See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me: Tommy, Rock Opera and Twentieth Century Britain

Special Issue, IASPM journal
Edited by Keith Gildart and Benjamin Halligan

With Tommy, British rock group The Who audaciously scoped British social history across the middle decades of the twentieth century in order to engage with themes of youth culture, hedonism and alienation, family dysfunctionality, the horrors of war and its aftermath, stardom and psychic damage, sexual abuse and exclusion, and the permissive society. The rock opera concept of Tommy was one that resulted in multiple iterations: the original album (1969), the London symphony production (1972), Ken Russell’s glam-era film (1975), stage productions at the moment of the “Britpop” renaissance in British culture (in the 1990s, and a 2015 revival), and the music continuing to feature in the live sets of The Who.

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Pedagogy and Practice in Popular Music Education

Association for Popular Music Education European Conference 2025
July 22-24, 2025, Liverpool, UK

The Association of Popular Music Education (APME) European Conference 2025, hosted at Liverpool Institute for Performance Arts in Liverpool, invites scholars, educators, musicians, practitioners, and industry professionals to submit proposals for papers, presentations, and workshops that explore innovative practices, foster critical discussions, and share emerging trends in popular music education. This year’s conference focuses on the intersection of pedagogy and practice in popular music education, highlighting key issues in diversity, social justice, and the evolving role of music education in our communities.

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Changing Mediations of Music, Audio and Sound: New Systems Across the World

Audio streaming, social media and short video platforms are transforming the systems by which sound media are configured internationally. Platformisation, datafication and automated recommendation have been central to such transformations, and now generative AI is bringing about further changes. These developments have generated great controversy, for example concerning effects on musicians, on local music production, and on the way that music is experienced in everyday life. These changes also have significant implications, via the rise of podcasting and other related developments, for the fate of radio, even if radio remains resilient in many territories. Arguably such transformations require a major rethinking of the politics of sound in everyday life.

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Artificial intelligence in the creator economy

Special edition of Global Media and China

Issue Editors
Keith Negus (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and University of Agder, Norway)
Qian Zhang (Communication University of China, Beijing)

Artificial intelligence in the creator economy

Artificial Intelligence (AI), powered by large data sets and advanced algorithms, is having a profound impact upon the global media. It is disrupting approaches to knowledge and information, models of communication and representation, along with creative practices and cultural production. This special edition addresses the impacts and consequences of AI for the study of global media, by focusing specifically on how AI is driving a growing creator economy. The creator economy refers to the way ever more content is made, modified, and monetized, using accessible AI apps, across audio-visual platforms like Douyin/ TikTok, YouTube, Sina Weibo, WeChat, Twitch, Bigo Live, and Boomplay.

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Depression in Popular Music

International Conference, June 26-27, 2025
Sorbonne University, Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health (iPLesp), Paris

Conference organizers:
Jessica A. Holmes
Associate Professor of Musicology, University of Copenhagen
4EU+ Visiting Professor, Sorbonne University iPLesp (Spring 2025)

iPLesp Social Epidemiology, Mental Health and Addictions Research Team led by Judith van der Waerden, Senior Research Associate, French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM)

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The Past, the Present and the Future of Popular Music Research in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe

IASPM CESE 1^st international conference, 11–12.09.2025

Organized by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music – Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (IASPM CESE) at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

IASPM’s Central, Eastern and Southeastern European branch invites submissions for its first international conference, focusing on the evolving landscape of popular music research in our region. As popular music continues to shape cultural narratives and social identities, we invite researchers from and of this part of Europe to contribute their (self-)reflections on the region’s historical contexts, contemporary practices, future directions, as well as on the ways in which their own work expands this field.

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Take Two: Expanding the Field of Music Production Research

Building on the success of the inaugural SMPR conference, we now turn our focus to Canada’s west coast, a region where the extraordinary natural environment inspires us to push boundaries and explore new ideas. It’s time for take two!

Using Victoria’s ecological diversity and soaring landscape as a metaphor, we have chosen three themes to map out research directions for Music Production Research (MPR): equity, diversity and inclusion; social responsibility; and innovation. We want to explore these themes both from within the MPR community, and also by turning our collective creativity outwards. At this conference, we aim to test the limits of conventional thought by fostering discussions about how music production and research can, broadly speaking, make a positive social impact.

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Mediterranean Byways. Music Across Borders Between Western Europe and the Maghreb

Transposition no. 14 (2026): “Mediterranean Byways”
Call for papers
Edited by Talia Bachir-Loopuyt and Karim Hammou

Approaches to music, whether in the field of musicology or the social sciences, tend to construct their objects and analyses in accordance with the divisions promoted by nation-states. Such a “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Schiller 2003) is not without limitations. It can even result in intractable deadlocks, particularly when examining cultural phenomena that, although constrained by political borders, may also transcend them to varying degrees and in different ways. Paul Gilroy’s proposition (1993) – to construct the Atlantic space as a relevant scale for analysing Afro-diasporic cultural and political practices – and the discussions and research it has inspired have demonstrated the value of considering alternative divisions (Agudelo et al. 2015, Aterianus-Owanga 2024). The term “byways” in the title of this call is borrowed from René Gallissot, a historian specialising in the Maghreb, whose work sought to explore the “transnationalisation at work beneath the model of the nation-state” (Gallissot 2000: 149).

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Popular Music and Violent Conflict

Popular Music History Special Issue for November 2025

The twenty-first century is defined by numerous wars. Unlike the large-scale global conflicts of the 20th century, today’s wars are predominantly localized. More broadly, conflicts shape lives politically, socially, and privately. Popular music has always played a dual role in such contexts: it has been used to mobilize masses for war while also serving as a medium for resistance. Anti-war songs are plentiful, ranging from the Italian “Bella ciao,” through the pacifist anthems of the Vietnam War era, to modern examples of resistance during the Intifada. As long as violent conflict has existed, so too have songs of resistance, such as “Biladi biladi” (“O my country!”) from Egypt’s 1919 revolution, or “Min djibalina” (“From our mountains”), opposing colonization.

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Watching rap: Hip-hop music videos and visual cultures

Call for papers: Journal Étude de communication n° 65

Website: https://journals.openedition.org/edc

For some observers of the music industry, “the clip itself has become little more than the sheathing in which a song is enclosed” (Straw, 2018, 187). How, then, can we explain the popularity of music video streaming? According to the latest report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI, 2023), it accounts for almost as much as audio streaming when it comes to online music consumption (31% and 32% respectively). Does it mean that YouTube video consumers are losing interest in the visual presentation of music and that they are listening to music videos rather than watching them (Kaiser and Spanu, 2018)? It seems difficult to imagine that people listening to music videos are not at the same time engaging with visuals − especially when we consider the image centrality in rap music due to the genre specific “registers of authenticity and legitimacy” (Guillard and Sonnette, 2020). Since the beginnings of rap, music videos, but also album covers, photographs, magazine covers and promotional visuals have participated in the construction of an aesthetic and representations at the intersection of race, gender and class (Collins, 2004). Among other examples, Franck Freitas (2011) analyzes the way in which the music video for the song In Da Club by 50 Cent is part of a marketing narrative around racial authenticity. Emily Q. Shuman for her part shows how race is performed in the work of rapper Casey through a visual aesthetic (Shuman, 2021).

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