Many artists are expected to organise their own ticket sales and event promotion. This is coupled with low pay from venues and having to juggle music with other full-time jobs.
Paying tribute to departed and living musicians via memorial tributes and awards is a way of lifting up artists’ significant roles defining and shaping musical innovation and cultural identity.
Vinyl’s unlikely comeback story is linked to a combination of slick marketing, claims of superior sound, its polysensorial character and how it evokes nostalgia to construct and reconstitute memory.
Beyoncé’s country-inspired album has caused a stir because the country music scene has a history of racial segregation that has erased its Black roots and gatekept it from Black artists.
All-female rock bands like The Beaches are both a breath of fresh air and also heirs to a tradition of women in rock that includes early Black female guitarists and the 1990s riot grrrl movement.
In the past, adolescents’ musical palettes were dominated by the Top-40 artists, creating a widely shared – if perhaps narrow – repertoire of musical knowledge.
Live Aid showed charities how much celebrity involvement could raise the profile of particular causes – but also the kind of problems that associations like this can bring.
Across the program, I was struck by how it was often more in the act of putting on and performing the work, rather than their spoken content, that expressed political responses to our times.