AUDIENCE WEB 2.0 BOOK active fandom UGC

This Wired feature on how the audience has become more active through the convergence of the online world is a great one to get into multiple concepts linked to audience. A few excerpts below (initially about UK prog rock Marillion, who ended up touring the US only because fans funded it!!!)

INDUSTRY Website only book Testament to diversification

A novel idea, the band book...

Thrash legends Testament (Burnt Offerings, Over the Wall, Souls of Black and many other classics that'll add a sonic boom to any day) are producing a band history which can only be ordered through their website, and comes with a personalised inscription.

Of course, there's a video from the lead singer, the venom vocalled Chuck Billy, to announce/flog the tome...

http://www.metalsucks.net/2017/03/10/testament-are-working-on-a-book-the-official-illustrated-history/

Books on music video

Be aware that there is an extensive links list (pictured below) for books on music video. See more on books for all elements of A2 Media here.

Especially useful:

Keith Negus' Popular Music in Theory: incredibly useful for both coursework and exam, this gives you a summary of media theories applied to music. Great for the Evaluation, but also blogging about audience; brilliant for both Q1 and Q1b of the exam. It is quite old, but still useful.

Not particularly academic but very useful for the history of music vids, + refs/analysis to/of many vids and directors you won't have heard of (but which could give you ideas), is Austerlitz' Money For Nothing: A History of the Music Video From The Beatles to The White Stripes. You can of course try a general music video (book) search, and you'll come up the likes of this. Austerlitz provides a history of the music video and how it developed over time, and mentions (details) lots of examples you won't have come across - but which might help for ideas. Such examples may also end up being used in your exam too.

PIRACY, AUDIENCE How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt

There are a lot of highly enjoyable reads on music and the music industry. Austerlitz's history of the music video is a must-read; Simon Reynolds' Retromania puts together a strong argument on the changing nature of the audience for music, and Ralph Negus has done a fantastic overview of academic theory around music and audiences.

Whichever artist you're working on, you will be able to find books on them, their influences, their genre which help throw up ideas. As a result of so frequently name-checking Madonna when discussing Lady Gaga through the 2015 A2 Bad Romance production, I tracked down the hefty bio on her, a great read, and reinforcing the view that the likes of Gaga 'borrow' hugely from the Madonna playbook.

Witt's book, just out, I haven't read yet, but covers the span of two decades in which a bloated music industry exploited digital technology to charge fans to re-purchase music many already owned on vinyl or cassette. This hubris would come back to bite them as digital piracy took off, an early indicator that the traditional passive producer-audience relationship was unstable and set for disruption under what would become web 2.0...

Article/infographic link below the line

MADONNA REPRESENTATION John Izod's the female shaman concept

Another to add to the list of will come back to, found this a very striking notion, and an unexpected encounter with one of my old uni professors ... in a Madonna biography

INDIE RETRO Before blogs there were zines...

Great, in-depth interview with Bruce 'Sub Pop' Pavitt (that's where Nirvana started if you don't know the name).

Simon Reynolds' writing, notably the book Retromania, is a good way of getting a handle on how the music industry and fandom was, back in the day; this interview is a great starter for any such wider reading.

The appeal of retro media and technology, from zines to vinyl, and that ridiculous music movement that insists on using only primitive 80s sequencers, is a marked feature of our postmodern, mashed-up era of pastiche and bricolage. Digitisation has ironically boosted the appeal of analogue technology, at least once it has almost entirely obliterated it from mainstream retailing and usage.

SOURCE: Diffuser.fm.

EDMs US success + Dubstep globalisation

The post title is an attempt to put in a few words one of the core themes of Simon Reynolds' (author of key books on music today such as Retromania) lengthy MusicGuardian feature (from the still superb Friday supplement, if you do buy the physical paper!), How Rave music conquered America.
Just as there was a long gap between punk going mainstream here and then in the US, rave also took around 15 years to hit big in the US. Reynolds breaks down a number of factors in this, from the impact of smoking bans changing drug consumption patterns to a death at a festival ironically publicising the existence of large-scale rave (EDM as its been relabelled in the US) live scene.
Above all, he notes how social media, including YouTube, Facebook + Twitter, have enabled UK scenes that once might have briefly enjoyed some cult, ultra-cool following in New York or the west coast to become mainstream in the US. BBC Radio 1 can, in our globalised, online age, greatly influence music culture in the US and beyond, as this excerpt suggests:

Best points to a September 2006 Radio One show by Mary Ann Hobbs as a critical moment in dubstep's dissemination through North America. "Dubstep Warz was this session where she had all the key DJs on the scene playing tracks, but more importantly talking about the music and the culture. It really painted a picture of what dubstep meant. That show was traded throughout the Internet, to the point where it's almost a cliche to say that it influenced you. Hobbs also talked about Dubstepforum in that broadcast. At that point it had a few hundred users. But subsequently it just grew and grew until it now has a million."
The internet helped to obliterate the time-lag that always used to hamper the US outposts of UK-based scenes like jungle. Because of the dubplate system, whereby the leading British drum & bass DJs played the latest sounds months before their official release, by the time American deejays got hold of the tracks as expensive imports, the UK scene was already six months into the future. But dubstep, as the first fully networked dance scene, is globally synchronized: sound-files are traded more freely and new tracks gets edited out of DJ mixes on pirate radio and posted as YouTube by fans.

I post this not just to reinforce yet again the key point about the impact of digitisation (the article also makes the point that dance is no different from other music forms these days in that artists make most of their income from live performances, not CD/recorded music sales, citing figures for the likes of Skrillex), but also as a potential audience for an artist relaunched through a new music video for a back catalogue track can be non-UK ... and through social media you have the opportunity to research and evidence the potential without travelling anywhere!