CFP: Technologies and Recording Industries Creative Industries Journal, Special Issue 8.2 (Fall 2015)

Deadline: March 6, 2015

The past 15 years have proven transformative for music recording industries around the world, as digital technologies from the ground up (mp3s) and the top down (streaming platforms) have helped transform the landscape of production, promotion, distribution, retail, and fandom.

Yet while these transformations have recently upended assumptions about musical practice for artists, industry workers, fans, journalists, and researchers, a broader historical perspective situates them in a legacy more than a century long. Indeed, a history of recording industries told from a media and technology perspective is one of constant flux. The introduction of new media technologies has continually reorganized the practices, regimes of value, discourses, and power relationships of the recording business.

This issue of the Creative Industries Journal seeks to address the constitutive roles of technologies in shaping recording industry practices. How have the introduction and adoption of new tools of production, distribution, promotion, or consumption facilitated changes in the creative and industrial practices surrounding popular music in a variety of global contexts? Following Williamson & Cloonan (2007) and Sterne (2014), we specify “recording industries” instead of “music industries” to focus attention on the myriad creative and industrial processes related to music (or, broadly, sound) recordings, and to evade the tendency to group a variety of disparate music and sound-related industries (licensing, instrument sales, live performance) under one heading. We use the plural to assert the multiplicity and variety of recording industries that have emerged over time, which may not have anything to do with the current corporate-owned, multinational recording industry.

Possible topics for this issue include, but aren’t limited to: * Connections between technological formats and genres * Streaming services and music distribution * Discourses surrounding the vinyl record resurgence * Collectors and collecting practices * Record stores and the recording industries * New technologies and global/local regimes of representation * Music, technology, and identity * Industry practices of the digital music era * Trade papers and the recording industries * Media mobility vs. audio fidelity * Sound recordings and radio * Television and the recording industry * Failed or ephemeral formats * Re-issues and new formats * Record label histories * Technological experimentation * From cylinder to disk * Recordings as material culture * The history of personal recordings * Internationalization of recording technologies/industries * The recording industry and children’s media * Spoken-word phonography * Taste-making and technologies

To be considered for publication, articles should be between 5000 and 6000 words, double-spaced in Harvard Style. For more information on style and formatting, please see Intellect’s style guide. All submissions in these categories will be blind reviewed. Queries regarding potential submissions also are welcome. Authors are responsible for acquiring related visual images and the associated copyrights. For more information or to submit a query, please contact the issue’s editors Kyle Barnett ([email protected]) or Eric Harvey ([email protected]) All submissions are due via email by March 6, 2015.

Creative Industries Journal is a peer reviewed journal with a global scope, primarily aimed at those studying and practicing activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent, and which have a potential for wealth creation. These activities primarily take place in advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, television and radio.

Eric Harvey, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Weber State University, 1395 Edvalson St., Ogden, UT 84408

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