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

Music and Online Cultures in a Changing Platform Ecosystem

Posted: July 30th, 2024 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Music and Online Cultures in a Changing Platform Ecosystem

International Conference
June 19–21, 2025, Lisbon, Portugal
Deadline: September 30

For around half of the world’s population, it is hard to imagine a day without being online in some way or another. The widespread adoption of internet technologies has ostensibly been in service of improving human connectivity, expression, and health. Yet technology companies face unprecedented criticism for the range of changes that internet platforms have wrought on everyday work and leisure practices. In few domains is this clearer than music.

As digital landscapes have shifted and evolved, music has often been the test subject for industrial change, and music cultures have accordingly negotiated the structures of online platforms. A lively body of scholarly and popular commentary has examined the power inequities, constraints, and affordances of online music platforms. In the mid-2020s, however, the formerly stable ecosystem of social media and streaming platforms is changing according to processes of platform decay.

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Most Wanted: Music Research

Posted: July 23rd, 2024 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Most Wanted: Music Research

Most Wanted: Music Research is a new subconference format of Most Wanted: Music Convention on November 14, 2024 at Kulturbrauerei Berlin as a collaborative format with the GMM and other academic partners. MW:M Research is established as a new arena for encounters between artists, practitioners and researchers. The day will start with the Applied Knowledge Lab initiated by GMM, IMBRA & MW:M. For the afternoon we invite talks, presentations, papers, demos and discursive formats from the areas of music business, music culture, and music tech. Topics are organized in three tracks and may focus on, but are not limited to this year’s conference theme Monetize!

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Music and fascism 33 1/3 Europe

Posted: July 1st, 2024 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Music and fascism 33 1/3 Europe

This is a brief and informal call for expressions of interest in contributing a book related to the evolving far-right for the 33 1/3 Europe book series.

Far-right nationalist (or fascist?) parties are rising across Europe. They won big enough in the elections for the European Parliament earlier this month to move the needle in the continent’s most powerful institution in the coming years. The relationship between music and politics cannot be conceived only or primarily in direct and causal terms. The two intersect in various ways—artists are sensitive to aspects of political culture, music is entangled in spaces and counter-spaces of fascism, and affective flows in political culture have a sonic dimension. There’s been a surge of interest in this topic. A research team in Germany and the Netherlands (involving the great Mario Dunkel and Melanie Schiller among others) has produced important research on music in rightwing populism. A CFP for a book titled “The Rising Right” was announced on this list a few days ago.

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Listening to Mainstream Popular Music in Europe: A Snapshot from the Early 2020s

Posted: July 1st, 2024 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Listening to Mainstream Popular Music in Europe: A Snapshot from the Early 2020s

Call for Articles: “Popular Music” Special Issue
Guest Editors: Bernhard Steinbrecher, Ondřej Daniel, and Jakub Machek

This special issue takes a comparative, transnational snapshot of popular music, using the idea of the mainstream to examine prevailing aesthetics, acts, and actors within a particular time and place. Specifically, it focuses on mainstream(ing) processes in Europe at the beginning of the second decade of the century. It explores how popular music’s globally circulating sounds and practices have recently been received, adapted, and negotiated in different European contexts against the backdrop of late modern global capitalism (Taylor et al. 2013, p. viii) and dominant (cross-)local conceptions and ideologies.

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