Professor Keith Negus

Staff details

Professor Keith Negus

Position

Professor of Musicology

Department

Music

Email

k.negus (@gold.ac.uk)

Cultural production, the music industries, and popular music

Keith Negus is internationally recognised for research on the music industries and cultural production, and for contributing to the study and teaching of popular music. After playing keyboards and guitar in various bands, he gained a degree in Social Science and PhD for a study of the music industry. He taught at the Universities of Leicester, and Puerto Rico before Goldsmiths. He is the author of Producing Pop (1992), Popular Music in Theory (1996), Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (1999), and co-author of Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value (2004), and Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (1997, 2013).

He is currently researching the music industries in China with Dr Qian Zhang, Communication University of China; the Eurasian routes of Korean popular song with Dr. Hyunjoon Shin, Sungkonghoe University; and creative interactions between British and Japanese musicians with Dr. Masahiro Yasuda, Kyoto Seika University, and Dr. Naomi Matsumoto, Goldsmiths.

Academic qualifications

  • PhD, Sociology, The Discovery and Development of Recording Artists in the Popular Music Industry, Southbank Polytechnic/ CNAA. 1992

Research interests

Keith Negus’s research encompasses all aspects of creating, producing, promoting and consuming popular music, and brings together insights from sociology, cultural theory, media studies and musicology by linking text (lyric, voice, sound, gesture, image) to context (media, political systems, economics, technology, commercial and state institutions) and to other art forms, media, and environments.

His publications range from detailed studies of the songs and music of individual artists, such as Bob Dylan, through research on fans, the psychogeography of postcolonial pop music, and the cultural life of music companies, to accounts of the global impact of nation states and transnational corporations on the international music industries. He is currently researching the history, culture, and organisations of the music industries and popular music in China with Dr Qian Zhang, Communication University of China, Beijing.

Grants and awards

2015: Digitisation and the Politics of Copying in Popular Music Culture
October 2013 to December 2015, Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology (CREATe) Research Programme, AHRC, EPSRC, and ESRC. Joint Principal Investigator, with Prof John Street, UEA.

Publications and research outputs

Book

Negus, Keith. 2011. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Edward Arnold. ISBN 0340575123

Negus, Keith. 2008. Bob Dylan. London: Equinox London. ISBN 13 978 1 904768 25 8

Pickering, M. and Negus, Keith. 2004. Creativity, Communication & Cultural Value. Sage. ISBN 0761970754

Book Section

Chen, Yuting and Negus, Keith. 2023. Guochao music and new Chinese identities: Gender, generation, and nation. In: Kimi Kärki, ed. Popular Music Climates. Turku, Finland: Turku: International Insitute of Popular Culture, pp. 18-23. ISBN 9789512994274

Zheng, Zhou and Negus, Keith. 2023. Creating an Oriental Fantasy: Transnational Game Production and New Nationalism in Honor of Kings. In: Kimi Kärki, ed. Popular Music Climates. Turku, Finland: Turku: International Insitute of Popular Culture,, pp. 105-110. ISBN 9789512994274

Negus, Keith. 2021. The Singles: A Playlist for Framing Dylan's Recording Art. In: Sean Latham, ed. The World of Bob Dylan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 46-57. ISBN 9781108499514

Article

Zhang, Qian and Negus, Keith. 2024. From cultural intermediaries to platform adaptors: the transformation of music planning and artist acquisition in the Chinese music industry. New Media & Society, ISSN 1461-4448

Negus, Keith. 2023. Book Review: Made in Hong Kong: Studies in Popular Music. Global Media and China, ISSN 2059-4364

Negus, Keith and Astor, Pete. 2022. Authenticity, empathy, and the creative imagination. Rock Music Studies, 9(2), pp. 157-173. ISSN 1940-1159

Conference or Workshop Item

Negus, Keith. 2005. 'When the artist meets the audience: amour, anxiety and ambivalence'. In: 13th Biennial IASPM Conference, Making Music, Making Meaning. Università La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, Italy 25-30 July 2005.

Professional projects

Keith has been a member of the Editorial Group of journal Popular Music, Cambridge University Press since 2000, and was Co-ordinating editor between 2001 and 2012. He is and has been a member of various editorial groups, advisory boards, and expert panels.

Conferences and talks

2024: Popular music, history, and memory: researching the past by walking in the present.
College of Music and Dance, Guangzhou University, China, 28 May 2024.

2020: Artificial intelligence and the production of music: issues, debates and prospects.
Keynote, Artificial Intelligence, Music, and Humanity Workshop. School of Music and Recording Arts, Communication University of China, Beijing. 24 May 2024.

2021: Producing Pop Out of Folk: Transforming Traditions
Musicology Colloquium, Between Folk and Pop, Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, 23 February 2023.

2020: Popular Music, Post-Media, and Platform Musicians
Post-Media Tokyo Conference, Tokyo University of the Arts, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo, 18 February 2023.

2015: Live music in the post-digital era
Public lecture, VELOSO@mangwon, Institute for East Asian Studies with Korean Association for the Study of Popular Music and Honguju Social Cooperative, Hongdae, Seoul, 28 October 2019.