Posted: October 3rd, 2024 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on 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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Posted: October 2nd, 2024 | Filed under: Calls for Papers, IASPM Conferences | Comments Off on 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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Posted: October 1st, 2024 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on 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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