2014/12/31 by Thomas Conner, Steve Jones · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Music History and Culture #Music and Audio Processing #Diverse Musicological Studies #Criticism #Popular music #Music industry #Journalism #Focus (optics) #The Internet #Consumption (sociology) #Advertising #Sociology #Aesthetics #Political science #Art #Literature #Media studies #Computer science #Visual arts #Business #Music education #World Wide Web
paper · doi:10.5429/2079-3871(2014)v4i2.2en
openalex publication_date 2014/12/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/26
This article reports the results of a content and textual analysis of popular music criticism from the 1960s to the 2000s to discern the extent to which criticism has shifted focus from matters of music to matters of business. In part, we believe such a shift to be due likely to increased awareness among journalists and fans of the industrial nature of popular music production, distribution and consumption, and to the disruption of the music industry that began in the late 1990s with the widespread use of the Internet for file sharing. Searching and sorting the Rock’s Backpages database of over 22,000 pieces of music journalism for keywords associated with the business, economics and commercial aspects of popular music, we found several periods during which popular music criticism’s focus on business-related concerns seemed to have increased. The article discusses possible reasons for the increases as well as methods for analyzing a large corpus of popular music criticism texts.