Adam Behr

Cultural value and cultural policy: some evidence from the world of live music

This article considers live music policy in relation to wider debates on the cultural (as opposed to instrumental) value of the arts. The findings are based on research into amateur/enthusiast, state-funded and commercial concerts across a range of genres – classical, traditional folk, jazz, singer–songwriter and indie – using the Edinburgh Queen’s Hall venue as a case study. We argue that (1) articulations of the cultural or intrinsic value of live music across genres tend to lapse back into descriptions of instrumental value; (2) although explanations vary from audiences, artists and promoters as to why they participate in live music, they also share certain characteristics across genres and sometimes challenge stereotypes about genre-specific behaviours; and (3) there are lessons to be learned for live music policy from examining a venue that plays host to a range of genres and promotional practices.

Live Concert Performance: An Ecological Approach

For the last decade we have been engaged in the study of the history, economics, and sociology of live music in Britain. In this article we will consider the value of “ecology” as an analytic concept (rather than just a buzzword) and compare an ecological account of the setting in which music happens to the use of previous spatial metaphors, from Durkheim’s milieus to Straw’s scenes. To illustrate our argument, we present case studies of three Scottish concerts: one in a small-scale venue (Glasgow’s King Tut’s), one in a mid-size venue (Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall), and one in a large-scale venue, the 12,000-seater SSE Hydro.

Join Together with the Band: Authenticating Collective Creativity in Bands and the Myth of Rock Authenticity Reappraised

This article considers how the group identity of rock bands relates to discourses of authenticity. Exposés of the Romantic rock ideology, while broadly convincing, have overlooked the extent to which it incorporated the collective creativity of bands. Building on Moore’s reorientation towards processes of authentication, rather than “authenticity” as a quality in itself, I assess the band as the site of intimate conjunctions between creativity and sociability, a method against which audiences make authenticating judgments. I suggest that deliberations surrounding genre and authenticity have overemphasized aesthetic and industrial processes and highlight the social practices underpinning them.

Going spare? Concert tickets, touting and cultural value

Abstract This article explores recent events around the secondary market for concert tickets in the UK. It first outlines the nature of the primary and secondary markets for concert tickets and then the story of attempts in the UK to regulate them over a twenty-year period, providing the political and industrial context. It moves on to examine key aspects of the political debates around tickets and the findings of enquiries into the subject – including the rhetoric around ‘real fans’ – and discusses the gradual dilution of legislative proposals (from an outright ban, to a cap, to mandating transparency) and legitimation of the secondary market. We then discuss the broader ramifications of the secondary ticket market for access to cultural events and suggest that those who wish to mobilise against the secondary market could gain much by looking beyond the market value of tickets towards ideas of cultural value which have hitherto played little part in the debate.

The place of popular music in Scotland's cultural policy

In the last two decades the status of popular music as both a cultural activity and creative industry has changed significantly in Scottish and UK cultural policy. The change is in line with a broader shift away from thinking of the arts as cultural activity in need of subsidy and towards treating them as part of the creative economy. The current cultural policy landscape pertaining to popular music is mapped out, drawing on interviews and an online survey with members of the Scottish Music Industry Association (SMIA) and complementary interviews with stakeholders from relevant government and arms-length funding and development bodies. The Scottish Governments (SG) White Paper on independence highlighted the creative industries as one of five growth sectors key to the Scottish economy, but for popular music – and in line with the global music industry – many working in the Scottish music industry face acute challenges. Given EU regulations (and the Scottish Governments preference to remain in the EU) and international agreements in areas like broadcasting and copyright, if they are to flourish many members of the SMIA will likely need to strengthen their relationships with the wider UK and global music industry, regardless of the outcome of the referendum on independence.

Copy Rights: The Politics of Copying and Creativity:

This article analyses the politics of copyright and copying. Copyright is an increasingly important driver of the modern economy, but this does not exhaust its significance. It matters, we argue, not just for the distribution of rewards and resources in the creative industries, but as a site within which established political concerns – collective and individual interests and identities – are articulated and negotiated and within which notions of ‘originality’, ‘creativity’ and ‘copying’ are politically constituted. Set against the background of the increasing economic value attributed to the creative industries, the impact of digitalisation on them and the European Union’s Digital Single Market strategy, the article reveals how copyright policy and the underlying assumptions about ‘copying’ and ‘creativity’ express (often unexamined) political values and ideologies. Drawing on a close reading of policy statements, official reports, court cases and interviews with stakeholders, we explore the multiple political aspects of copyright, showing how copyright policy operates to privilege particular interests and practices and to acknowledge only specific forms of creative endeavour.

The sampling continuum: musical aesthetics and ethics in the age of digital production

Abstract This article argues for a view of popular music production that better accounts for sampling than has historically been the case by viewing it as a continuum of activity. Weighing evidence from interviews with musical practitioners against the legal and industry frameworks, we illustrate, first, how sampling has been legally differentiated from other types of musical copying. Secondly we show that, despite this, comparable ethical codes exist within and across musical methods wherein sampling is part of the spectrum of activities. Thirdly, we discuss the ubiquity of digital technology within popular music production and the resultant closer relationship between sampling and other musical techniques moving onto, fourthly, how the sampling aesthetic has become integrated into musical practice in a manner insufficiently accounted for by its legal and industrial contexts. This ‘post-sampling’ reality places sampling and other musical techniques along a spectrum, in practical and ethical terms, and musicians would be better served by sampling being treated as part of the overall musical palette, allowing both scholars and the law to concentrate on ideologies of practice across the tools that musicians use rather than between different specific techniques.

Copying, copyright and originality:Imitation, transformation and popular musicians

With copyright becoming ever more important for business and government, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the practices and values associated with copying in popular music culture and advocates a more critical approach to notions of originality. Drawing from interviews with working musicians, this article challenges the approaches to copying and popular music that pitch corporate notions of piracy against creative sharing by citizens. It explores differing approaches to the circulation of recordings and identifies three distinct types of creative copying: (1) learning through imitation, (2) copying as transformation and (3) copying for commercial opportunity. This article then considers how copying is caught between a commercial necessity for familiar musical products that must conform to existing expectations and a copyright legislative rationale requiring original sounds with individual owners. This article highlights how legacies from a long history of human copying as a means of acquiring knowledge and skills lead to a collision of creative musical practices, commercial imperatives and copyright regulation and result in a series of unavoidable tensions around originality and copying that are a central characteristic of cultural production.

The real “crossroads” of live music – the conventions of performance at open mic nights in Edinburgh

This article presents ethnographic work on open mic nights in Edinburgh, a hitherto under examined activity that lies in the hinterland of professional live music and serves as a junction between professional and amateur practice. It proceeds from the theoretical context of different musical “worlds”, notably the difference between “folk” and “commercial” popular music, to provide a basic typography of the different types of open mic. These intersect to varying degrees with the wider music “scene”, allowing for contact between musicians at different points on the scale of amateur to professional. Open mics also differ from other forms of “open” activity like folk sessions in that they face towards the commercial popular world, as exhibited in the use of microphones and the privileging of individual performers. I describe how different types of night, and venue, act as nodes onto the wider scene and look at the common features of open mics, particularly the central role of the host in managing spaces that serve musical and other business purposes simultaneously. The host is responsible for maintaining the explicit rules, which vary, and the implicit code of a supportive atmosphere, which is a common factor and takes precedence over other rules.