Remembering Popular Music’s Past capitalizes on the growing interest, globally, in the preservation of popular music’s material past and on scholarly explorations of the ways in which popular music, as heritage, is produced, legitimized and conferred cultural and historical significance. The chapters in this collection consider the spaces, practices and representations that constitute popular music heritage to elucidate how popular music’s past is lived in the present. Thus the focus is on the transformation of popular music into heritage, and the role of history and memory in this process. The cultural studies framework adopted in Remembering Popular Music’s Past encompasses unique approaches to popular music historiography, sociology, film analysis, and archival and museal work. Broadly, the collection deals with the precarious nature of popular music heritage, history and memory.

Remembering Popular Music’s Past capitalizes on the growing interest, globally, in the preservation of popular music’s material past and on scholarly explorations of the ways in which popular music, as heritage, is produced, legitimized and conferred cultural and historical significance. The chapters in this collection consider the spaces, practices and representations that constitute popular music heritage to elucidate how popular music’s past is lived in the present. Thus the focus is on the transformation of popular music into heritage, and the role of history and memory in this process. The cultural studies framework adopted in Remembering Popular Music’s Past encompasses unique approaches to popular music historiography, sociology, film analysis, and archival and museal work. Broadly, the collection deals with the precarious nature of popular music heritage, history and memory.

Music Sociology critically evaluates current approaches to the study of music in sociology and presents a broad overview of how music is positioned and represented in existing sociological scholarship. It then goes on to offer a new framework for approaching the sociology of music, taking music itself as a starting point, and considering what music sociology can learn from related disciplines such as critical musicology, ethnomusicology, and cultural studies. As a central form of leisure, consumption, and cultural production, music has attracted significant attention from sociologists who seek to understand its deeper socio-cultural meaning. With case studies that address sound environments, consumption, media technologies, local scenes, music heritage, and ageing, the authors highlight the distinctive nature of musical experience, and show how sociology can illuminate it. Providing both a survey of existing perspectives the sociology of music, and a thought-provoking discussion of how the field can move forward, this concise and accessible book will be a vital reading for anyone teaching or studying music from a sociological standpoint.

Popular music is increasingly being represented and celebrated as an aspect of contemporary cultural history and heritage. In many places across the world, popular music heritage sites – including museums, archives, commemorative plaques adorning buildings, and what could be referred to as DIY music heritage initiatives – constitute some of the key ways in which popular music artists, scenes and events are being remembered. Bringing together a selection of wide-ranging contributions, the purpose of this book is to present a number of case studies from Europe and Australia that demonstrate the variety of ways in which popular music is being cast as cultural heritage and as a medium that invokes the collective memory of successive generations whose identity and sense of cultural belonging have often been indelibly inscribed by the musical soundscapes of their teen and early adult years. This book was originally published as a special issue of Popular Music and Society.

In recent decades, the importance of sound for remembering the past and for creating a sense of belonging has been increasingly acknowledged. We keep "sound souvenirs" such as cassette tapes and long play albums in our attics because we want to be able to recreate the music and everyday sounds we once cherished. Artists and ordinary listeners deploy the newest digital audio technologies to recycle past sounds into present tunes. Sound and memory are inextricably intertwined, not just through the commercially exploited nostalgia on oldies radio stations, but through the exchange of valued songs by means of pristine recordings and cultural practices such as collecting, archiving and listing. This book explores several types of cultural practices involving the remembrance and restoration of past sounds. At the same time, it theorizes the cultural meaning of collecting, recycling, reciting, and remembering sound and music.

This volume examines the location of memories and histories of popular music and its multiple pasts, exploring the different ‘places’ in which popular music can be situated, including the local physical site, the museum storeroom and exhibition space, and the digitized archive and display space made possible by the internet. Contributors from a broad range of disciplines such as archive studies, popular music studies, media and cultural studies, leisure and tourism, sociology, museum studies, communication studies, cultural geography, and social anthropology visit the specialized locus of popular music histories and heritage, offering diverse set of approaches. Popular music studies has increasingly engaged with popular music histories, exploring memory processes and considering identity, collective and cultural memory, and notions of popular culture’s heritage values, yet few accounts have spatially located such trends to focus on the spaces and places where we encounter and engender our relationship with popular music’s history and legacies. This book offers a timely re-evaluation of such sites, reinserting them into the narratives of popular music and offering new perspectives on their function and significance within the production of popular music heritage. Bringing together recent research based on extensive fieldwork from scholars of popular music studies, cultural sociology, and museum studies, alongside the new insights of practice-based considerations of current practitioners within the field of popular music heritage, this is the first collection to address the interdisciplinary interest in situating popular music histories, heritages, and pasts. The book will therefore appeal to a wide and growing academic readership focused on issues of heritage, cultural memory, and popular music, and provide a timely intervention in a field of study that is engaging scholars from across a broad spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical perspectives.

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.