Music’s role in, and value to, society has emerged in the news from multiple angles recently from its health benefits, to its economic contribution, to challenges for music education and venues. With music at the centre of such a broad range of benefits, controversies and challenges, we revisit in today’s post the keynote address by Professor Simon Frith OBE from our Live Music Exchange, Newcastle event in 2016, in which he draws upon his experience as a rock critic, researcher and academic writer to examine the different criteria that we apply when making assessments of music’s value.
Our latest guest post is by Dobe Newton, OAM – an active music professional for over 40 years and leader of the 2012 Victorian Live Music Census and the 2017 Melbourne Live Music Census. Here, he presents key findings and observations from the Melbourne Live Music Census of 2017, and reflects on the census process.
With Parliamentary attention turning to ticket touting again, today’s post features Live Music Exchange’s Adam Behr writing about Ticketmaster’s decision to close its secondary market sites in Europe, and a video of an expert panel on the secondary market from the Live Music Exchange Newcastle event in 2016.
The secondary ticket market has been in the news again recently, with minister for digital and the creative industries Margot James urging consumers consumers to boycott Viagogo, as National Trading Standards launches an investigation into the company and FIFA files a criminal complaint against it. Meanwhile, a new body has launched in defence of resellers – The Fair Ticketing Alliance, whose …
This week’s blog by Kim Ramstedt is a discussion of issues related to the study of superstar DJs and follows the recent death of Swedish DJ Avicii. Superstar DJs frequently perform on the main stages of pop music festivals, and festivals built predominantly around DJ performances and electronic dance music attract record amounts of visitors. Yet, popular discourse around large-scale …
David Rovics is a Portland-based singer songwriter of “Songs of Social Significance”. Originally published as a blog on his website, in this article David explains the economics of touring as a politically committed artist who still needs to pay the bills. We would like to thank David for permission to use this article. I suddenly feel compelled to do some …