On July 7, 2023, POPLIVE researcher Martijn Mulder defended his PhD Thesis “I was There!” at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The goals of this study have been to map the live pop music practice in the 21st century, achieve an understanding of value creation within live music, and assess the feasibility of an ecology approach to live music. The book is built from a holistic (interdisciplinary, multi-epistemological) perspective on live music and approaches the subject from both what happens onstage, how that is organised backstage and how that is received and experienced frontstage. A digital copy of the Thesis can be downloaded here. An article about the study in Dutch newspaper Trouw can be found here.

The Live Coaches is a podcast series in The Netherlands hosted by Vincent de Raad en Melanie Esther. They interview people from the pop music sector with the goal to help (emerging) artists to learn more about performing live. In the first episode of the second season, POPLIVE-researcher Martijn Mulder explores live performance in pop music from a scientific context. Based on his research on venues and festivals and on how the audience members construct their experience of the concert, he explorer how academic research can benefit the daily practice of doing gigs. The podcast can be found here and on Spotify.