An Anthology of Australian Albums offers an overview of Australian popular music through the lens of significant, yet sometimes overlooked, Australian albums. Chapters explore the unique qualities of each album within a broader history of Australian popular music. Artists covered range from the older and non-mainstream yet influential, such as the Missing Links, Wendy Saddington and the Coloured Balls, to those who have achieved very recent success (Courtney Barnett, Dami Im and Flume) and whose work contributes to international pop music (Sia), to the more exploratory or experimental (Curse ov Dialect and A.B. Original). Collectively the albums and artists covered contribute to a view of Australian popular music through the non-canonical, emphasizing albums by women, non-white artists and Indigenous artists, and expanding the focus to include genres outside of rock including hip hop, black metal and country.

Described on its first publication in 1967 as “a scholarly account of Australian music that is also entertaining social history”, Roger Covell’s Austrlaia’s Music: Themes of a New Society has become a classic of Australian music history for its beautifully written explorations of almost two hundred years of music-making across classical, Indigenous and Anglo-Celtic traditions. This revised edition, including more than sixty musical examples, is supplemented by a new postscript written by the author.

At a time when the traditional media have been reshaped by digital technologies and audiences have fragmented, people are using mediated forms of communication to manage all aspects of their daily lives as well as for news and entertainment. The Media and Communications in Australia offers a systematic introduction to this dynamic field. Fully updated and expanded, this fifth edition outlines the key media industries – from print, sound and television to film, gaming and public relations – and explains how communications technologies have changed the ways in which they now operate. It offers an overview of the key approaches to the field, including a consideration of Indigenous communication, and features a ‘hot topics’ section with contributions on issues including diversity, misinformation, algorithms, COVID-19, web series and national security. With chapters from Australia’s leading researchers and teachers in the field, The Media and Communications in Australia remains the most comprehensive and reliable introduction to media and communications from an Australian perspective. It is an ideal student text and a key resource for teachers, lecturers, media practitioners and anyone interested in understanding these influential industries.

How did Melbourne earn its place as one of the world's 'music cities'? Beginning with the arrival of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s, this book explores the development of different sectors of Melbourne's popular music ecosystem in parallel with broader population, urban planning and media industry changes in the city. The authors draw on interviews with Melbourne musicians, venue owners and policy-makers, documenting their ambitions and experiences across different periods, with accompanying spotlights on the gendered, multicultural and indigenous contexts of playing and recording in Melbourne. Focusing on pop and rock, this is the first book to provide an extensive historical lens of popular music within an urban cultural economy that in turn investigates the contemporary nature and challenges of urban music activities and policy.

This volume explores aspects of popular music and culture from the twentieth century to the present day. It brings together contributions challenging or reassessing assumptions about how individual, subjective experience comes to terms with modernity. While the emphasis is on Australian case studies, the essays here raise larger questions, ranging from our disempowerment as consumers demanding instant gratification to our ambiguous status as observers of and participants in historical change. They examine the complex relationship between sound and visual media in the formation of various communities, and how this relates to daily lived experience.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture provides a comprehensive and fully up-to-date overview of key themes and debates relating to the academic study of popular music and youth culture. While this is a highly popular and rapidly expanding field of research, there currently exists no single-source reference book for those interested in this topic. The handbook is comprised of 32 original chapters written by leading authors in the field of popular music and youth culture and covers a range of topics including: theory; method; historical perspectives; genre; audience; media; globalization; ageing and generation.

Is there such a thing as women's music? Do women write and listen to music differently than men do? While recognizing that the differences among women are as distinct as the differences between genders, this bold new study examines gender's influence on music. The author's unique analytical strategy shows, in its application to actual musical compositions, that there is a fluid relationship between the music and the analyst, between the text and the context, and that 20th-century music is inextricably bound to notions of gender that transcend aesthetics. Much of the work on women's music to date has failed to deal critically with the actual compositions, settling instead for more biographical or sociological approaches. In this respect, this work fills an important void. Using many concrete examples and careful analyses of the work of such undervalued composers as Alma Mahler-Werfel, Anne Boyd, and Moya Henderson, it grounds the abstract firmly, and fascinatingly, in the practical.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy is the first thorough analysis of how policy frames the behavior of audiences, industries, and governments in the production and consumption of popular music. Covering a range of industrial and national contexts, this collection assesses how music policy has become an important arm of government, and a contentious arena of global debate across areas of cultural trade, intellectual property, and mediacultural content. It brings together a diverse range of researchers to reveal how histories of music policy development continue to inform contemporary policy and industry practice. The Handbook maps individual nation case studies with detailed assessment of music industry sectors. Drawing on international experts, the volume offers insight into global debates about popular music within broader social, economic, and geopolitical contexts.

The Oxford Companion to Australian Music is a reference work that will be of interest to music lovers as well as of use to musicians, scholars and students. To date no volume has combined an account of Australia's music with biographical information about its musicians, a critical guide totheir works, publishers and recordings, and a guide to the burgeoning literature in the field. With more than 2,000 entries, the Companion ranges across a wide spectrum, from ancient Aboriginal traditions and European-derived orchestral, operatic and concert music, to Australian folk jazz, country, popular, rock, electronic and experimental music. It covers the music not only of mainstreamaudiences but also of Australia's religious denominations and recent migrant communities. Special attention is given to the distinctive features of Australian musical life: its reliance on government support rather than private or ecclesiastical patronage, its unquenchable appetite for eisteddfods,choral societies and bands; the shadow cast by European traditions; the vicissitudes of its attitudes towards composers; the late development of music criticism and scholarship; and the role of regional cities and towns. There are numerous entries on Aboriginal subjects and on key musical organizations and considerable space is given to a series of longer entries covering musical works, institutions, genres, instruments, terms, and many of the historical contexts of Australian music. These key essays offer anauthoritative framework for a better understanding of the shape and originality of music-making in Australia.

The album examined in this book transformed the singer John Farnham from a faded teen pop star into the most popular solo rock performer in Australia, in a career that has lasted for more than 30 years. Whispering Jack remains the top-selling album by an Australian artist in Australia, and constitutes the turning point in Farnham's bid to achieve credibility as an adult contemporary musician. The first single from the album, 'You're the Voice,' has achieved such iconic status that it is routinely referred to as Australia's unofficial national anthem. The book examines the album, its context and that history in order to recover a crucial conjuncture in the development of Australian rock and popular music, one that has previously been ignored in Australian popular music studies.