Everyone Loves Live Music

The book Everyone Loves Live Music presents the first comprehensive theory of the evolving international field of pop music performances in clubs and festivals and their place in modern society. The book looks beyond the media-centrism and sensationalism that dominate the contemporary images of live music. I argue that the widespread enthusiasm for live music explains the ignorance about the fact that live music is the product of a commercial exploitation and re-branding of popular forms of musical performance. Powerful institutions are promoting the idea that everyone loves live music, but how does this idea redefine musical culture in society?

Everyone Loves Live Music introduces a long overdue critical sociology of musical performance culture as a realm of human experience and of organized cultural life in modernity. The book investigates the ongoing social structuring of the human condition in musical performance, from the bourgeois secular citizenship that defined the concert hall and the music festival in the eighteenth century to the global consumer cultures dominating contemporary clubs and festivals. It introduces a theoretical framework for understanding performance in the broader landscape of organized musical life across the Global North, highlighting outlook and functions of commercial institutions in seasonal leisure domains. The book focuses on two central institutions of popular music performance, the club and the festival, both of which emerged in neo-bohemian scenes and transformed as promoters adapted to new urban populations and turned to more popular forms of music in situations of growing market competition within evolving media flows across the Global North. Throughout the inquiry, commercial institutions are analyzed as agents in music and cultural life with the wider aim of revitalizing critical humanist knowledge interests in organized cultural life. The book is written for the interested reader, musicians, fans, and the academic fields of music studies, sociology, performance studies, and cultural history.