Welcome to The International Association for the Study of Popular Music UK and Ireland Branch

The Punk Scholars Network website

Posted: May 20th, 2020 | Filed under: News | No Comments »

The Punk Scholars Network is celebrating 8 years of punk scholarship by launching our brand new Punk Scholars Network website https://www.punkscholarsnetwork.com/

Please go visit the fantastic new website where you  can view all the interesting and insightful work the Punk Scholars Network has been involved in since its inception in 2012, including publications and events as well as our new blog that features announcements about new punk research and other creative work. You can even buy affordable PSN merch direct from the website to help support the not-for-profit Punk Scholars Network.

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Music, Sound and Silence in Videogames

Posted: May 18th, 2020 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Journal of Sound, Silence, Image and Technology (JoSSIT)
Issue editor: Lidia López Gómez

Number: 3 (December 2020)
Deadline for full articles: 1st October 2020
Issue date: 22nd December 2020

The scientific publication the Journal of Sound, Silence, Image and Technology (JoSSIT) grew out of the research group of the same name (SSIT), which is linked to the TecnoCampus university centres, affiliated with Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). The journal seeks to bring together academic debate and scientific research on the relationship between sound as a broad concept and an audiovisual context.

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IASPM UK&I London Calling Conference

Posted: May 18th, 2020 | Filed under: IASPM Conferences, News | No Comments »

IMPORTANT INFO FOR THOSE PLANNING TO ATTEND THE ONLINE CONFERENCE:

  1. If you haven’t registered on Eventbrite by 5pm UK time on Monday 18th May (Click Here To Register) we can’t guarantee we can process you in time for the first keynote on Tuesday with Mykaell Riley – although you will still be able to watch it on the website – just not participate in the discussion. You can continue to register after that and we will process people as quickly as we can.
  2. On Tuesday morning we will email everyone who has registered with the conference login details. People who register later will be emailed separately.
  3. We can only let 100 people into the keynote Zoom sessions but you can also watch the session live on the website and use the comments section to ask questions. (There are nearly 200 people registered at the moment and still rising). Details of the ‘door policy’ for the Zoom session will be announced in the login email on Tuesday morning.
  4. Every week there will be some streamed performances after the keynote and, for the most part, they are musicians without other income so please support them by contributing something through the PayPal.Me links under the YouTube Live screens on the website.

The website for the event is here: https://london-calling-iaspm2020.com


Masters scholarship for BAME students at Goldsmiths

Posted: May 15th, 2020 | Filed under: News | No Comments »

Goldsmiths Department of Music offers a MA/MMus scholarship for BAME students.

There is a dramatic under-representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) music scholars at the academic professional level. The same is true throughout British academia. This full tuition fee-waiver scholarship aims to support a BAME student who intends to progress through postgraduate study and into an academic research position.

The deadline for applying for this scholarship is 9am, 13 July 2020.

Full details: https://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/fees-funding/departmental-awards/music/


Born to Be Alive: Live Music as a Crucial Dimension of 21st Century Popular Music

Posted: May 4th, 2020 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Ethnomusicology Review Special Issue (more info here)

Savage (2019) paints a devastating portrait of the music industry’s current state. In the United States, record sales have dropped about 80% in the last decade: from 450 to 89 million, and its plight continues. From 2017 to 2018, worldwide record sales percentage plummeted an additional 23%. At the latest Grammy Awards, two of the nominees for best album never had a physical release. The situation becomes more acute when analyzing 2018’s top selling records: the vast majority relates to film soundtracks. How can the music industry react? We must first consider that this is a very recent reality and that the actors’ adaptability cannot keep up with the constant technological progress in music digitalization and that, these days, anyone with a computer or smartphone is able to download hundreds of albums and stockpile thousands of songs. We sometimes forget that those processes only started back in 1998 with the evolution of the MP3 player. At the time, the MP3 format allowed a revolutionary audio compression. It was a clear example of an action’s non-intended consequences: a tool which was supposed to help the music industry ended up harming it in the long run. As we know, after MP3 came sharing websites like Napster, KaZaa with peer-to-peer downloads of free music. If, on the one hand, the number of downloads was ever-growing, the music industry’s reaction was to potentially sue any and all people who illegally downloaded a file (Morris, 2015). The most recent example of this phenomenon in everyone’s mind may be Metallica’s quixotic struggle.

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