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The aim of this paper is to aid the DIY artist in moving towards sustainability through the use of new technologies, which will be achieved by defining DIY music culture, identifying the creative and business needs of an artist as well as establishing a model for artists to be self‐sufficient.

The research methodology consisted of a mixture of unstructured interviews, such as e‐mail, telephone and face‐to‐face. A total of 15 interviews were conducted with DIY artists from local music scenes around the UK.

The DIY musicology model is a foundation for the DIY artist to be self‐sufficient through the three main perspectives: artistic process, managerial process and information systems.

Many artists and managers continue in their struggle to be independently sustainable, therefore it is necessary to continue this research on a wider scale.

By gaining a more in‐depth understanding of the sub‐sectors within the music industries, artists and managers can understand more about how to manage their own creative activities or projects.

Through a strong DIY ethic, with an emphasis on creativity and self‐management, a clear understanding of local music scenes helps to identify one of the key sub‐sectors of the music industries as well as demonstrate that sub‐cultures have value.

The paper discusses issues of sustainability within local music scenes from the perspective of the DIY artist, which is a new area of academic research.

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of scholarly monographs on rock music from 1980 to the present. It aims to provide an overview to the literature for practical purposes of collection development as well as giving the reader insight into key issues and trends related to a interdisciplinary topic that attracts scholars from many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

This bibliographic essay, focusing on works related to American culture and of a general nature, includes an overview and historical background; a discussion of how music and ethnomusiciological scholars approach the topic; geographic approaches; literature on four key icons (Elvis, Dylan, Springsteen, and Madonna); American studies; subcultures and genres; other methodologies; and concludes by discussing notable recent works.

The scholarly literature on rock incorporates a wide variety of approaches and methodologies. Many music‐related scholars appropriate methodology from other disciplines and some non‐music‐related scholars use the formalistic analysis of music scholars. Authenticity is a major theme in the literature on rock.

This essay covers the widest range of monographs on the topic, providing insight into not only the key scholars but also the diversity of approaches to the topic. The historical approach to the literature gives the reader a sense of how the academic discourse on rock has evolved. This essay is of interest to librarians, scholars of rock music, and others concerned with how American scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences has grown since the advent of cultural studies.

If an information retrieval system is going to be of value to the user then it must give meaning to the information which matches the meaning given to it by the user. The meaning given to music varies according to who is interpreting it – the author/composer, the performer, cataloguer or the listener – and this affects how music is organized and retrieved. This paper aims to examine the meaning of music, how meaning is communicated and suggests this may affect music retrieval.

Musicology is used to define music and examine its functions leading to a discussion of how music has been organised and described. Various ways of establishing the meaning of music are reviewed, focussing on established musical analysis techniques. It is suggested that traditional methods are of limited use with digitised popular music. A discussion of semiotics and a review of semiotic analysis in western art music leads to a discussion of semiotics of popular music and examines ideas of Middleton, Stefani and Tagg.

Agreeing that music exists when communication takes place, a discussion of selected communication models leads to the proposal of a revised version of Tagg's model, adjusting it to include listener feedback.

The outcome of the analysis is a revised version of Tagg's communication model, adapted to reflect user feedback. It is suggested that this revised communication model reflects the way in which meaning is given to music.

Harold Samuel, music librarian and professor of music at Yale University, provides an excellent overview of the growth and development of musicology and the implications for library music collections in his recent article “Music and the Music Library” (Library Trends, April, 1977, pp. 833–845.). He notes that the musicologist's narrow emphasis on the “serious music” of Western Europe has broadened to include serious study of ethnomusicology, popular music, “serious” music of the United States, and musical performance. While my survey does not cover popular music, the growing importance of the other three areas is reflected in the best reference books of the past year.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new web‐based cataloguing system for the global music bibliography project, Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM), and discuss the implications for the manipulation and discovery of musical heritage materials.

The paper is designed to illustrate the workflow and tools used in creating a global musical catalogue, and to present the experiences of the Swiss RISM working group in developing new tools and re‐thinking traditional music bibliography tools.

The new tools developed present a further decrease in latency between source cataloguing and availability to users by integrating both the cataloguing and exploration interfaces into a single web application.

For music researchers, the opportunity to search and manipulate a global musical source database opens up new possibilities for data‐driven computational musicology and analysis.

This paper reports preliminary work in musical incipit searching in the Swiss RISM database, as well as the latest developments in integrating digital facsimile images and sound resources.

The purpose of this article is to illuminate the relations of work-related practices of local managers of live music events in Ostwestfalen-Lippe (OWL) and barriers and needs of vulnerable customers (VC) in order to explore possibilities to increase cultural participation of VC.

This article explores work-related practices of managers of live music events in OWL and asks if and to what extent these practices have an influence on the cultural participation of “vulnerable customers” (VC). It combines the findings of two studies: a) an explorative investigation on the work-related self-conceptions of managers of live music events in OWL (Study 1), and b) a sub-project on cultural participation of VC, which is part of the research project “kulturPreis. Increasing cultural participation through innovative and economically sustainable pricing concepts”, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Study 2).

It can be stated that there is an imbalance of knowledge: while VC tend to have a clear understanding of which barriers are the responsibility of managers of live music events, managers tend to lack knowledge regarding the needs of VC, and regarding the interrelationships between financial and social barriers facing them. Whether this knowledge and understanding can be developed in the future depends on the possibilities of exchanges between managers of live music events, cultural institutions, welfare organisations, political institutions and not least VC.

Based on these studies, this article combines different approaches by linking work-related practices of managers of live music events with cultural participation of VC.

The purpose of this paper is to study the role of academic music libraries in financially straitened times. The academic music library aims to cover the information needs of the academic community; yet the unique nature of music information also allows academic libraries to develop services for a broad spectrum of different user groups.

The theoretical analysis is supported by empirical evidence from a nationwide survey in Greece. The survey was carried out from July to September 2013 and presents results from interviews with the directors of all academic music libraries in Greece.

The results suggest that the period of economic crisis is also a period of challenges and innovation for music libraries which calls them to redefine policies and priorities, and further consider the needs and expectations of wider audiences, i.e. musicians outside the academic community. The financial downturn can be seen as an opportunity for restructuring the academic music libraries and for the development of a wider framework of operation which calls for an outreach strategy and cooperation with external music associations and organizations.

It is one of the very few studies providing theoretical and empirical evidence linking academic music libraries to musicians and the significance of collaborative partnerships.