Amanda Brandellero

Popular music as cultural heritage: scoping out the field of practice.

This paper sets out to deepen our understanding of the relationship between popular music and cultural heritage and to delineate the practices of popular music as cultural heritage. The paper illustrates how the term has been mobilised by a variety of actors, from the public to the private sector, to highlight the value of particular popular music manifestations and justify or encourage their preservation and diffusion for posterity. We focus on Austria, England, France and the Netherlands – countries with diverse popular music histories and with varying national and international reach. Popular music heritage is present in national and local public sector heritage institutions and practices in a number of ways. These range from the preservation and exhibition of the material culture of heritage in museums and archives, to a variety of ‘bottom-up’ initiatives, delineating a rich landscape of emblematic places, valued for their attachment to particular musicians or music scenes. The paper points to an underlying tension between the adoption and replication of conventional heritage practices to the preservation and remembrance of the popular music and its celebration as an expression of the dynamism of contemporary popular culture.

Popular music heritage, cultural memory and cultural identity

This issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies presents the first results of the European research project entitled ‘Popular music heritage, cultural memory, and cultural identity. Localised popular music histories and their significance for music audiences and music industries in Europe’, hereafter referred to with the acronym POPID. The three-year project, which started in 2010, was financed under the Humanities for the European Research Area (HERA) and set out to examine the increasing importance of popular music in contemporary renderings of cultural identity, and local and national cultural heritage, from a comparative perspective. To this end, the POPID brought together a team of internationally established academics in the fields of popular music studies, sociology of the arts, media research and cultural studies. The Erasmus Research Centre for Media, Communication and Culture at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University led the project, which included partners at the University of Liverpool, the University of Ljubljana and the University of Vienna.

Making a scene: exploring the dimensions of place through Dutch popular music, 1960-2010

This paper applies a multi-layered conceptualisation of place to the analysis of particular music scenes in the Netherlands, 1960–2010. We focus on: the clustering of music-related activities in locations; the delineation of spatially tied music scenes, based on a shared identity, reproduced over time through music practices and memory work; and the scale of interconnections in music practices. Using a variety of data sources (music industry locational data from 2011; pop chart entries, analysed by artist location, music genre, and social network ties; popular music history books; the Canon of Dutch Popular Music, published in 2007), we study the development of music scenes in the country. Our findings reveal that different dimensions of place come together in different combinations in music scenes in the Netherlands, allowing us to highlight three models: the big city; the infrastructure and media model; and the niche model. While we highlight the relative importance of specific locational and economic indicators, we also note the strength of memory work and narratives in legitimising certain local music scenes and supporting their endurance through time.

The Globalization of Popular Music, 1960-2010 A Multilevel Analysis of Music Flows

This study offers a cross-national multilayered analysis of music flows between 1960 and 2010. Advancing on previous empirical studies of cultural globalization, it attends to the global and country level, while adding the individual level of music flows. Concretely, the authors analyze the international composition of pop charts in nine countries by (a) mapping trends, (b) comparing countries, and (c) conducting multivariate analyses. The results show that pop charts increasingly contain foreign music, with the exception of the United States. Explanatory analyses of foreign success confirm that limited cultural distance results in greater flow as found in film and television studies, while revealing additional positive impacts of centrality of production (e.g., artists from more “central” countries in music production are more likely to chart abroad) and the “star power” of artists. Both the innovative methodological approach and findings of this article offer promising research avenues for globalization, media industry, and celebrity studies.

National popular culture in an interconnected world: The case of pop charts

Music charts have long been a potent symbol of the relationship between the music industry, artists and consumers (Hakanen 1998). Since the first appearance of the Billboard’s ‘Music Popularity Chart’ in July 1940 (Sassoon 2006), many radio stations and magazines across the world have rapidly followed suit. Our study takes pop charts as a vantage point to study the changing trends in the production and consumption of popular music over the last 50 years with special attention to the role of media. It allows us to gain insights into processes of cultural globalization and cultural diversity more generally, and to explore the interconnectedness of national and global markets for and audience responses to cultural products such as pop songs more specifically.

Globalisering in popmuziekhitlijsten in negen landen, 1960-2010

Dit artikel is ondersteund als onderdeel van Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity (POPID) project door de HERA Joint Research Programme ( www.heranet.info ) dat is medegefinancierd door AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR en The European Community FP7 2007-2013, binnen het Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities-programma. De auteurs danken Pytrik Schafraad voor advies over het meten van extreemrechtse politieke partijen.