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 …
This week’s blog is a repost of an article by Live Music Exchange’s Adam Behr in The Conversation following the recent announcement of a Rolling Stones tour. An article in Rolling Stone magazine described the legendary band – its near namesake – as “growing old angrily”. Its portrait of Mick Jagger referenced “age lines around his eyes … as old as …
Today we feature a repost of an article by Live Music Exchange’s Adam Behr in The Conversation discussing the debate about headliners at Glastonbury and other festivals. Controversy around the Glastonbury line-up, given the vagaries of the British weather, is an even more reliable feature of the festival calendar than photographs of mud dwelling festival-goers. This year, Norman Cook, one of …
This week’s blog post is by Brighton-based musician, Chris T-T, and was originally published on his website. In it, he examines the ongoing issue of the lack of diversity in festival line-ups and recommends looking further down the bill to better assess the future ‘direction of travel’ for gender diversity at festivals. Note that the original article was originally posted …
Anna Cowan, is 17 and lives in Glasgow. She, along with 3 of her friends, founded and run the campaign, Girls Against, to fight against sexual harassment at gigs. This blog post was first published in 2016 on the Girls Against blog. I believe all powerful political movements and campaigns begin from a sense of anger or alienation; the feeling that …
This blog is an introduction to the resources available for workers who may be interested in becoming a member of a tour’s road crew. Gabrielle Kielich provides guidance to some of the information available and we invite readers to comment and suggest additional resources in the comments box below. Road crew — or “roadies” — are an important part of …
This week’s blog post is by guest contributor Gareth Whitehead, who manages Bullet Dodge Records, regularly promotes House and Techno events, and lectures in Music Business at New College Lanarkshire. In it, he highlights the issue of high DJ fees and the booking agents who ask for them, and questions whether there is now a need for collective action against …
In this, the last blog post of 2016, Live Music Exchange’s own Simon Frith reflects on his 25-year tenure as the chair of the judges of the Mercury Prize to consider what has – and hasn’t – changed within the UK record industry over the last quarter of a century. On September 15, after Skepta was awarded the 2016 Mercury …