The Social Network of Contemporary Popular Musicians

In this paper we analyze two social network datasets of contemporary musicians constructed from allmusic.com (AMG), a music and artists' information database: one is the collaboration network in which two musicians are connected if they have performed in or produced an album together, and the other is the similarity network in which they are connected if they where musically similar according to music experts. We find that, while both networks exhibit typical features of social networks such as high transitivity, several key network features, such as degree as well as betweenness distributions suggest fundamental differences in music collaborations and music similarity networks are created.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Australian Musical Futures: The New Music Industry

On September 5th 2008, the Music Council of Australia held a national summit, bringing together 100 leaders in the music field to identify and debate the major issues facing the music sector in Australia. The summit was structured into four expert groups. This paper was commissioned to brief participants in the 'New Music Industry' stream, one of the four expert groups assembled for the event and chaired by the author. Against the background of major international trends, the paper summarises the major issues, roadblocks and opportunities in the Australian music industry in 2008 across the domains of recording, live performance and digital distribution. The paper also includes a survey of existing government support to the industry and the activities of the Contemporary Music Working Group to develop a comprehensive contemporary music strategy in partnership with the Australian government

Instrumentational complexity of music genres and why simplicity sells

Listening habits are strongly influenced by two opposing aspects, the desire for variety and the demand for uniformity in music. In this work we quantify these two notions in terms of musical instrumentation and production technologies that are typically involved in crafting popular music. We assign a "complexity value" to each music style. A style is complex if it shows the property of having both high variety and low uniformity in instrumentation. We find a strong inverse relation between variety and uniformity of music styles that is remarkably stable over the last half century. Individual styles, however, show dramatic changes in their "complexity" during that period. Styles like "new wave" or "disco" quickly climbed towards higher complexity in the 70s and fell back to low complexity levels shortly afterwards, whereas styles like "folk rock" remained at constant high complexity levels. We show that changes in the complexity of a style are related to its number of sales and to the number of artists contributing to that style. As a style attracts a growing number of artists, its instrumentational variety usually increases. At the same time the instrumentational uniformity of a style decreases, i.e. a unique stylistic and increasingly complex expression pattern emerges. In contrast, album sales of a given style typically increase with decreasing complexity. This can be interpreted as music becoming increasingly formulaic once commercial or mainstream success sets in.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, Supporting Informatio

Conflicts, integration, hybridization of subcultures: An ecological approach to the case of queercore

This paper investigates the case study of queercore, providing a socio-historical analysis of its subcultural production, in the terms of what Michel Foucault has called archaeology of knowledge (1969). In particular, we will focus on: the self-definition of the movement; the conflicts between the two merged worlds of punk and queer culture; the \u201cinternal-subcultural\u201d conflicts between both queercore and punk, and between queercore and gay\lesbian music culture; the political aspects of differentiation. In the conclusion, we will offer an innovative theoretical proposal about the interpretation of subcultures in ecological and semiotic terms, combining the contribution of the American sociologist Andrew Abbot and of the Russian semiologist Jurij Michajlovi\u10d Lotma

Music and Islamic Reform

Music in the Islamic world is being used as a tool for change. Islam is going though a period of major reform, and music is a way to get people all over the world to listen. Though music is prohibited among conservative groups, the Sufis and Islamic youth are spreading ideas of nonviolence and love both to audiences within the religion and to outsiders. The introduction of music has been met with heavy resistance by orthodox members of the religious community, but it has also brought change and success

Getting It on Record: Issues and Strategies for Ethnographic Practice in Recording Studios

The recording studio has been somewhat neglected as a site for ethnographic fieldwork in the field of ethno-musicology and, moreover, the majority of published studies tend to overlook the specific concerns faced by the researcher within these contexts. Music recording studios can be places of creativity, artistry, and collaboration, but they often also involve challenging, intimidating, and fractious relations. Given that recording studios are, first and foremost, concerned with documenting musicians’ performances, we discuss the concerns of getting studio interactions “on record” in terms of access, social relations, and methods of data collection. This article reflects on some of the issues we faced when conducting our fieldwork within British music recording facilities and makes suggestions based on strategies that we employed to address these issues

Dancing to the same beat

There is a longstanding historical and cultural relationship between Congo and Cuba via the slave trade and the ‘return’ of Cuban music to Africa. Do historic connections enable contemporary musicians from both worlds to recognise similarities in each other’s music

The State of the Guitar in Kathmandu

The thriving guitar scene in Kathmandu is not well known outside of the country, and particularly not in the West. It has also not been the topic of much recent scholarship. It has been assumed that for Nepalis the guitar, as a foreign instrument, represents freedom and modernity; but, is this true, and what else might it signify to Nepali guitarists themselves? This article gives an overview of the history of the guitar in Kathmandu by drawing on both published scholarship and interviews conducted by the authors with twelve prominent Nepalese guitarists and guitar educators to establish the current state and future outlook of the guitar in Nepal. Findings suggest that, in addition to freedom and modernity, the guitar is connected with individualism, and is becoming naturalized and less foreign than it used to be