This article addresses the growing global phenomenon of automated holographic concerts given by virtual pop stars called ‘Vocaloids’. Alternately acclaimed by music journalists as ‘the future of music’ and derided as ‘a robo-show, a concert simulacrum’, Vocaloid concerts across the past 10 years have sparked feelings of anxiety and prompted debate about the loss of human interaction at pre-programmed concerts. In this article, I extend Vocaloid research from recent work that addresses Vocaloid's creative online community into the middle of arenas of screaming fans, drawing on participant observation, reception history and live performance analysis in order to demonstrate the importance of participatory fandom in Vocaloid culture and its implications for 21st-century concepts of liveness. I argue that the creation of cultural meaning and the most significant interactions occur within the audience itself, when online amateur music-making communities intersect with participatory fandom at live concert events.

Between artists and the audience, the concert promoter holds an important position within the music industry. This article, based on an empirical study of promoters in Norway, aims to analyse how concert promoters think, what their motivation and attitudes are like, their goals and their perceptions of a good concert and a good promoter. Drawing from both qualitative and quantitative data, we identify two dimensions in concert promotion: a paternalistic and a demand-driven approach. We also identify five typologies of concert promoters: the idealist, the curator, the rationalist, the entrepreneur and the instrumentalist.

This paper presents an analysis of Frank Zappa's aesthetic values, drawing on two examples: his writing and his music. This paper examines Zappa's musical techniques and contextualises them within art criticism; Zappa's discussion of his own music and theories of art in The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989) further help align his work with contemporary aesthetic theories, namely those of Levinson (Music, Art, and Metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2011) and Berleant (‘Further ruminations on music’, New Sound International Journal of Music, 50/2, pp. 129–37, 2017). Together, Zappa's techniques and his own testimony suggest an aesthetic standpoint underpinning his discography that emphasises referentiality as well as subjectivity and the role of the public in the musical experience. Indicating a more sympathetic view of popular opinion, distinct from the Adornian condemnation of mass culture with which Zappa is often attributed, this analysis of Zappa's aesthetic beliefs subsequently indicates a position sympathetic to both popular and avant-garde musics.

When an iconic pop star dies, agency regarding that artist's persona and work is distributed in ways that transform the artist's significance and reveal much about the societies in which the artist participated. This article examines Macedonian pop singer Toše Proeski, an iconic star celebrated throughout former Yugoslavia who died in 2007 at age 26. For Macedonians and people throughout former Yugoslavia, Toše represented ideals of a moral alternative to corruption and violence, and of international recognition of Macedonia that could engender economic and political stability. The article argues that, after the death of Toše, such ideals that are distant from reality are displaced to a ‘remembered future’, a future that would have occurred had he lived. The agency of the living transforms a dead artist into a nostalgic bridge to a remembered future, producing a cathartic, if temporary, satisfaction of longings for unattainable ideals.

The myth of the deal with the devil at the crossroads frames the reception of Robert Johnson's corpus, particularly lyrics that directly or indirectly reference otherworldly forces. Setting aside the myth, I analyse the uncanny sonic qualities in his performances that evoke a spectral presence. A close examination of vocal and guitar timbre that considers harmonic resonance, chimera effect and other ‘eerie’ qualities of the music breaks down musical elements other than lyrics that evoke the myth of supernatural power. Humming, mumbling and talking, corner loading, falsetto, simultaneous rhythm and lead, among other acoustic effects, contribute to a complex soundscape with spectral resonances. Taking a lead from Johnson's mentor Ike Zimmerman and his fondness for practising in the cemetery, my analysis of timbral quality informed by Freud's concept of the uncanny seeks to explore what we hear, how it is produced and the origin that we construct for the sounds.

In ‘Intertextuality and hypertextuality in recorded popular music’, S. Lacasse (in M. Talbot (ed.) The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, Liverpool University Press, 2000) proposes a model for understanding intertextuality in recorded popular music. His model provides different ways one text may reference another, while simultaneously transforming the style and/or subject of the original text. Style and subject are two of the integral elements that make up a work, yet what is missing from Lacasse's model is the medium through which these elements are presented. This article addresses that gap by introducing three phonomatic referential practices (retronormativity, vinyl aesthetics and analogue allusion) that transform the medium of a referenced work alongside transformations of style and/or subject. It further expands the model by discussing self-quotation as a referential practice. The applicability of the expanded model is demonstrated using the music of Portishead, one of the bands that pioneered the trip hop genre in the 1990s.