The Business of Live Music

A conference to mark the completion of the AHRC funded project, The Promotion of Live Music in the UK.

31st March 2011

“It was exactly the same as 1000 other rooms above pubs that I’ve been to during my life time.” The live music space as heritage object – Rob Horrocks (Birmingham City University)

Date: 8–9 September 2011
We invite proposals from a broad range of academic disciplines for a 2 day symposium examining sites of popular music heritage: from institutions such as museums, to geographic locations, websites and online archives. Papers are welcomed that explore popular music within narratives of heritage and identity, real and imagined geographies, cultural memory and contested histories.

The event will focus on three thematic areas:

Popular Music Heritage in the Museum

In recent years museums have increasingly engaged with popular music heritage, as evidenced in a proliferation of exhibitions including those in the UK such as Kylie: The Exhibition at the V&A and the British Music Experience at the O2. Museum interaction with popular music heritage enables methods of narration beyond traditional written histories, engaging visitors with objects, sounds and images. The place of popular music in the museum raises issues of how music is both represented and used to represent and explore social histories, personal and collective identities, memories, and geographies. Possible themes for papers include:

• Popular music and locality in the museum
• Disseminating popular music heritage in museums beyond text
• History and memory in popular music exhibitions and collections

Heritage, Place and Local Identity

While ideas of heritage and cultural memory play an increasingly important role in popular music historiography, the spatial and geographic frameworks underpinning the production of popular music histories remain comparatively under-examined in studies to date. The spatial embedding of popular music heritage raises questions as to the ways in which ideas of local, regional and national identity are shaped by geographies of music and place; the role of mobility practices in the production of local music histories; and the capacity for popular music memoryscapes to stimulate (and sustain) embodied and emotional attachments to places and localities. Possible themes for papers include:

• Contested geographies of popular music heritage
• Routes of popular music heritage: mobility, migration, wayfinding
• Cartographies of popular music history

Digital Archives and Online Practice

Heritage practices have proliferated in the digital age and a large part of related activity online is devoted to popular music. ‘Authorised’ or otherwise, social media groups, blogs and web pages are organised and defined by, amongst other things, genre, artist, period and geography. Sites dedicated to the popular music of Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Coventry, Bristol, Woolongong, Brisbane or Detroit speak simultaneously to the hyper-local and global quality of popular music culture. The nature of such online practices raise questions about the ontology of the archive, the digital ‘artefact’ and collective memory. In light of the challenges presented to the music industries by digitisation, key questions concern the role of music and related intellectual property in online ‘folk’ histories. Possible themes for papers include:

• Contested geographies of popular music heritage
• Authorising popular music heritage and archiving practice online
• Building music cultures and communities of memory online
• Online music heritage, music industries and ownership

Please submit proposals for papers (300 words max) to

Dr Rob Knifton (robert.knifton@liverpool.ac.uk ) and Dr Les Roberts (les.roberts@liverpool.ac.uk).
Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2011

Date for registration: 30 June 2011

Deadline for submission of draft papers: 01 Aug 2011

• Further information and registration details will be posted shortly at www.liv.ac.uk/music/
• Papers presented at the symposium will be considered for publication.

This event is co-organized with the Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University.

I started the Birmingham Popular Music Archive as way of engendering civic pride through the wide range of music activity that has emanated from Birmingham and as a way celebrating and recognising those individuals and organisations that have played a role in this.

It has always struck me as a missed opportunity, and indicative of the way popular culture is viewed, that there is no permanent archive dedicated to the music of the city. For many reasons I hope that this is rectified soon.

In light of this then, I set about creating an online archive that asks its users to ‘tell us what you know’ about Birmingham and its music. It runs on a wordpress platform and was really an experiment to see if people would engage in constructing an archive which in turn would go some way to proving if such a resource was needed. It has been so successful that I’m now looking to host it on a dedicated site that will enable the site to become a proper user friendly website.

One of the reasons for doing this will be so I can fully integrate it across the spectrum of social media platforms. Bizarrely, although I use Twitter extensively and Facebook a lot in a personal capacity, I’ve never really used these tools to push the archive out to further potential users or audiences.

A Facebook page has been set up and my Twitter bio states ‘Celebrating Birmingham’s rich musical heritage’ with a link to the archive site.

However, I very rarely tweet about the archive and when I do it is usually to highlight an event or piece of work that we have done (such as the recent documentary Made In Birmingham) and I’ve never  posted on the Facebook page despite people still joining it, albeit in small numbers.

So I was pleased to be pointed in the direction of this recent academic article: An Analysis of Twitter and Facebook Use by the Archival Community
Adam Crymble in the ARCHIVARIA 70 (Fall 2010): 125–151which I hoped would provide me with an insight into this area.

