While more than 80 percent of the world's commercial music is controlled by four multinational firms, most music is made and enjoyed in diverse situations divorced from such corporate behemoths. These fourteen original essays examine the fascinating world of "music scenes," those largely inconspicuous sites where clusters of musicians, producers, and fans explore their common musical tastes and distinctive lifestyle choices. Although most music scenes come and go with hardly a trace, they nevertheless give immense satisfaction to their participants, and a few - New York bop jazz, Merseybeat, Memphis rockabilly, London punk, Bronx hiphop - achieve fame and spur musical innovations. To date, serious study of the scenes phenomenon has focused mainly on specific music scenes while paying less attention to recurrent dynamics of scene life, such as how individuals construct and negotiate scenes to the various activities. This volume remedies that neglect. The editors distinguish between three types of scenes - local, translocal, and virtual - which provide the organizing framework for the essays. Aspects of local scenes, which are confined to specific areas, are explored through essays on Chicago blues, rave, karaoke, teen pop, and salsa. The section on translocal scenes, which involve the coming together of scattered local scenes around a particular type of music and lifestyle, includes articles on Riot Grrrls, goths, art music, and anarcho-punk. Aspects of virtual scenes, in which fans communicate via the internet, are illustrated using alternative country, the Canterbury sound, postrock, and Kate Bush fans. Also included is an essay that shows how the social conditions in places where jazz was made influenced that music's development.

This volume examines the global influence and impact of DIY cultural practice as this informs the production, performance and consumption of underground music in different parts of the world. The book brings together a series of original studies of DIY musical activities in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Oceania. The chapters combine insights from established academic writers with the work of younger scholars, some of whom are directly engaged in contemporary underground music scenes. The book begins by revisiting and re-evaluating key themes and issues that have been used in studying the cultural meaning of alternative and underground music scenes, notably aspects of space, place and identity and the political economy of DIY cultural practice. The book then explores how the DIY cultural practices that characterize alternative and underground music scenes have been impacted and influenced by technological change, notably the emergence of digital media. Finally, in acknowledging the over 40-year history of DIY cultural practice in punk and post-punk contexts, the book considers how DIY cultures have become embedded in cultural memory and the emotional geographies of place. Through combining high-quality data and fresh conceptual insights in the context of an international body of work spanning the disciplines of popular-music studies, cultural and media studies, and sociology the book offers a series of innovative new directions in the study of DIY cultures and underground/alternative music scenes. This volume will be of particular interest to undergraduate students in the above-mentioned fields of study, as well as an invaluable resource for established academics and researchers working in these and related fields.

This volume explores the ways in which music scenes are not merely physical spaces for the practice of collective musical life but are also inscribed with and enacted through the articulation of cultural memory and emotional geography. The book draws on empirical data collected in cites throughout Australia. In terms of understanding the relationship between music scenes and participants, much of the existing popular music literature tends to avoid one key aspect of scene: its predominant past-tense and memory-based nature. Nascent music scenes may be emergent and on-going but their articulation in the present is often based on past events, ideas and histories. There is a noticeable gap between the literature concerning popular music ethnography and the growing body of work on cultural memory and emotional geography. This book is a study of the conceptual formation and use of music scenes by participants. It is also an investigation of the structures underpinning music scenes more generally.

Site and Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes examines how independent pop and rock music scenes of the 1980s and 1990s were constituted within social and geographical spaces. Those active in the production and consumption of «indie» pop and rock music thought of their practices as largely independent of the music mainstream - even though some acts recorded for major labels. This book explores the web of personal, social, historical, geographical, cultural, and economic practices and relationships involved in the production and consumption of «indie» music.

This brings together new work from Brazilian and European scholars around the themes of musical place and transnationalism across the Atlantic triangle connecting Brazil, Africa and Europe with particular attention to the role of the city in producing, signifying and mediating music-making in the colonial and post-colonial Portuguese-speaking world

"To be a fan is to scream alone together." This is the discovery Hannah Ewens makes in Fangirls: how music fandom is at once a journey of self-definition and a conduit for connection and camaraderie; how it is both complicated and empowering; and how now, more than ever, fandoms composed of girls and young queer people create cultures that shape and change an entire industry. This book is about what it means to be a fangirl. Speaking to hundreds of fans from the UK, US, Europe, and Japan, Ewens tells the story of music fandom using its own voices, recounting previously untold or glossed-over scenes from modern pop and rock music history. In doing so, she uncovers the importance of fan devotion: how Ariana Grande represents both tragedy and resilience to her followers, or what it means to meet an artist like Lady Gaga in person. From One Directioners, to members of the Beyhive, to the author's own fandom experiences, this book reclaims the "fangirl" label for its young members, celebrating their purpose, their power, and, most of all, their passion for the music they love.

Fractured Scenes is the first extensive academic account of music and sound art practices that fall outside of the scope of ‘mainstream music’ in Hong Kong. It combines academic essays with original interviews conducted with prominent Hong Kong underground/independent musicians and sound artists as well as first hand-accounts by key local scene actors in order to survey genres such as experimental/noise music, deconstructed electronic music, indie-pop, punk, garage rock, sound art and DIY ‘computer’ music (among others). It examines these Hong Kong underground music practices in relief with specific case studies in Mainland China and Japan to begin re-defining the notion of a ‘musical underground’ in the context of contemporary Hong Kong.