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What causes turnover on the Billboard charts? The neutral model of cultural evolution, which assumes that taste is transmitted via an unbiased copying process, provides precise predictions regarding expected popularity distributions and turnover within a popularity-ranked list. Recent advances in this line make it possible to characterize the likelihood of music taste transmission mechanisms by investigating departures of observed turnover rates from neutral model predictions. Here, I bias the neutral model to investigate four alternative conceptions of individual music taste transmission (song quality, individual status, social network, and anticonformist) and use agent-based simulations to examine the impact on turnover. I then compare modeled with empirical turnover data from the Billboard Hot 100 over the period from 1958 to 2021 and find that observed turnover patterns are reproduced only in an anticonformist model simulating the systematic rejection of the most popular songs. This finding was unexpected and challenges the notion of a generalized "preference for the popular." Overall, this study contributes to ongoing debates regarding the mechanisms involved in the transmission of taste and the mechanics of fashion change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recording and radio industries have faced a reckoning over their lack of gender equity. While Generation Z is poised to become the dominant music audience, research on the wants and needs of young women listeners is lacking. This study used focus groups to investigate how Generation-Z women feel about today's music and audio media options. Specifically, their musical tastes are more eclectic, but they find little appeal in current popular music, and they see widespread disrespect for women in music. Participants also recognize that current trends of male-dominated radio presentation are likely to turn potential women listeners away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the work of the US DJ and producer Diplo as a case study, this article examines the development, internationalization, and sensationalization of Brazilian funk carioca. It argues that this trend has contributed to glamorized global perceptions of impoverished Latin American communities and perpetuated a troublesome history of Western producers using source material from the Other for novelty and financial gain. It concludes with a discussion of the emerging ideals and aesthetics of the “global remix,” as well as an examination of contemporary attitudes towards hybridity, authenticity, and ownership in the global popular music sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues for a view of popular music production that better accounts for sampling than has historically been the case by viewing it as a continuum of activity. Weighing evidence from interviews with musical practitioners against the legal and industry frameworks, we illustrate, first, how sampling has been legally differentiated from other types of musical copying. Secondly we show that, despite this, comparable ethical codes exist within and across musical methods wherein sampling is part of the spectrum of activities. Thirdly, we discuss the ubiquity of digital technology within popular music production and the resultant closer relationship between sampling and other musical techniques moving onto, fourthly, how the sampling aesthetic has become integrated into musical practice in a manner insufficiently accounted for by its legal and industrial contexts. This ‘post-sampling’ reality places sampling and other musical techniques along a spectrum, in practical and ethical terms, and musicians would be better served by sampling being treated as part of the overall musical palette, allowing both scholars and the law to concentrate on ideologies of practiceacrossthe tools that musicians use rather than between different specific techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What is popular music to Slovene listeners? How is it conceived of in terms of vocabulary, and what can be said of the political potential of its aesthetic instance? In the field of Slovene popular music and audience research, these issues have thus far remained un(der)explored. Nevertheless, they need to be addressed: if carefully contextualized, looking into the questions of what popular music signifies, and is connected with, for different Slovene audiences points to the cultural meaning-assigning power-play at work. Bearing this issue in mind, the text attempts to provide a contextually informed overview of how Slovene popular music audiences of different—inductively singled out—age groups conceive of the aesthetics of Slovenian popular music. The text analyzes 150 semi-structured interviews with popular music audiences in Slovenia, conducted in 2012 as part of the HERA POPID project. It employs a Bakhtinian conceptual framework and attempts to locate the aesthetic coordinates of popular music discourse in Slovenia, arguing that the aesthetic moment might offer a possibility of escaping stabilized connections between popular music, nation, identity, and ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Extreme heavy metal music is transgressive, but can it be understood as resistant in Adorno's sense of “serious music?” This article seeks to show how extreme heavy metal music approaches what Adorno valued in serious music and the interests of critical theory. I begin with the method of negative dialectics—a difficult and contradictory notion. The philosophy of negative dialectics is, I argue, crucial for the material studies informed by it. I consider next the idea of resistant music itself, distinguishing the negations of serious music from “positive” popular protest music. Finally, I provide an analysis of the negative dialectics of extreme heavy-metal music, considering the music and its culture in historical context. Overall, I offer a side-by-side “critical model,” in Adorno's sense, of negative dialectics and heavy metal music and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including popular music adaptation, case studies of popular music as heritage, and the framing, preserving as well as commercializing the popular music through music industry.

The paper argues that a critical toehold for understanding the formation, modernization, and popularity of Highlife in the 1950s is its transnational dimension. To corroborate this claim, the paper puts emphasis on Highlife musicians in the UK, especially London, during this time, their musical activities and productions there, and the effects of their journeys on popular music. The growing evidence that cultural practices and processes in different locales, across national and continental boundaries, were interrelated in the making of Highlife, asks for a multi-sited study of Highlife especially with regard to the musical creativity and productivity of 1950s and 1960s. It requires further research into how the journeys of musicians, the 'transport' of culture, and the resulting interplay of musical styles affected the popular African music Highlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]