Andrew Mall 10/12/18 Andrew Mall 10/12/18

Archival Research Methods and Music Industry Pedagogy

Proceedings of the 2018 MEIEA International Summit (2018). In this article, I discuss the value of archival research and primary document sources to pedagogy in music industry education. I describe the archival methods I have employed in a research project documenting contemporaneous discourse about the corporate consolidation of Christian record labels within (secular) major record labels in the early 1990s.

Andrew Mall 10/7/18 Andrew Mall 10/7/18

Concentration, Diversity, and Consequences: Privileging Independent over Major Record Labels

Popular Music (2018). A meta-analysis of popular music literature on record labels reveals an ‘indie prejudice’: a preference for (and even a bias in favour of) independent labels coupled with a dismissive approach to the study of major labels and musical mainstreams that impacts our ability, as a scholarly field, to speak with authority about the largest segments of the commercial record industries. What larger implications for our scholarship might confronting this prejudice reveal? What master narratives have structured popular music studies’ preference of independent over major record labels?

Andrew Mall 3/19/18 Andrew Mall 3/19/18

Tuning in to Locality: Participatory Musicking at a Community Radio Station

The Routledge Companion to the Study of Local Musicking, Routledge (2018). This chapter examines how marketplace factors affect programming decisions made within radio stations at the macro level, and illustrates their local impacts through a case study of the Chicago Independent Radio Project (or CHIRP). I argue that stations like CHIRP facilitate public intimacy and personal relationships in local spaces and places via imagined communities that are more social than they are imaginary. Through participatory musicking, their staff, volunteers, and listeners help construct musical locality together.

Andrew Mall 3/8/16 Andrew Mall 3/8/16

“This is a chance to come together”: Subcultural Resistance and Community at Cornerstone Festival

Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age, Ashgate (2015). Based on historical research and ethnographic fieldwork in 2009–2012, including two summers volunteering as festival staff, this chapter examines the ways in which Cornerstone’s imagined community was constructed, manifested, perpetuated, and mourned. This work participates in a growing literature on contemporary Christian congregational music practices and contributes to scholarship in ethnomusicology and popular music studies that address explicitly peripheral musical activities.

Andrew Mall 8/20/15 Andrew Mall 8/20/15

“We Can Be Renewed”: Resistance, Renewal, and Worship at the Anchor Fellowship

The Spirit of Praise, Penn State University Press (2015). Live music is integral to worship services, where aesthetics of charismatic worship and rock concerts often overlap. This chapter examines the ways in which the Anchor Fellowship’s theology, worship practices, and congregational music are co-constitutive. This work participates in a growing literature on contemporary Christian worship music practices and contributes to scholarship that addresses peripheral musical activities.

Andrew Mall 10/20/13 Andrew Mall 10/20/13

Christian Popular Music, U.S.A.

The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, Canterbury Press (2013). Christian popular music is an umbrella category for a sonically diverse repertoire of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century evangelical Protestant commercial popular music. It encompasses several distinct subcategories based on musical genre, industrial context, or function including, but not limited to, Jesus Music, Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), Praise & Worship music, and Christian rock.

Andrew Mall 10/20/13 Andrew Mall 10/20/13

Billy Ray Hearn

The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, Canterbury Press (2013). A visionary and innovator in the Christian music industry, Hearn is primarily known as the founder of Sparrow Records, currently a part of the Capitol Christian Music Group family of record labels and distributors owned by Universal Music Group, a subsidiary of media conglomerate Vivendi.

Andrew Mall 5/10/12 Andrew Mall 5/10/12

Christian Rock

Encyclopedia of Popular Musics of the World, Continuum (2012). the emergence of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) in the early 1970s as the dominant category of popular music marketed to white evangelical Christians, there have been Christian recording artists whose music has failed to meet the aesthetic, contextual, economic, ideological, lyrical, stylistic or theological requirements of the US CCM recording industry. Early ‘Christian rock’ artists’ theological message located them on the periphery of the secular popular music recording industry, while their aggressive sound—heavily influenced by contemporary rock music—located them on the periphery of the existing Christian music recording industry, which focused primarily on sacred music and hymnody.

Andrew Mall 5/31/06 Andrew Mall 5/31/06

What Would the Community Think: Communal Values in Independent Music

voiceXchange (2006). An enthusiastic post on a website, a supportive audience in a smoky club, an animated conversation at a local music store—every interaction between fans of independent music binds them in a community. This paper presents my initial research into the ways in which the independent music community’s boundaries and values are expressed and shared in evolving social networks by means of interactions that authenticate participants into this community.