This study employs inductive thematic analysis to examine democratisation in music production—making resources and knowledge more accessible—by comparing classical (CMP) and popular music production (PMP). PMP embraces technological innovations, fostering decentralised tools and platforms for diverse creators. CMP, however, prioritises fidelity to live performance and historical conventions, resisting democratisation due to institutional conservatism and entrenched power dynamics. Using data from 34 qualitative interviews with professionals, the study highlights how educational, institutional, and technical factors slow CMP’s adaptation to technology. While the democratisation of CMP would require cultural shifts and educational reforms, the adoption of select PMP innovations might enhance accessibility without compromising CMP’s traditional values. This research contributes to the underexplored intersection of democratisation and CMP practice. The paper suggests that through implementing hybrid approaches inspired by PMP, CMP could evolve to create more flexible and creative production environments while preserving its rich heritage.
This article analyses the media and public discourse surrounding the sold-out symphonic metal concert, Organic Metal: Two Worlds Collide, performed by Plague of Angels at York Minster in April 2025. Using Critical Discourse Analysis of thirty-two news and broadcast items alongside netnography of Reddit discussions, it asks what the controversy tells us about how popular music’s meanings are negotiated across religious authority, heritage discourse, and fan reception. The findings pivot on three axes: heritage versus sacrilege, inclusion versus elitism, and the tension between community mission and commercialism. A single metonym, the “blasphemy-by-association” t-shirt, proved highly spreadable and repeatedly recoded the event as a moral breach. Sequencing effects were decisive: when stories led with risk to heritage and mission, coverage read as stewardship; when they led with finance, it read as commercialisation. Participatory publics often softened sacrilege by reframing the event through pragmatic preservation. The study contributes to popular music studies by showing how genre legitimacy is negotiated when metal enters institutional heritage settings, and it offers practical guidance on programming and communication for sacred heritage sites hosting popular music.
The 23rd IASPM Biennial Conference (Paris, 2025), themed “Recording Popular Music”, directed scholarly attention from external social crises toward a renewed focus on the medium of recording itself. This review identifies three key intellectual currents evident at the conference: an ontological turn that redefined recording as music’s mode of existence; a technological-historical turn that reframed sound technologies as cultural artifacts; and a continued engagement with identity politics, now turned inward to examine recording as a site of gendered power and decolonial contestation. Together, these shifts established recording as a central object of theory and method. The conference also signaled a move toward a more mediatized and polycentric future for the discipline, exemplified by the growing participation of scholars from beyond the Anglo-American sphere.
The Golden Section, sometimes referred to as the “golden ratio” or “golden mean”, has been referenced in many studies in the arts, serving as a mathematically-based aesthetic criterion for form, structure, proportionality, and balance. In the domain of musical composition, scholars have noted the relationship between the golden section and musical structure; I will briefly illustrate how these studies have focused on proportions and structures in classical music only, which has used a methodology of counting bar numbers in a musical score. I follow this by demonstrating that golden section proportionality may not only be confined to classical music but can also be applied to popular music. I introduce an analytical method that measures the elapsed or clock time of the sounding music rather than examining a musical score. In doing so I use the concept of a temporal “key event point”, illustrating this in six works by Jacob Collier.
