This paper considers the cultural intermediary function of Australian jazz festivals. It presents a detailed analysis of programming patterns across five Australian Jazz music festivals – namely, the Manly Jazz Festival, Wangaratta Festival of Jazz and Blues, Melbourne International Jazz Festival, Brisbane International Jazz Festival, and Bellingen Jazz Festival – in the ten year period, 2004-2014. Using this data, this paper draws attention to the ‘search and select’ function of cultural intermediaries speaking to the broader significance of festivals as sites of popular music study. This paper considers a number of programming trends, including a comparison between local and international musicians; the frequency with which musicians performed at each festival and across festivals; issues of gender in programming; and identify musicians who could be placed into a number of genre categories, with a particular focus on those musicians who identify in some way with the category of World Music. This study presents an insight into current trends in jazz scenes in Australia and the roles that festivals play as cultural intermediaries in contributing to this aspect of Australian cultural life.

Sonic branding – the sonic expression of a brand's identity – is the audio equivalent of a brand's logo, a sound that is both distinct and adaptable to diverse contexts, and serves to communicate a brand's narrative. Sonic branding has been a feature of marketing strategies for the past two decades, but more recently there has been increased commercial interest in sonic branding, a move from the ‘visual turn’ to the ‘sonic turn’, as voice activation technologies such as Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant immerse the consumer in a personal encounter across diverse sensory touch points. While there has been significant scholarly discussion in popular music studies of the ways that sound is employed to increase capital in commercial contexts, little has been written to address the ways in which popular music is courted and implicated in brand strategy specific to sonic branding. In this paper, we consider the ways in which sounds are embedded in contemporary brand practice and detail the ways in which popular musicians and genres are complicit partners in ‘branding to the senses’. Here, we focus on two sonic branding case studies – Mastercard and HSBC – which highlight the key role of popular music in constructing the way we ‘hear’ brands.

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is a musician and academic, specialising in the areas of popular music studies and ethnomusicology. His doctoral studies examined the discourse of World Music in Australia. He has published in the areas of arts policy, musical sustainability, music ecology, and music festivals. He currently teaches at Macquarie University and UTS in the areas of Popular Music, International Communications, and Media Studies. He also plays and performs on the oud, and has studied for a number of years with oud virtuoso and ARIA award winner Joseph Tawadros.

From soundscape studies to ethnomusicology and popular music, the production and study of field recordings is usually framed in terms of their role in archival research, in cultural revivals, and the politics of engaging with the sonic other both “in” and “out” of the field. Few studies, however, have addressed the use of field recordings as a tool for actively constructing authenticity in contemporary global popular music. In the popular music industries, field recordings provide a musical experience that appears less “mediated”—less interfered with by producers, audio engineers, high-tech recording equipment and environmental noise purged by the studio. Such recordings help to authentically position the artist with respect to the fan in a reactionary move against the incessant progression of “new” technologies, technologies that have the ability to convert any performance into an acceptable product of mass consumption. This article critically explores such field recordings as an important site of the construction of “authenticity” in contemporary popular music.