Recording popular music

IASPM 23rd international conference

Organized by Iaspm-branche francophone d’Europe and Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France

7-11 July 2025

The calendar at the bottom of this page has been updated on Nov. 14th, 2024.

Call for papers

    Recording played a central role in the establishment of the field of popular music research in the 1970s and 1980s: at a time when popular music studies was gaining traction as a field of study, the specific status of recording made it possible to distinguish three areas of study: popular music, art music and folk music.

    Recording has also been seen as a symptom and a variable in the development of the music business. Having become a reproducible commodity, music evolved in new directions when, towards the middle of the 20th century, the record became the main medium of the music industry. At the same time, recording made music available for distribution across a broad range of media, including radio, cinema and later television and then the Internet. In the present era of the domination of streaming platforms in the consumption of popular music (known as “platformisation”), music rights and the creation of catalogues are taking on major importance for the cultural industries and the digital economy. 

    The recorded medium, as a reproducible asset, is also becoming something that can be preserved, archived and restored (republished) as media change. In addition to commercial aspects – the renewing of home equipment, the sale of augmented editions, alternate takes, and so on – there is a creative dimension involved. Recordings can be a medium for creation (for example in the practices of turntablism, dj-ing or sampling), as well as having a heritage dimension (recordings can be traces or treasures of the past). 

    The analysis of recordings as 'texts' of popular music has naturally been one of the main areas of research over the last forty years. This type of analysis, applicable to all recorded music, also has the advantage of problematising the barriers between musical meta-genres and blurring the boundaries between categories applied, sometimes too rigidly, to music.

    Research into music production and studio techniques has also seen considerable development over the last few decades. Scientific literature has long emphasised the importance of  the recording studio as a technical and artistic tool (the studio as musical instrument), as well as as a place of interaction, and an economic focal point, at the crossroads of the practical, the technical, the aesthetic and the social, with very specific characteristics in terms of space and time. It is also a place where certain production relationships have been seen to change. If we consider, for example, the relationship between musicians and production intermediaries, whose status has developed throughout the history of the recording studio. More recently, the growth of home studios since the 1980s has opened up new social and economic horizons. Here we might also mention creative revolutions: the composition-performance-production continuum, the central role of recording, the questioning of the status of the author/performer, and so on.

    New questions have come into play in the recording of popular music in recent years, and research has expanded to take in other, more contemporary, perspectives. These include postcolonial studies: how is music recorded around the world? Gender studies: how do recording practices reflect or shift power relations and gender stereotypes? Ecological issues also arise, through the question of the environmental footprint of recorded music, whether produced on physical media or in digital format.

    Moreover, in recent years, there has been a renewal of scientific curiosity regarding concerts and live performance as a central element within music production, as distinct from recordings. How distinct or different are they? It is often thought that the notion of live performance only exists because recordings dominate, and that the concept of liveness has only developed in relation to recordings, which are themselves mediated music.From an aesthetic and ontological point of view, there is a continuum between live music and recorded music (for example, when recorded music becomes the basis for new compositions or is used on stage). Cases range from hip-hop and trip-hop to electronic music; and beyond these, what should be said about the role of computers, artificial intelligence and the automatic production of recordings, in concerts and on record, and how these practices will evolve in the future?

    The revival of research on live performance parallels the re-emergence of the concert as the focal point of the music economy, in contrast to the situation in the second half of the 20th century, when live performance was little more than a means of promoting recordings and attracted little academic attention. We can therefore assume that the current interest in live music stems from the crisis in sales of recorded music seen in the first fifteen years of the 21st century. But more recently, with the advent of the global public health crisis from 2019 to 2022, the impossibility of going on stage or to a concert shook up live music habits and initiated new thinking and research into the live/recording bipolarity.