Crymble has provided a qualitative and quantitive study into 195 institutional and individual users over a 30 day period and in particular looks at the 2926 outbound links – links to other websites of archival information or interest – that were posted. Cymble splits the study groups in to three categories:

Archival organisations using Facebook
Archival organisations using Twitter
Archivists using Twitter

As the title states, Crymble looks at Facebook and Twitter as the social media platforms that he studied and provides a brief, but interesting account of the debates and usage that the archive community engaged with online. Surprisingly, the introduction of ‘Web 2.0′ didn’t significantly change the engagement with online tools and added a further issue to the debate in the community, one that I contend is still on going, that of the ability of researchers/content generators to tag or re-order collections which archivists argue, undermine their roles as professional practitioners.

The author offers a useful guide to Facebook and Twitter, including a ‘Quick Facts’ table showing comparisons between both and should be congratulated on  the clarity of language which, one would hope, will be of use to it’s intended audience – archivists!

Crymble is also clear that he is not writing a ‘how best to use’  social media but offering an insight to how the archive community is currently using social media which those thinking about, or already using these tools, might find useful for their practice. He rejects providing a textual analysis approach, merely looking at what people write to infer meaning, as being to narrow to provide a robust conclusion. Instead Crymble has thoughtfully chosen to look at the outbound links posted by users. These are links that lead to other sites that contain further information about the subject being discussed and the author categorised them as such:
User’s own website
User’s own blog
User’s own Facebook page
External website
External blog

and he further divided the links into four categories as to the motivation for providing the links:
Non-Archival: No intention to promote personal, organisational or archival information
Promotional Outreach: Promoting archival work of the organisation or person, a closely related organisation posting the link
Interest to Archivists/Other Archives: Links that other archivists or organisations may find useful
Broken Links: Links that were posted but no longer working when the author was researching the article

Using this method enabled the author to provide some clear analysis in his finding as to different approaches to how the groups used social media. As Crymble states, the three study groups all broadcast and use the platforms very differently form each other. He also provides a robust explanation of the methodology he used in the statistical data that he provides. Too complicated for me to try and explain here!

In brief, his finding showed that archivists used Twitter as a way of engaging in conversation with other users and the links posted were heavily weighted to material written by others as opposed to promotional outreach of their work.
For archival organisations using Twitter, the reserve was true. These organisations overwhelmingly posted links directly relating to their own material, for events and so on, and didn’t engage in the wider archival conversations.
Archival organisations using Facebook pages were much less active and during the study period over half the pages remained unchanged. Those that were updated were again pointed towards their own material and significantly linked back to their Facebook page. Again this was a case of an organisation using social media as a way of promotion rather than engagement.

As Crymble points out, there is a lot here that points to the need of further research being undertaken in the area of online archival activity to better inform those engaged in archive activity in reaching and engaging audiences. This he suggests, would also be off use when comparing offline with in-house programming in aiding archive organisations to better understand where to focus their outreach programs.

If there is a note of criticism it is the surprise that organisations such as the British Library with their Sound Archive or the Home Of Metal and Birmingham Popular Music Archive weren’t looked at in this study despite the author’s fairly extensive trawl for archive activity (there is an invaluable list of the 195 organisations and archivists included.) Harder to find but worthy of inclusion I think, are those individual Facebook pages set up as informal archives to mainly site specific places such as the Barrel Organ venue in Birmingham. Certainly an archive, certainly not an organisational one. Perhaps these these types of archives should be added to the list of further research Crymble notes. Although the author acknowledges that some will have been missed, just a cursory glance throws up these organisations.

However this is not enough to detract from a well timed and needed piece of research that has certainly made me think about how and why I should use these social media platforms in my own practice and the wider question of how the digital space has thrown up a huge amount of archives from a wide range people across a wide range of interests.

The full article can be reached here: http://adamcrymble.blogspot.com/2010/11/analysis-of-twitter-and-facebook-use-by.html

Bibliography

Crymble, Adam (2010) An Analysis of Twitter and Facebook Use by the Archival Community
Archivaria 70: 125–151

Investigating Northern Soul
 panel discussion/Q&A by Interactive Cultures

Following a screening of Tony Palmer’s 1977 film ‘The Wigan Casino’ the panel comprising
Prof Tim Wall, Dr Nicola Smith, Dr Lucy Gibson, Ady Croasdell (Ace Records) and Prof David Sanjek discussed the film and responded to comments from the audience.

Investigating Northern Soul
, Visual Representations of Northern Soul – Panel discussion by Interactive Cultures

The film is on YouTube. Not a great copy but it is there.

