Popular music and cultural memory: Localised popular music histories and their significance for national music industries: data

Full description

This dataset contains approximately 100 confidential interviews from individuals and focus groups involved in the music industry and 60% of the data will be sound based. It is the Australian output of an ARC Discovery Project which commenced in 2010 and is a collaborative study, involving four Australian researchers and four international researchers. It aims to record national narratives of all kinds of audience interactions with music, from the super-fan down to the disinterested listener to discover the many ways music finds a place in how people remember their own past and that of the nation. The Australian chief investigators include Andrew Bennett, Sarah Baker and Alison Huber (Griffith University), Shane Homan at Monash University and Peter Doyle from Macquarie University. The international partner investigators include Sara Cohen (University of Liverpool), Timothy Dowd (Emory University) and Susanne Janssen (Erasmus University, Netherlands) and Regev Motti (The Open University of Israel). The project team have set up a web site which invites contributions from participants who send in accounts of their musical memories to be used as source material for publication in academic journal articles, book chapters and presentations by members of the project team. All contributions are anonymised, to protect the individual's identity and members of the project team may arrange a face-to-face interview to give participants the opportunity to expand on their written contributions. Through interviews with archivists, fans, cultural industry workers, presenters from television and radio shows and the audiences the project raises questions about the commercial viability of local popular music heritage for the music industry in Australia, Israel, Netherlands, UK and USA. For example, participants are asked about the national history narratives in the form of documentaries, such as “Love is in the air” (ABC series on pop music) and “Long way to the top” (ABC series on rock music). Producer participants are asked how they selected interviewees for the documentaries and audience members are shown episodes and asked "Do your memories correlate with what you see in documentaries?” In addition focus group interviews on popular music establish what have people collected in the way of fandom. The project will generate new insights into how audience articulations of the place of local popular music heritage in their negotiations of cultural identity might be re-articulated in the business practices of the global popular music industry in a technologically changing world. Analysis of the data has the potential to develop and strengthen community cohesion and also raise questions of how the voices of interviewees might be incorporated into the production and distribution practices of Australia’s music industry. It will be of interest to researchers undertaking studies in cultural memory, media, history, psychology and popular music.

Notes

Approximately 100 sound files (mp3); transcripts (doc); spreadsheets (xsl); annotated bibliography;

Significance statement

The Australian dataset will provide evidence for current debates about the importance of local histories in a national context and point to possible economic benefits through cultural tourism and leisure outlets, for example, community‑based exhibitions and guided tours focusing on local popular music history and heritage.