    There exists another aspect, and it is one of the most important: beyond recording as a process involving studios or various pieces of technical equipment, our conference is an invitation to look at the recording of popular music in global and cultural terms. Recording means keeping traces or tracks, a practice which can also be understood in a broader, anthropological sense: how are the traces kept or preserved? How are they also sometimes erased? How is socio-cultural diversity “recorded” or not in popular music? What role do field recordings play in this process? What is the logic behind this rendering invisible or this preservation, which facilitate the accessibility of certain genres or repertoires over others? How does the recording of music contribute to its semanticisation, its representation, the shaping of musical genres and the establishment of their aesthetic, economic, political, cultural and social value?

    The difference between musical genres is also in evidence in their relationship to recording. Here we see the tension perpetually created in popular music by the notion of authenticity, which varies according to popular music genre and often comes into play in the relationship between recording and live performance. The values associated with a live sound in recording are not therefore the same in all genres. This has an impact on recording techniques, and on the various illusions that such techniques are called on to create, or not, when they aim to obfuscate the fact that recording is always an artefact.

    How recordings are received and listened to is also a factor here: how do communities - audiences, but also critics and other professionals - judge recorded music? According to what criteria? Recording techniques have in turn led to changes in tastes, sensibilities, listening styles and habits. We have seen that the development of records as the predominant format for the consumption of music led to a habituation to sounds worked on in the studio and a resultant increased attention to timbre, for example. Listening has evolved in step with the habits and behaviours made possible by recorded music and its various formats, which are central to popular music. This also feeds into recent questions raised by sound studies and media archaeology in terms of soundscapes, sound archives, musical heritage and sound beyond music.

    The IASPM 2025 biennial conference invites the exploration of these questions across all popular musical genres, emphasising their multidisciplinary nature, a key characteristic of popular music studies. Perspectives are welcome from anthropology, economics, sociology, aesthetics, musicology, history, and political fields, from technical studies, etc. This list is not exhaustive, and the intention is also to encourage cross-fertilisation between all possible approaches to the subject. Proposals may fall within the following areas, although proposals that fall outside the conference theme will not be exluded from the process, and will also be considered:

• Recording as a medium
• From recording to data and the predominance of streaming platforms (“platformisation”) in the consumption of popular music
• Recording and liveness, recording and performance
• Recording as a technique: equipment, media, electronic and digital technologies in signal processing
• The recording studio and its different formats
• Recording in sound studies
• Recording practices and mediations, the status of intermediaries
• Recording and related rights, remuneration models, international conventions
• Recording and artificial intelligence
• Recording and gender studies
• Recording popular music and global cultural diversity. Traces or erasures of cultural diversity
• Recorded music as heritage in exhibitions and museums
• Recording and the music economy, the commodification of music
• Sound recording as an investigative technique and/or as writing
• Recording as a text for analysis
• Recordings and their reception: how is recorded popular music listened to? What categories of evaluation are there? What are the links between recording and musical genres? 
• Uses of recordings and dance practices

Submission

Individual communications

We invite abstracts, in English or in French, between 250 and 300 words, alongside a short list of bibliographical references (and/or sources if applicable). Please also include a short bio-bibliography of the author(s), as well as their IASPM branch in the text field. You will also have to specify in which of the thematic areas the presentation falls (maximum three). Individual paper presentations are 20 minutes long, to be followed by a 10 minute discussion.

Panels and roundtables

Proposals for organised panels or roundtables are encouraged. The format is 90 minutes for three communications (up to 6 participants for roundtables), or two papers and on discussant. Each session should leave at least 30 minutes for discussion or for comments by a discussant immediately following the presentations.

The panel organiser should submit the panel abstract and all individual abstracts (250-300 words each) as one single submission, with a full list of participant names, their biography and their IASPM branch. (Panels that have already been submitted as individual communications will nonetheless be treated as collective submission for a full session.)

The abstract should be submitted on this page: https://iaspm-paris2025.sciencesconf.org/submission/submit

Each participant must be a member of a branch of IASPM: www.iaspm.net/how-to-join

Some sessions will be broadcast online. However, remote participation will not be possible.

Calendar

Submissions will be accepted until October 15th, 2024 October 30th, 2024.

Notification of acceptance (or rejection) will be sent from January 25th, 2025.