Professor Tim Wall & Dr Paul Long, recently presented a paper at a ‘On, Archives!’, a conference that took place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA from July 6-9.
This is Paul’s report.
On, Archives! was hosted by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) and also contained within it a dedicated symposium on ‘Broadcasting in the 1930s’ organized by Hugh Chignall (Bournemouth) and Jamie Medhust (Aberystwth).
En route to Madison we stopped over in Chicago. Now Chicago is undoubtedly a ‘cinematic’ city, so mythologised in American and wider cultures as to be already familiar to new visitors like me. We arrived on Independence Day which meant that the Stars and Stripes was ubiquitous and firework displays abounded.
Given the tendency to wax lyrical about such places in comparison to the familiarity of home I’ll reserve further remarks for another occasion. However, and acknowledging the trompe l’oeil effect of the cityscape and delights of wandering the streets in sweltering heat, what impressed were the various ways in which the cultural heritage of the city was celebrated.
Prof Tim Wall and Dr Paul Long presenting to the Sights and Sounds conference, University of Salford, June 2010. All You Need is Love is a 17 part documentary covering the Story of Popular Music. The program was originally broadcast between 1976 and 1981, but since that time it has neither been commercially released or repeated.
On Friday 25th June Matt Grimes attended a one-day symposium on Popular Music Fandom. Here is a full report from his blog.
Popular music fandom: a one day symposium, took place at the University of Chester and was organised byMark Duffettfrom the School of Media at Chester. As I will be conducting some research around fans as part of my PhD research I thought it would be useful to attend.
The keynote presentation was from Matt Hills from Cardiff University who is one of the UK’s key thinkers in Fan Culture and Fan studies. I had worked with Matt in the past as part of a research team that conducted some research about audience/fan online interaction with the BBC Radio websites as part of a Knowledge Transfer Project. Matt’s presentation was around considering new ways of looking at and researching fan culture based on three ideas of post-popular music, mnemic communities and intermediary fandoms. What I particularly liked was the area of mnemic communities drawing on the work of Bollas (1993) and how music has personal and/or community memory stored within it. He also touched on the idea of whether those memories are imagined and /or a community narrative. I thought this would be very useful to my research as my object of study centres around cultural/popular memory. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve just been in Groningen in the Netherlands to brainstorm and research Tribemonitor – an online information service to artists and record labels, created by New Music Labs.
The purpose of Tribemonitor is to measure the popularity of music artists based on social media buzz across a range of platforms, rather than on sales or radio airplay.
Measuring online buzz is not a simple thing to do, however. There are some scrapable and publicly accessible pieces of information such as Last.FM plays or numbers of MySpace friends that are obvious and countable. These simple statistical measures that make a good starting point that can act as a basis for artist consultancy (or reassurance): number of MySpace plays, number of artist followers on Twitter, number of YouTube views, etc.
But these metrics only measure what could be described as fan activity, rather than a useful and measurable social score, which would have more to do with the extent to which that artist is being discussed outside of their own sphere of influence. And this is the reason for this intervention.
A new one hour film about Birmingham’s music heritage called Made In Birmingham: Reggae, Punk, Bhangra received a private invitation only premiere recently.
In the video above, Jez Collins of interactive cultures explains the purpose and the genesis of the film, and how it connects with the Birmingham Music Archive.
We’re at the IASPM Conference in Liverpool, where Tim presented a paper on the ways in which popular music histories are portrayed on public television. Here’s the video.
Among other things, we’re in the midst of putting together a funding proposal for a study of Music Consumption in the Digital Age, in partnership with Fat Northerner Records. We recently went to Manchester to meet with a group of music industry representatives, to generate interest in the project and, hopefully, to attract people who would act as an advisory board, if the bid is successful. We asked Ruth Daniel of Fat Northerner to reflect upon the proceedings. Read the rest of this entry »
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