Photo by Tomas Whitehouse
I’m an academic for a living. My job title is Reader in Music Industries Innovation at Birmingham City University. If you’ve not come across the term before, ‘Reader’ essentially means almost (but not quite) smart enough to be a professor. I’m working on it.
You can follow my academic work here on Academia.edu.
I’m a member of the Centre for Media and Cultural Research, and part of an international team working on a European Jazz research project called Rhythm Changes. My research interests include digital media cultures, online music enterprise, radio in the digital age, music as a tool for social change, and music as culture. I teach about radio broadcasting, the music industries and those places where they intersect with each other and the internet.
Outside the university, I’m part of an organisation called New Music Strategies – an independent think tank and consultancy group; I’m a board member of Un-Convention, an international grassroots music industry organisation that facilitates international events as well as knowledge exchange and networking; and I’m on the board of advisors for Bandcamp.
My research tends to be very ‘hands-on’ and practice-based. I work outside the university a lot of the time, making things and thinking about them in collaboration with artists, the industry and other practitioners. Fortunately for me, that’s a bit fashionable at the moment, so I get to work on some great projects in interesting places around the world.
And of course, I blog about a lot of that stuff here.