Ady Croasdell
Rare Records and Raucous Nights: Investigating Northern Soul symposium, University of Salford, 4 November, 2010

Ady Croasdell went to this first “Old Soul” all nighter in 1969 and now bosses the longest running Northern Soul club/all nighter of all time (31 years and counting) at the 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street. He has worked for Ace Records since 1982 compiling Northern Soul LPs and CDs for their Kent subsidiary. He oversees the production of these from concept to product and actively seeks and negotiates deals with the US owners.

Dr Lucy Gibson at the Rare Records and Raucous Nights: Investigating Northern Soul symposium
4 November, University of Salford

Lucy Gibson is a temporary lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research explored popular music and the life course, which included ethnographies of Northern Soul and rare soul, rock music, and electronic dance music scenes and interviews with over 70 adult fans. She is particularly interested in how ageing shapes participation in music scenes and music taste and is currently working on publications in this area.

Lucy’s slides are unreadable on the video so we have reproduced them here:

A micro history of Black Handsworth in the 1980s from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Wednesday afternoon research seminar presentation from our guest speaker Kieran Connell – a research student at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary History, University of Birmingham. Kieran is completing a micro history of Black Handsworth in the 1980s.

Kieran’s paper on recent cultural history was well programmed as our regular Book Group discussion that followed his presentation used Exhibiting Popular Music: Museum Audiences, Inclusion and Social History by Marion Leonard (University of Liverpool) and Museums and Popular Culture by Kevin Moore as the starting point for a wider discussion about the cultural heritage work that some  members of the centre are involved in.

Rare Records and Raucous Nights: Investigating Northern Soul
Robert Powell Theatre, 4 November, 2010; 1-5 P.M.

A spirited examination of dance culture, record collecting, and the perpetual British love for American Rhythm & Blues

Programme

1:00 Tim Wall, Birmingham City University

“Northern Soul: There’s Nothing Northern About It (And While We’re At It, It Isn’t Soul and the Dancers Aren’t Break Dancers”)

1:30 Nicola Smith, University of Wales Institute Cardiff

“Dancing Alone, Together: Pleasure, Competency and Competition On The Northern Soul Dancefloor”

2:00 Screening “The Wigan Casino” (Tony Palmer, 1977)

2:30 Panel Discussion of visual representation of Northern Soul

3:00 Lucy Gibson, University of Manchester

“Nostalgia, Symbolic Knowledge and Generational Conflict: Contentious Issues in Contemporary Northern and Rare Soul Scenes”

3:30 Ady Croasdell, Ace Records

“Acquiring Rights and Righting Wrongs: The Copyright Clearance of Northern Soul”

4:00David Sanjek, University of Salford

“Over & Over & Over: Repetition, Reanimation and Northern Soul”

4:30Open Discussion

For more information, please contact d.sanjek@salford.ac.uk
Speakers

Ady Croasdell

Ady Croasdell went to this first “Old Soul” all nighter in 1969 and now bosses the longest running Northern Soul club/all nighter of all time (31 years and counting) at the 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street. He has worked for Ace Records since 1982 compiling Northern Soul LPs and CDs for their Kent subsidiary. He oversees the production of these from concept to product and actively seeks and negotiates deals with the US owners.

Lucy Gibson

Lucy Gibson is a temporary lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research explored popular music and the life course, which included ethnographies of Northern Soul and rare soul, rock music, and electronic dance music scenes and interviews with over 70 adult fans. She is particularly interested in how ageing shapes participation in music scenes and music taste and is currently working on publications in this area.

David Sanjek

David Sanjek is a Professor of Music and Director of the Popular Music Research Centre at the University of Salford. Previously, he was Archives Director of Broadcast Music Inc., the performance licensing agency. He has advised many organizations, including the R&B Foundation, the Blues Foundation, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Library of Congress and the Experience Music Project. He is currently readying a collection of essays (Always On My Mind: Music, Memory and Money), a special issue of Popular Music & Society on copyright in sound recordings, and a conference collection on music documentaries for publication.

Nicola Smith

Dr. Nicola Smith is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Popular Culture at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff. Her doctoral research explored the British Northern Soul scene and she writes widely on ageing music cultures, adult-frequented music scenes and the performance of identities within fandom and popular dance. Her current research is aimed at convincing people that popular music is not just for the under-25s.

Tim Wall

Tim Wall is Professor of Radio and Popular Music Studies and Director of the Birmingham City Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University. More importantly, he’s been dancing to Northern Soul since the early 1970s, even if it is a little less energetic these days. He’s written widely on the relationship between African American and white popular culture, including an analysis of Northern Soul dancing. He may play some Northern records, but he won’t be dancing himself today.