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Activities

Outputs from the Unit arising directly from its activities include:

‘Spot the Difference: replication, rights and the musical work‘, ongoing

‘Explore Squeeze’s Spot the Difference album (2010)’ at the IF Oxford Science + Ideas Festival (19 October 2018 – flyer)

‘Nightshift: Exploring Oxford’s Music Magazine’ (27 March 2018), a full day of discussion about Oxford’s local music magazine (poster, flyer, news item)

A PMRU/OxPAN postgraduate popular music study day in 2017 brought together experts from academia and the music industry to discuss syncing – the process of connecting a musical composition with a moving picture (programme, call for papers, flyer)

‘Looking back, moving forward’, a half-day symposium in 2015 which gathered together different perspectives on the current state of popular music studies and discussed the possibility of setting up a regional group for popular music scholars – OxPAN – focused on Oxford but incorporating the Midlands and home counties.

A punk study day in 2013 brought together academics and practitioners from around the UK, including Penny Rimbaud from Crass and Professor George McKay.

Shifting Ground study days:-

  • Shifting Ground seeks to bring together musicians, journalists, industry representatives and academics to explore relationships between music and publishing in all its forms. Our study days and symposia offer exciting opportunities to tap into current concerns about the effects of the internet on the dissemination of music, to explore how our experience of music is shaped by publications relating to it, and to explore more broadly the important issue of the relationship between music and commerce, both in a historical context and in the present. The first two Shifting Ground study days divided into studies of contemporary music publishing and music journalism, while the third was a study of issues in copyright attendant upon the film Anyone Can Play Guitar (Canal Cat Films, 2011). Keynote speakers and key participants in the days have included: Barney Hoskyns, Fiona Maddocks, Alyn Shipton, Jon Spira, Hank Starrs, Barbara Zamoyska, and Stephen Navin, Chief Executive of the Music Publishers’ Association.

A commissioned twenty-minute film (Anyone Can Clear Music: Seven Things you Need to Know about Music Clearance from the makers of Anyone Can Play Guitar, 2012)

An exhibition, Editions of You (26.3–24.4.2011), O3 Gallery Oxford, which included the work of 22 independent artists and 17 independent record labels

A peer-reviewed journal article (Dai Griffiths, ‘Words to songs and the internet: a comparative study of transcriptions of words to the song “Midnight Train to Georgia”, recorded by Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1973’, Popular Music and Society, 2013)

An MA dissertation: Marc Rose, ‘Music as Culture, Commodity, and Content: Musical Ownership and Copyright in the 21st Century’ (2012)