Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres

Why is music so important to radio? This anthology explores the ways in which musical life and radio interact, overlap and have influenced each other for nearly a century. One of music radio’s major functions is to help build smaller or larger communities by continuously offering broadcast music as a means to create identity and senses of belonging. Music radio also helps identify and develop musical genres in collaboration with listeners and the music industry by mediating and by gatekeeping. Focusing on music from around the world, Music Radio discusses what music radio is and why or for what purposes it is produced. Each essay illuminates the intricate cultural processes associated with music and radio and suggests ways of working with such complexities.

Morten Michelsen is Associate Professor in Musicology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is head of the research project "A Century of Radio and Music in Denmark," co-author of Rock Criticism from the Beginning (2005), and co-editor of Tunes for All? Music on Danish Radio (2018) along with Mads Krogh, Iben Have, and Steen Kaargaard Nielsen.

Mads Krogh is Associate Professor of Popular Music Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research explores issues of genre, mediation, and practice combining inspiration from cultural sociology, assemblage, affect, and actor-network theory. In recent years, he has been particularly concerned with genre formation and classificatory practices in digital contexts of musical life. He is co-editor of six books, including Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Methodologies of Affective Experimentation (2022).

Steen Kaargaard is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is co-author of Denmark's First Sound Recordings (2017).

Iben Have is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Aarhus University. She studies audio and audiovisual media from an interdisciplinary perspective across Media Studies, Sound Studies and Digital Humanities. Her most recent publications are Digital Audiobooks: New Media, Users, and Experiences (2016) and Tunes for All: Music on Danish Radio (co-editor, 2018). She is founder and chief editor of the online journal SoundEffects and co-manager of the digital radio archive LARM.fm.