The Popular Music Studies Reader maps the changing nature of popular music over the last decade and considers how popular music studies has expanded and developed to deal with these changes.

A wide range of international contributors featuring some of the biggest names in popular music and cultural studies including Philip Auslander, Paul Gilroy and Kodwo Eshun and discuss:

* the increasing participation of women in the industry
* the changing role of gender and sexuality in popular music
* the role of new technologies, especially in production and distribution
* the changing nature of the relationship between music production and consumption.

The Popular Music Studies Reader places popular music in its cultural context, looks at the significance of popular music in our everyday lives, and examines the global nature of the music industry.

Black British musicians have been making jazz since around 1920 when the genre first arrived in Britain. This groundbreaking book reveals their hidden history and major contribution to the development of jazz in the UK. More than this, though, the chapters show the importance of black British jazz in terms of musical hybridity and the cultural significance of race. Decades before Steel Pulse, Soul II Soul, or Dizzee Rascal pushed their way into the mainstream, black British musicians were playing jazz in venues up and down the country from dance halls to tiny clubs. In an important sense, then, black British jazz demonstrates the crucial importance of musical migration in the musical history of the nation, and the links between popular and avant-garde forms. But the volume also provides a case study in how music of the African diaspora reverberates around the world, beyond the shores of the USA - the engine-house of global black music. As such it will engage scholars of music and cultural studies not only in Britain, but across the world.

Migrating Music considers the issues around music and cosmopolitanism in new ways. Whilst much of the existing literature on 'world music' questions the apparently world-disclosing nature of this genre - but says relatively little about migration and mobility - diaspora studies have much to say about the latter, yet little about the significance of music. In this context, this book affirms the centrality of music as a mode of translation and cosmopolitan mediation, whilst also pointing out the complexity of the processes at stake within it. Migrating music, it argues, represents perhaps the most salient mode of performance of otherness to mutual others, and as such its significance in socio-cultural change rivals - and even exceeds - literature, film, and other language and image-based cultural forms. This book will serve as a valuable reference tool for undergraduate and postgraduate students with research interests in cultural studies, sociology of culture, music, globalization, migration, and human geography.

Migrating Music considers the issues around music and cosmopolitanism in new ways. Whilst much of the existing literature on world music' questions the apparently world-disclosing nature of this genre -- but says relatively little about migration and mobility -- diaspora studies have much to say about the latter, yet little about the significance of music. In this context, this book affirms the centrality of music as a mode of translation and cosmopolitan mediation, whilst also pointing out the complexity of the processes at stake within it. Migrating music, it argues, represents perhaps the most salient mode of performance of otherness to mutual others, and as such its significance in socio-cultural change rivals -- and even exceeds -- literature, film, and other language and image-based cultural forms. This book will serve as a valuable reference tool for undergraduate and postgraduate students with research interests in cultural studies, sociology of culture, music, globalization, migration, and human geography.

Media studies needs richer and livelier intellectual resources. This book brings together major and emerging international media analysts to consider key processes of media change, using a number of critical perspectives. Case studies range from reality television to professional journalism, from blogging to control of copyright, from social networking sites to indigenous media, in Europe, North America, Asia and elsewhere. Among the theoretical approaches and issues addressed are: critical realism post-structuralist approaches to media and culture Pierre Bourdieu and field theory public sphere theory - including post-Habermasian versions actor network theory Marxist and post-Marxist theories, including contemporary critical theory theories of democracy, antagonism and difference. This volume is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers of cultural studies, media studies and social theory.

Media studies needs richer and livelier intellectual resources. This book brings together major and emerging international media analysts to consider key processes of media change, using a number of critical perspectives. Case studies range from reality television to professional journalism, from blogging to control of copyright, from social networking sites to indigenous media, in Europe, North America, Asia and elsewhere. Among the theoretical approaches and issues addressed are: critical realism post-structuralist approaches to media and culture Pierre Bourdieu and field theory public sphere theory - including post-Habermasian versions actor network theory Marxist and post-Marxist theories, including contemporary critical theory theories of democracy, antagonism and difference. This volume is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers of cultural studies, media studies and social theory.

The Popular Music Studies Reader maps the changing nature of popular music over the last decade and considers how popular music studies has expanded and developed to deal with these changes.

A wide range of international contributors featuring some of the biggest names in popular music and cultural studies including Philip Auslander, Paul Gilroy and Kodwo Eshun and discuss:

* the increasing participation of women in the industry
* the changing role of gender and sexuality in popular music
* the role of new technologies, especially in production and distribution
* the changing nature of the relationship between music production and consumption.

The Popular Music Studies Reader places popular music in its cultural context, looks at the significance of popular music in our everyday lives, and examines the global nature of the music industry.

The accompanying Analysing Media Texts DVD-ROM is the winner of the 2006 British Universities Film and Video Council 'Learning on Screen Award' for Interactive Media (Course and Curriculum related content). More about the awards and the shortlist can be found at www.bufvc.ac.uk/conferences/learningonscreen/losawards.html Visit the Understanding Media series microsite. This book provides an engaging introduction to analysing media texts. Students learn how to do semiotic, genre and narrative analysis, content and discourse analysis, and engage with debates about the politics of representation. Each chapter provides readings and worked examples, from the classic 1959 film melodrama by Douglas Sirk, Imitation of Life, to contemporary television ads. The book has an accompanying DVD-ROM for PC users. "Another exemplary volume from the OU presents a wide range of questions that cab be asked about mediated texts and the complexity of providing adequate answers to such questions. An enjoyable interactive DVD-ROM offers exercises that allow the reader to make the critical language their own." Professor Annabelle Sreberny, Centre for Media and Film Studies, SOAS. "This is an impressive resource, accessible and user-friendly, but authoritative in its development of established theories of textual analysis. The DVD-ROM offers a series of excellent exercises making this a 'must-have' for all undergraduate media studies courses." Professor Richard Paterson, British Film Institute. "An excellent introduction to the theory and practice of media analysis [and] a much-needed 'toolkit'... The DVD-ROM, with its 'cool' design, clips gallery and innovative narrative sequence builder, allows students to put into practice skills acquired throughout the text and offers an important tool for bringing concepts to life... A wonderful addition to a first-rate series." Alison Griffiths, Associate Professor, Communication Studies, Baruch College, The City University of New York.

Partly because they are objects of such intense adulation by fans, popular musicians remain strangely enigmatic figures, shrouded in mythology. This volume looks beyond the myth and examines the diverse role music makers have had to adopt in order to go about their work: designer, ventriloquist, star, delegate of the people. Arguing against that strand in cultural studies which deconstructs all claims for authorship by the individual artist, the author suggests that creativity should be reconceived rather than abandoned. What is needed is a sense of "the radius of creativity" within which musicians work, an approach that takes into account both the embedded collectivism of popular music practice and the institutional power of the music industries. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical positions, as well as examining musical texts from across the history of 20th century pop, this text develops a case for the importance of production in contemporary culture.