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POPLIVE at New Perspectives in Popular Music conference

June 2nd, 2022

POPLIVE researchers Erik Hitters and Martijn Mulder presented their research on (de)festivalisation in the Dutch live music industry at the conference New Perspectives in Popular Music: Changes and Turmoil. The conference took place on June 1-2, 2022 at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway.

Based on an overview of twelve years of live pop music in the Netherlands (2008-2019), Hitters & Mulder aim to better understand the development of music festivals as part of the live industry, frequently referred to as festivalisation. Drawing from this database, consisting of almost 300.000 live gigs, they seek evidence for this development, as well as for an expected decline in the number of festival gigs already before the Covid-crisis (de-festivalisation). In specific, the researchers are interested in the effects of this (de)festivalisation on the rest of the live industry; to what extent has the growth of the festival supply been at the expense of regular pop music venues? Did it affect the smaller venues more than the bigger? Als had this process of festivalisation and defestivalisation affected the live music supply in bigger cities more than in smaller municipalities? This first results of this study were presented during this conference. Among other things, Hitters & Mulder conclude that there has clearly been a development of festivalisation between 2008 and 2016 and defestivalisation between 2016 and 2019 in the Netherlands. Yet, this development didn’t significantly affect the development of regular pop music venues in a negative way. Moreover, there has been a co-evolution between music festivals and venues until 2016.

 

During the two-day conference in Kristiansand Ruth Dockwray (University of Chester, UK) opened with her key-note on proxemics in live and recorded music. The following paper presentations included Roderick Udo’s (HU Business School, NL) presentation on entrepreneurship theories in artist career developments and Matthias Jung’s (University of Agder, NO) study on designing co-creative pop music performance technologies.

University of Agder campus