Entropy and Popular Culture: Product Diversity in the Popular Music Recording Industry

1996 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Product Diversity ◽  
Music Recording

scholarly journals The The skillset of professional studio musicians in the German popular music recording industry

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Peter Herbst ◽  
Tim Albrecht
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Public Media ◽  
New Business ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Studio Musicians ◽  
Music Recording

Among the professional roles in the recording industry, studio musicians have received relatively little academic attention. Who has played on a record and who has developed the rhythms, melodies and fills are secrets that remain hidden behind closed studio doors. Since the little public media available mainly recollects memories of past stars or musical developments from more than twenty years ago, little is known about more recent biographies, individual skills and working practices of average studio musicians from different parts of the world. Against this backdrop, the present study explored the skillset of studio musicians in Germany’s popular music recording industry. The interviewees provided rare insights into their careers, expressed their views on technological developments and depicted their economic realities. With increasing power and affordability of music production resources, new business models for studio musicians were developing along with a change of skills. For a long time, the successful studio musician had incredible playing skills, stylistic flexibility and was an excellent sight-reader. These requirements seem to have shifted; today’s musicians must have a broader skillset and be experts beyond their instruments. A repertoire of ideas and sounds to be offered spontaneously in a recording session are highly valuable next to empathy, social skills and a likeable and humble personality. The musicians must be both unique and flexible to serve a project and compete with the many fellow musicians and programmers of computer instruments.

Humanism and Music

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher M. Driscoll
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Theoretical Relationship ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between humanism and music, giving attention to important theoretical and historical developments, before focusing on four brief case studies rooted in popular culture. The first turns to rock band Modest Mouse as an example of music as a space of humanist expression. Next, the chapter explores Austin-based Rock band Quiet Company and Westcoast rapper Ras Kass and their use of music to critique religion. Last, the chapter discusses contemporary popular music created by artificial intelligence and considers what non-human production of music suggests about the category of the human and, resultantly, humanism. These case studies give attention to the historical and theoretical relationship between humanism and music, and they offer examples of that relationship as it plays out in contemporary music.

“Poor Butterfly”: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Popular Music

Prospects ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 41-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Prigozy
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
42Nd Street

The seventy-one song titles (see chart below) and innumerable lyrics that sprinkle his works indicate the extent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's reliance upon popular music as a source of his art. Contemporaneous descriptions of him as “laureate of the Jazz Age” need not be considered derisive; Fitzgerald was thoroughly in touch with his culture, was aware of the meaning of his sources, and was a keen analyst of the effects of popular culture on American lives. Cecilia Brady, in The Last Tycoon, admits “some of my more romantic ideas actually stemmed from pictures—42nd Street, for example, had a great influence on me. It's more than possible that some of the pictures which Stahr himself conceived had shaped me into what I was.” Fitzgerald was shaped by movies, by musical comedies, and not least by popular music. Other writers of our century were influenced in the same way, but it was Fitzgerald who acknowledged his debt to popular culture, who used it with meticulous care, and who evaluated seriously its impact, for better or worse, on the American scene.

Invented Dances, Or, How Nigerian Musicians Sculpt the Body Politic

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Dotun Ayobade
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
African Music

AbstractPopular dances encapsulate the aliveness of Africa's young. Radiating an Africanist aesthetic of the cool, these moves enflesh popular music, saturating mass media platforms and everyday spaces with imageries of joyful transcendence. This essay understands scriptive dance fads as textual and choreographic calls for public embodiment. I explore how three Nigerian musicians, and their dances, have wielded scriptive prompts to elicit specific moved responses from dispersed, heterogenous, and transnational publics. Dance fads of this kind productively complicate musicological approaches that insist on divorcing contemporary African music cultures from the dancing bodies that they often conjure. Taken together, these movements enlist popular culture as a domain marked by telling contestations over musical ownership and embodied citizenship.

Hallyu tourism: The effects of broadcast and music

2021 ◽  
pp. 135481662110482
Author(s):  
Chew Ging Lee ◽  
Shi-Min How
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Research Note ◽  
Destination Image ◽  
Inbound Tourism

Limited studies have empirically shown that the inbound tourism of South Korea (hereafter Korea) is positively influenced by Hallyu, a Korean popular culture. Conceptually, some studies have suggested that in recent years, the popularity of Korean popular music is greater than Korean dramas, which spread Hallyu beyond the boundary of Korea since the late 1990s. This research note is the first attempt to analyse the effects of the two main aspects of Hallyu: broadcast, inclusive of Korean dramas and variety shows, and Korean popular music, on Korea’s inbound tourism. The findings suggest that broadcast has a stronger positive impact than Korean popular music on Korea’s inbound tourism because broadcast improves the destination image by featuring locations.

‘ROCK SPECTRALE’: THE CULTURAL IDENTITY OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR IN TRISTAN MURAIL'S vampyr!

Tempo ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (274) ◽  
pp. 22-32
Author(s):  
Ben Jameson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
New Music ◽  
Electric Guitar ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
Analytical Approaches

AbstractThe electric guitar is one of the most iconic musical instruments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and, due to its ubiquitous use in much rock and popular music, it has developed a strong cultural identity. In recent years, as the electric guitar has become increasingly common in contemporary concert music, its cultural associations have inevitably shaped how composers, performers and listeners understand music performed on the instrument. This article investigates various issues relating to the electric guitar's cultural identity in the context of Tristan Murail's Vampyr! (1984), in the hope of demonstrating perspectives that will be useful in considering new music for the electric guitar more generally. The article draws both on established analytical approaches to Murail's spectral oeuvre and on concepts from popular music and cultural studies, in order to analyse the influence that the electric guitar's associations from popular culture have in new music.

Imagining the Next Day

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roshi Naidoo
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
National Narrative

If popular culture shapes subjectivity in an individualized and collective sense, popular music heritage must affect “meaning-making” in the present. In examining the battle for meaning within music heritage displays, the author considers two things. First, how and why subversion, resistance, creative dissent, and the imaginative possibilities of identity are reconfigured within a consensual national narrative. Second, how some heritage expressions resist such containment by signaling the power of identity to facilitate both present and future rebellion.

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 215-222
Author(s):  
Landon Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
History Of

This chapter concludes the volume with a concise coda that problematizes the genre and medium specificity of categories such as “rock” and “cinema,” and interrogates their relevance to understanding popular music stardom onscreen in the twenty-first century. By exploring several recent visual albums, this coda demonstrates how the history of rock stardom onscreen paved the way for the unification of the feature film and the music video on display in this unique form. Yet, at the same time, visual albums present musicians with renewed opportunity for overt political expression and aesthetic experimentation not seen since late 1960s rock movies. Visual albums are ultimately the latest intersection between the recording industry and moving image media—an intersection that, as this book demonstrates, has a rich and enduring history.

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