Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The subfield of popular music studies occupies an elusive position vis-à-vis media studies. Media studies introductory texts (Baran, 2002; Campbell, 2000) acknowledge the importance of recorded music as a communication medium, and there is a body of music research deriving from more traditional social scientific approaches to media (as reviewed by Christenson and Roberts, 1998), but the most visible studies of popular music issue from a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, literary criticism, and musicology, or from interdisciplinary approaches such as cultural studies and ethnomusicology. Of course, media studies itself is an interdisciplinary field, and there have been many studies of popular music that engage with communication issues (e.g. Lull, 1992; Jones, 1992); generally, though, contemporary popular music studies evolved through a trajectory in which “media studies,” as a field, was not a major component. This may be, in part, due to the fact that early media studies were focused largely on broadcast media, and thus “radio” became entrenched as a topic of study; Barn (2002) considers radio and sound recording together in one chapter of an overview of media studies. While radio still occupies a site for research in media studies, it would be difficult to argue that it could stand in for the wide-ranging practices and sites surrounding popular music, let alone ... log in or subscribe to read full text