Presentations
Publications
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Performances
How Mariah Carey's 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' Became the Holiday Gift That Keeps on Giving
Interviews, Featured In Andrew Mall Interviews, Featured In Andrew Mall

How Mariah Carey's 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' Became the Holiday Gift That Keeps on Giving

TIME (2019). The temperatures are dipping and twinkling lights are being hung, but nothing confirms that the holiday season is in full swing as cogently as Mariah Carey’s now-iconic holiday classic, “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” The festive track, a veritable pop masterpiece written and performed by Carey (with a co-writing assist from her longtime collaborator at the time, Walter Afanasieff) has consistently dominated not only the holiday music charts, but the zeitgeist since it made its joyous debut in 1994.

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“Find a Way”: Amy Grant and Christian Pop’s Mainstream Crossover
Conferences, Presentations Andrew Mall Conferences, Presentations Andrew Mall

“Find a Way”: Amy Grant and Christian Pop’s Mainstream Crossover

AMS conference presentation (2019). In this paper I argue that Amy Grant’s success was the cumulative result of longer strategies to cross her over from the relatively small Christian market to the massive general mainstream pop market. Archival research reveals business and artistic decisions that prepared Grant for her first attempt at crossover with the 1985 album Unguarded.

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Conferences Andrew Mall Conferences Andrew Mall

The Future of Pop: Big Questions Facing Popular Music Studies in the 21st Century

AMS pre-conference symposium (2019). Despite the normalization of popular music studies over the last 50 years, complex questions linger about the state of the field and the directions it will take. “The Future of Pop” fostered interdisciplinary collaborations between scholars of different ranks and diverse backgrounds by encouraging conversations about the future of popular music studies.

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‘Old Town Road’ defied a 20-year trend in hit music. Math explains why
Interviews, Featured In Andrew Mall Interviews, Featured In Andrew Mall

‘Old Town Road’ defied a 20-year trend in hit music. Math explains why

PBS Newshour (2019). For more than two decades, Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men could not be knocked off their U.S. Billboard throne. From December 1995 to March 1996, their ballad “One Sweet Day” spent 16 weeks at the top of the charts, setting a record that outlasted the megahit-makers that came after them: Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, Beyonce, Outkast, Green Day, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z and Adele. Then “Despacito” and “Old Town Road” arrived.

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“Beer & Hymns” and Congregational Song: Participatory Sing-alongs as Community
Conferences, Presentations Andrew Mall Conferences, Presentations Andrew Mall

“Beer & Hymns” and Congregational Song: Participatory Sing-alongs as Community

Christian Congregational Music conference presentation (2019). Beer and Hymns is exactly what it sounds like: we raise our red Solo cups and lift our voices together to sing hymns, spirituals, praise songs, and folk songs together. Song choices include both secular and sacred selections, and the nightly gatherings attract participants from a variety of theological backgrounds, many of whom have an ambivalent or troubled relationship with Protestant Christianity (including mainline and non-denominational evangelicalism). Our voices entwine, and often our arms do, too. And by the end of the night, as our singing reverberates in the night, we emerge unified by our singing, even if only for one night.

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How iTunes changed music
Interviews, Featured In Andrew Mall Interviews, Featured In Andrew Mall

How iTunes changed music

News@Northeastern (2019). Apple’s music platform, iTunes, changed the digital music landscape when it debuted in 2001. It “proved that digital music could be profitable,” says Andrew Mall, an assistant professor of music industry at Northeastern University. Now, 18 years later, Apple is retiring the music service in favor of three separate apps for music, video, and podcasts.

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“Beer & Hymns” and Redemption: Reimagining and Reclaiming Religious Identity through Participatory Sing-alongs
Conferences, Presentations Andrew Mall Conferences, Presentations Andrew Mall

“Beer & Hymns” and Redemption: Reimagining and Reclaiming Religious Identity through Participatory Sing-alongs

Sound & Secularity symposium presentation (2019). Given the ambivalent (and sometimes antagonistic) relationship between houses of worship and houses of drink in the United States, the mere act of singing hymns in bars can be interpreted as resisting prescriptive religious norms. But in recontextualizing these songs in Wild Goose’s pub tent, beers in hand, participants—including current and former churchgoers—reimagine their theologies and reclaim their religious identities. In this paper, I analyze the sonic and social fabric of Beer and Hymns as a participatory space that enables resilience and redemption.

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Subculture
Publications, Encyclopedia Entries Andrew Mall Publications, Encyclopedia Entries Andrew Mall

Subculture

The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, SAGE Publications (2019). Subculture is a theoretical perspective used to describe and analyze social groups that constitute some subset of a larger dominant, mainstream, or mass culture. Subculture theory has been most commonly applied to oppositional social groups and youth cultures by scholars in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, communications, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, media studies, popular music studies, sociology, and others.

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Emo
Publications, Encyclopedia Entries Andrew Mall Publications, Encyclopedia Entries Andrew Mall

Emo

The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, SAGE Publications (2019). Emo, short for “emocore” or “emotional hardcore,” refers both to a genre of rock music and to its subculture. The genre first emerged from punk rock and hardcore punk in the mid-1980s in local underground music scenes, most notably that of Washington, D.C. Throughout the 1990s, it gradually spread across the trans-local networks of underground music scenes in North America. In the early 2000s, several emo bands and the genre itself achieved mainstream success. Like punk rock and other subcultures in previous decades, emo became a popular trend and commodity at its commercial peak, especially among teenagers and young fans.

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Ethnography in Creative Industries

In this course, we consider the various roles that ethnography can play in creative industries. What do we learn from ethnography? For what purposes is ethnographic research best suited? How might ethnography contribute to strategic decision-making? What unique methodological issues might ethnographic research in creative industries pose? In what ways could ethnography enrich creative practice and artmaking? How have the social sciences reacted to the ethnography of creative industries?

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Introduction to Music Industry

This course introduces students to a wide array of standard business practices, roles, and norms in the music industries, with a focus on U.S. markets. We address a variety of content areas and business sectors: artist relationships and management, entrepreneurship, intellectual property, international markets, the live music industry, music and other forms of media or entertainment (radio, TV, film, video games, advertising, etc.), and the recorded music industry.

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Worship Capital: On the Political Economy of Worship Music
Publications, Articles Andrew Mall Publications, Articles Andrew Mall

Worship Capital: On the Political Economy of Worship Music

American Music (2018). Scholars and scholar-practitioners from a wide variety of disciplinary and faith backgrounds have enriched our understandings of the ways in which music functions in worship contexts around the world. Yet, the political economy of worship music remains underexamined and undertheorized. In this article, I develop the theory of ‘worship capital’ as a corrective.

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Publications, Articles, Proceedings Andrew Mall Publications, Articles, Proceedings Andrew Mall

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.

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Concentration, Diversity, and Consequences: Privileging Independent over Major Record Labels
Publications, Articles Andrew Mall Publications, Articles Andrew Mall

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?

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Courses Andrew Mall Courses Andrew Mall

Music Industry Research Methodology

This course introduces students to a number of research methodologies and analytical approaches used in music industry studies and the music industry itself. As an interdisciplinary area, music industry methods draw from disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and business. Success as a scholar of or professional in the music industry frequently depends upon one’s ability to collect, interpret, and analyze data from a variety of sources and perspectives.

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