on the platformization of music production
May 2–3, 2025, University of Oslo, Department of Musicology

The PLATFORM-project at University of Oslo’s Department of Musicology invites paper contributions to a symposium on the platformization of music production.

This symposium asks how contemporary platforms of music production are developed and what their significance might be for music making. We thereby invite explorations of platformization in terms of the technological platforms as well as the implications for “platformized” creative practice.

The basic meaning of “platform” is a “raised level surface on which people or things can stand” (Oxford English Dictionary), and it has been associated with networked services that are able to accommodate a growing range of users and somehow transform the relationship between them (e.g. Gillespie, 2010). The notion of platformization of music making has perhaps primarily been associated with distribution services, such as Spotify, and the way songwriting is influenced by recommendation systems and mood-based playlists that promotes listening (e.g. Morris 2020, Kiberg 2023). Recent research has also engaged with the platformization of production resources, such as online services offering automated mastering (Landr; see Sterne and Razlogova 2020) or royalty-free samples (Splice; see Arrieta 2021). Digital audio workstations, such as Apple’s Logic Pro or Ableton’s Live, increasingly resemble what Foxman (2019) calls “platform tools,” that are “integral to the entire production process’ and able to ‘act as an intermediary between industries and platforms.” These technologies increasingly offer opportunities of online production and real-time collaboration while also providing networked distribution facilities. Social media platforms, such as TikTok, are also integrating creative and distributive activities in new ways, while AI-based platforms offer new opportunities (and challenges) for music producers as well as consumers of music.

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IV International Conference on Sonorities Research (CIPS)

Silences

Dates: June 4-7, 2025
Location: Federal University of Espírito Santo – Vitória/ES – Brazil

Online stage: May 31, 2025
The story of composer John Cage is well-known, as he underwent an experience of deep silence in an anechoic chamber and found that he could still hear the internal sounds of his own body. This story confronts us with the inevitability of a complex phenomenon, of a multiple and inexhaustible nature: silence.

Silence, which would seem, at first, to be a counterpoint to sound, a kind of negative, reveals itself as an overflow of the audible boundaries. Western music makes explicit the inescapable importance of silences, from the staff to sound synthesis. In the score, the pause is a marked and significant element, a fundamental part of the composition itself. In digital audio workstations, silence is a block of time without a pulse that is added to the compositional timeline. The absence of sound, it can be concluded, is not a nullity of meaning, but rather the partial result of a broader communicational machination of power games to be mapped from interdisciplinary perspectives.

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New Metal Worlds: Building Bridges and Mending Broken Backs

The International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS) and Metal Music Studies-Spain, in collaboration with the University of Seville, the Complutense University of Madrid, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the University of Granada, the University of Córdoba, the University of Jaén, the University of Oviedo, and the University of La Laguna, invites applications in response to the Call for Proposals 2025 for ISMMS’ 7th Biennial International Research Conference. The event will be held in Seville, Spain, 3-6 June, 2025 (and virtually) under the theme:  NEW METAL WORLDS / BUILDING BRIDGES AND MENDING BROKEN BACKS

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Negotiating the Revolt: Punk in Times of Political Transformation

The conference is organized by the Institute of Czech History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University alongside the project Negotiating the Revolt in Czech and Slovak Postsocialist Transition, which is supported by the Czech Science Foundation and carried out in collaboration with the Archive of Czech and Slovak Subcultures, the Centre for the Study of Popular Culture and the Punk Scholars Network Slovak and Czech.

Date: May 16 – 18, 2025

Venue: Eternia, Nádražní 3, Prague 5, Czech Republic: https://www.eterniasmichov.com/

Conference organizers: Karolina Válová, Miroslav Michela, Ondřej Daniel, Marta Harasimowicz

Email contact: [email protected]

The fall of communist rule in Central Europe has often been interpreted as a long-awaited renaissance of civil society, a national emancipation or “rebirth of Eastern Europe” characterised by a state of euphoria, at least during and immediately after the political upheavals. Artists and intellectuals who had participated in the broadly contextualised cultural opposition often believed that democracy would bring the creative freedom they had been longing for. Transformations in politics and the economy affected the institutional background of the music and entertainment industry and brought new challenges to social hierarchies by redefining categories such as “alternative”, “underground”, “official” and “unofficial”. With the opening of post-socialist countries to global cultural trends and markets, the youth began to be seen as a key marketing demographic and a target for both material and nonmaterial cultural production.

