The popular music industries are a vital part of the media industries. Music is the soundtrack to our lives. It provides the score to our quietest moments alone and our loudest parties with friends. Music helps us create and understand our identities and those of others. It is both a form of subversive activism and one of the most commercially valuable commodities in the media industries. Explore the contemporary popular music industries and the roles businesses, artists, audiences, fans, and technologies play in shaping music as a media industry. Focus specifically on the disruption that the internet, digital technologies, and social media have ushered in over the last two decades and the new ways artists, listeners, and businesses are discovering, promoting, sharing and experiencing music. Talk about the music you love, how it gets made, and why that matters for how we understand creative industries, ourselves, and each other.
University of Wisconsin – Madison