This week’s blog post is by Live Music Exchange’s own Emma Webster, in response to The Times‘ leader about the removal of nightclubs from the ONS ‘basket of goods’ in March 2016. The post draws attention to The Times’ seeming horror at the inefficiency of the process, a latent hatred of nightclubs, an implicit fear of gathering crowds, and the delight in the pursuit of individual rather than group pleasure. The piece offers a defence of nightclubs from an economic and social perspective, and questions the real motives behind the glee of the author in chronicling the demise of the nightclub sector.
As a new show covering Beatles recording sessions at Abbey Road premiers at the Royal Albert Hall, Live Music Exchange’s Adam Behr writes in The Conversation today about talking to the show’s producer, how the Beatles changed the status of the record in popular music, and the challenges of depicting that process on stage.
To mark the publication of our academic article on the live music ecology, the LMX team is publishing our original discussion notes. These illustrate the origins of the ideas that inform the article but include points that weren’t further developed (and perhaps should have been). We thought it worth making public—particularly in relation to this topic—an aspect of the academic process that is usually hidden.
In December 2015, collecting society PRS for Music published a summary of responses from its consultation on the terms of its Popular Music Concerts Tariff (‘LP’) that is applied to ticketed live popular music events such as concerts and festivals. To discuss the document, we asked Mark Davyd of Music Venue Trust to comment from the perspective of live music venues, and we asked John Markey, drummer and backing vocalist in Glasgow band Young Aviators, to give the perspective of a musician in receipt of PRS royalties.