The Global Jukebox

Popular music is with us constantly. It is part of our everyday enviroment and in global terms it is now perhaps the most universal means of communication. The Global Jukebox is the first comprehensive study of the international music industry at a time of great change, as the entertainment industry acknowledges its ever growing global audience. Robert Burnett provides an international overview of the music business and its future prospects in the UK, Northern Europe and the United States and Canada. He examines the relationship between local and global cultures and between concentration of ownership (Sony, Warner and the rest of the `big six') and the diversity of music production and consumption. The Global Jukebox not only illuminataes the workings of the contemporary entertainment industries, it captures the dynamics at work in the production of musical culture between the transnational media conglomerates, the independent music companies and the public. It is essential reading for anyone studying popular music.

Popular music is with us constantly. It is part of our everyday enviroment and in global terms it is now perhaps the most universal means of communication. The Global Jukebox is the first comprehensive study of the international music industry at a time of great change, as the entertainment industry acknowledges its ever growing global audience. Robert Burnett provides an international overview of the music business and its future prospects in the UK, Northern Europe and the United States and Canada. He examines the relationship between local and global cultures and between concentration of ownership (Sony, Warner and the rest of the `big six') and the diversity of music production and consumption. The Global Jukebox not only illuminataes the workings of the contemporary entertainment industries, it captures the dynamics at work in the production of musical culture between the transnational media conglomerates, the independent music companies and the public. It is essential reading for anyone studying popular music.

From its indefinite beginnings through its broad commercialization and endless reinterpretation, American rock-and-roll music has been preoccupied with an end-of-the-world mentality that extends through the whole of American popular music. In Apocalypse Jukebox, Edward Whitelock and David Janssen trace these connections through American music genres, uncovering a mix of paranoia and hope that characterizes so much of the nation’s history. From the book’s opening scene, set in the American South during a terrifying 1833 meteor shower, the sense of doom is both palpable and inescapable; a deep foreboding that shadows every subsequent development in American popular music and, as Whitelock and Janssen contend, stands as a key to understanding and explicating America itself. Whitelock and Janssen examine the diversity of apocalyptic influences within North American recorded music, focusing in particular upon a number of influential performers, including Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, John Coltrane, Devo, R.E.M., Sleater-Kinney, and Green Day. In Apocalypse Jukebox, Whitelock and Janssen reveal apocalypse as a permanent and central part of the American character while establishing rock-and-roll as a true reflection of that character.

Music is omnipresent in human society, but its language can no longer be regarded as transcendent or universal. Like other art forms, music is produced and consumed within complex economic, cultural, and political frameworks in different places and at different historical moments. Taking an explicitly spatial approach, this unique interdisciplinary text explores the role played by music in the formation and articulation of geographical imaginations--local, regional, national, and global. Contributors show how music's facility to be recorded, stored, and broadcast; to be performed and received in private and public; and to rouse intense emotional responses for individuals and groups make it a key force in the definition of a place. Covering rich and varied terrain--from Victorian England, to 1960s Los Angeles, to the offices of Sony and Time-Warner and the landscapes of the American Depression--the volume addresses such topics as the evolution of musical genres, the globalization of music production and marketing, alternative and hybridized music scenes as sites of localized resistance, the nature of soundscapes, and issues of migration and national identity.

The remarkable life and times of the man who popularized American folk music and created the science of song Folklorist, archivist, anthropologist, singer, political activist, talent scout, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, concert and record producer, Alan Lomax is best remembered as the man who introduced folk music to the masses. Lomax began his career making field recordings of rural music for the Library of Congress and by the late 1930s brought his discoveries to radio, including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Burl Ives. By the 1940s he was producing concerts that brought white and black performers together, and in the 1950s he set out to record the whole world. Lomax was also a controversial figure. When he worked for the U. S. government he was tracked by the FBI, and when he worked in Britain, MI5 continued the surveillance. In his last years he turned to digital media and developed technology that anticipated today's breakthroughs. Featuring a cast of characters including Eleanor Roosevelt, Leadbelly, Carl Sandburg, Carl Sagan, Jelly Roll Morton, Muddy Waters, and Bob Dylan, Szwed's fascinating biography memorably captures Lomax and provides a definitive account of an era as seen through the life of one extraordinary man.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Alan Lomax is a legendary figure in American folk music circles. Although he published many books, hundreds of recordings and dozens of films, his contributions to popular and academic journals have never been collected. This collection of writings, introduced by Lomax's daughter Anna, reintroduces these essential writings. Drawing on the Lomax Archives in New York, this book brings together articles from the 30s onwards. It is divided into four sections, each capturing a distinct period in the development of Lomax's life and career: the original years as a collector and promoter; the period from 1950-58 when Lomax was recording thorughout Europe; the folk music revival years; and finally his work in academia.

Accompany CD has excerpts from a speech given by Alan Lomax on March 7, 1989, at the New York Public Library plus seven tracks of folk songs recorded by Alan Lomax.

Since the rise of the contemporary ecology movement in the 1960s, American songwriters and composers, from folk singer Pete Seeger to jazz saxophonist Paul Winter, have lamented, and protested against, environmental degradation and injustice. The Jukebox in the Garden is the first book to survey a wide range of musical styles, including folk, country, blues, rock, jazz, electronica and hip hop, to examine the different ways in which popular music has explored American relationships between nature, technology and environmental politics. It also investigates the growing link between music and philosophical thought, particularly under the influence of both deep ecology and New Age thinking, according to which music, amongst all the arts, has a special affinity with ecological ideas. This book is both an exploration and critique of such speculations on the role that music can play in raising environmental awareness. It combines description and analysis of American popular music made during the era of modern environmentalism with a consideration of its wider social, historical and political contexts. It will be of interest to undergraduates and post-graduates in music, cultural studies and environmental studies, as well as general readers interested in popular music and the environment.

"Sandra Beasley eschews the poet-as-speaker convention and unleashes a collection teeming with the inanimate, the anachronistic, and the animal kingdom. In these poems Beasley approaches the world with all of its wild music, Wednesday compromises, migrating battlefields, and lovelorn minotaurs with clarity, humor, and compassion."--