Output details

Specialist music, public service and the BBC in the internet age

This article emerges from collaborative work with Prof Tim Wall and is an academic version of a research report that we wrote for the BBC. The project formed part of an AHRC/BBC funded piece of work into online fan cultures and was the basis for some of the intellectual threads that have underpinned a good deal of our later work into specialist music fandom online and digitally mediated representations and expressions of popular music culture. The article draws out the academic and intellectual applications of what we fed back to the BBC. We presented the findings to a gathering of BBC management, and gave them a range of insights about how you can understand specialist music online. In addition we analysed the BBC's engagement with specialist music fandom and then developed a set of techniques and approaches that would allow them to practically apply that knowledge. It has taken several years for these insights to be implemented, but several of these insights - such as our suggestion of a modularised approach to live radio presentation and production - have found their way into recent applications and developments in the BBC's music radio presentation online.