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Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives Conference

Eighth Biennial Conference

Deadline: December 18, 2024
Conference dates: 5–8 August 2025
Location: Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford, United Kingdom
Website: https://congregationalmusic.org/call-papers-2025

Congregational music-making is a vital and vibrant practice within Christian communities worldwide. It reflects, informs, and articulates convictions and concerns that are irreducibly local even as they flow along global networks. The Christian Congregational Music Conference aims to expand the avenues of scholarly inquiry into congregational music-making by bringing together world-class scholars and practitioners to explore the varying cultural, social, and spiritual roles music plays in the life of various Christian communities around the world. The conference will feature guest speakers, roundtables, and workshops that reflect the ever-broadening scope of research and practice in Christian congregational music-making around the world.

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Music Ecosystems: Challenges and Opportunities

Editors
Guy Morrow (University of Melbourne)
Carsten Winter (Hanover University of Music, Drama Media)

Following the (15th) International Music Business Research Days conference (Music Ecosystems Research: Challenges and Opportunities) produced by the International Music Business Research Association and held from June 5-7, 2024 at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media, we invite you to further elucidate the formation and special features of “music ecosystems” by submitting a chapter proposal for this contributed volume.

We are looking for contributions that will help to better understand and explain music contexts as “ecosystems”. The term “ecosystem”, which has now become a key strategic and political term, was introduced into strategicdiscussions to emphasize the fact that the environment of more and more organizations was becoming more dynamic, complex, interdependent and borderless; that such organizations were beginning to resemble “ecosystems”, i.e. biological systems in nature (see for e.g. in particular Davidson, Harmer & Marshall 2014 and, for the origin and logic of ecological thinking, the literature review by de Bernard, Comunian & Gross 2021). We only understand these newly (more dynamic, complex, interdependent and borderless) social relationships/environments if we take these characteristics and normative implications that go with them into account. Some even think that we cannot/should not do this with classic economic concepts (e.g. Scharmer & Kaufer 2013), which focus mostly on the economic efficiency of relationships, markets, contracts, advertising, etc. or for example with classic concepts concerning culture for similar reasons.

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Journal of Festive Studies

Issue 8

In addition to our guest-edited section described below, we always welcome submissions on a rolling basis, with no deadline for consideration. Please do think of us if your research or professional background touches on festive practices!

International borders affect you every day. They play a role in determining whether you are a birthright citizen or an unauthorized migrant. They showcase a nation’s ability or inability to guarantee your wellbeing. They factor into immigration, asylum, and national security debates. Media and political analysts often portray borders as places where pathos, illegality, and poverty thrive innately. Yet, they are also places where ordinary citizens make historical claims, or defend, criticize, and even parody immigration and security policy.

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K-popology: Music, Video, Choreo, Fandom

Uppsala, Sweden, June 8–11, 2025

K-popology: Music, Video, Choreo, Fandom is an international conference at Uppsala University (Sweden), June 8–11, 2025, covering artistic, cultural and industrial aspects of K-pop as a multifaceted global trend. Since the turn of the millennium, K-Pop has ventured into largely uncharted territories, giving rise to transmedial and transcultural phenomena that present unique challenges and opportunities for scholars, as well as for performers, composers, choreographers, promoters, and fans. The rapid evolution of K-Pop often outpaces scholarly efforts to fully comprehend its complexities. We encourage academics as well as artists, composers, choreographers and producers to propose presentations that deepen our knowledge of K-pop as both an aesthetic and a socio-economic phenomenon. The conference takes place after the K-pop Nordic Festival, June 7, 2025, in Stockholm which is ca. 40 minutes from Uppsala by train.

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