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Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Justice and the Deindustrialising City
- Sarah Baker, Zelmarie Cantillon, Raphaël Nowak
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- Published online:
- 15 February 2023
- Print publication:
- 02 March 2023
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- Element
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The celebration of popular music can be an important mode of cultural expression and a source of pride for urban communities. This Element analyses the capacity for popular music heritage to enact cultural justice in the deindustrialising cities of Wollongong, Australia; Detroit, USA; and Birmingham, UK. The Element develops a critical approach to cultural justice for examining music and the city in a heritage context and outlines how the quest for cultural justice manifests in three key ways: collection, preservation and archiving; curation, storytelling and heritage interpretation; and mobilising communities for collective action.
Chapter 11 - Questioning the Future of Popular Music Heritage in the Age of Platform Capitalism
- from Part II - HERITAGE
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- By Raphaël Nowak, cultural sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research
- Edited by Lauren Istvandity, Sarah Baker, Zelmarie Cantillon
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- Book:
- Remembering Popular Music's Past
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 09 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2019, pp 145-158
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
The realm of recorded music has recently entered a new era. Following almost 20 years of uncertainty and upheavals, which commenced with the advent and success of Napster and illegal downloading of music files in the late 1990s (see Nowak and Whelan 2014), modes of music distribution and consumption are increasingly centred on music streaming platforms (see IFPI 2017). The implementation, and then increasing success, of music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Google Play, TIDAL, Apple Music, Deezer or Pandora changed the ways in which music content is distributed and interacted with by consumers. Distribution of music through streaming platforms primarily relies on immediate access to content, and such access is largely mediated by algorithmic processes. The prominence of playlists in consumption patterns and the constant browsing through a great array of content are the two main instances of how the modes of music distribution and consumption are changing in the age of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2016, 2017). At a time when the preservation of popular music heritage has somewhat become an ‘obsession’ (see Baker 2015, 2017; Le Guern 2015), contemporary cultural transformations in the ways music is valued raise significant questions about what content will be worth preserving and celebrating in the near future. Institutions committed to popular music heritage preservation draw largely on the concept of cultural significance in their narration of popular music histories in exhibitions (see Baker et al. 2016a, 2016b, 2018). Halls of fame for instance induct artists that are deemed significant, even though the criteria vary across different institutions (see Nowak and Baker 2018). This chapter draws on the premise that a turn to platforms in the distribution and consumption of music will change consumers’ relationship with music and present significant issues for the future of music heritage preservation. To put it plainly, what music will be worth preserving in the coming years? This chapter explores current transformations in modes of music distribution and consumption, and how, subsequently, the ways music is culturally valued also change, and how this impacts upon the preservation of its heritage. In the first section, I provide a brief overview of platform capitalism, as well as the main transformations that streaming platforms induce in the ways music is accessed, listened to and valued by consumers.
6 - Popular music, community archives and public history online: cultural justice and the DIY approach to heritage
- Jeannette A. Bastian, Andrew Flinn
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- Book:
- Community Archives, Community Spaces: Heritage, Memory and Identity
- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 16 February 2020
- Print publication:
- 30 October 2018, pp 97-112
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter explores the expanding range of community archiving activity concerned with the preservation of cultures, experiences and memories associated with popular music. Engendered by forms as disparate as jazz, rock, soul or country music, such is the variety of this field that a similarly expanding scholarly literature has emerged as a means of mapping and understanding its meanings and significance. While much of this activity takes a familiar physical form (Baker, 2017), here we explore the ways in which the digital enables the extension of such activity. In further democratising the nature of historical work and the archive, online practice is also suggestive of how popular pleasures are subject to a form of cultural justice, a concept which frames this chapter.
The nature of online community archives of popular music can be illustrated with reference to heavy metal, the most listened to genre of music on the streaming service Spotify (Van Buskirk, 2015). Affirming this popularity, Wall Street Journal reporter Neil Shah (2016) describes the genre as the real ‘World Music’, that ‘Heavy Metal has become the unlikely soundtrack of globalization’. While record sales and tour receipts attest to the genre's economic power, its popularity is equally tangible in the activity of hundreds of thousands of individuals who contribute to the range of communities of interest associated with it. These are most visibly formed online at sites such as Metal Wiki (https://metal.wikia.com) or Metal Travel Guide (https://www.metaltravelguide.com), an ‘evolving database of rock and metal clubs, bars, pubs, venues and more all added and reviewed by people like you!’
A key site discussed in this chapter is Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives (https://www.metal-archives.com), which, alongside the dynamic world of current activity, seeks to record the genre's global history. This archival intent is not uncommon among similar online communities. In relation to the metal genre, for instance, on Facebook one can find Museo del Metal En Paraguay (The Paraguayan Metal Museum), MetalMusicArchives or Old School Metal, T Shirts And Memorabilia, while on Twitter, the user Black Antiquarium presents ‘Black Metal pics from ‘80s, ‘90s & present days’. One of the most ambitious projects to engage the metal community in building its collective history is the Home of Metal project.