Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, live music spaces -and the practices which produce them as economically viable -have found themselves in crisis. In spite of a UK government announcement on the 25th of July 2020 which allocated £2.25 million to support 150 music venues across the country, the processes of allocation, the conditions under which this emergency funding is allocated, and capacity to secure medium-to-longterm sustainability of the live music industry in the UK, remains unclear. In this paper, we present a Lefebvrian analysis of live music, highlighting the complex ways in which space is produced and consumed within a live music environment. By extending this framing to consider Lefebvre's conceptualisation of dominated and appropriated space, we argue that the economic viability of live music stems from its spatiality, and that ongoing responses to the crisis require greater sensitivity to the spatial practices of music production and consumption.

Recorded music, as both aesthetic listening experience, and as material culture, has a deep mnemonic resonance for a great many people. Starting from Csikszentmihalyi's (1993) theorisation on the significance of artefacts in the structuring of 'well-worn grooves' of consciousness, this article considers the biographical function of the metaphorical (and literal) 'well-worn grooves' of music-based artefacts such as records. Building upon existing arguments from material culture studies and popular music studies, this article used excerpts from research interviews with self-identified 'music enthusiasts' to argue that an attentiveness to the complex and intertwined relationships between popular music listening, and it's materiality, presents possibilities for looking beyond a broadly canonic understanding of popular music history, arguing for a greater attentiveness to the richness of the individual music-based biographies as a means of exploring the relationship between popular music and the past

While there has been growing interest in the curation and exhibition of popular music ephemera in recent years, such exhibitions have tended to focus on propagating canonical accounts, or on the telling of local or social histories. This article considers a different form of popular music curation, one driven not by a desire to preserve, but rather with the revaluing of what Straw (2000) calls 'exhausted commodities' -damaged, degraded, and defaced artefacts which would otherwise be discarded. Focusing upon the case study of We Buy White Albums -an ongoing collection and exhibition by New York-based collector, curator, and artist Rutherford Chang -this article explores the complexities associated with such notions of curation in the context of the 'music-commodity' (Taylor, 2007: 282), and the potential for curatorial recontextualizations of damaged, defaced, and degrading artefacts as a means of exploring hidden histories of popular music.

For the live music industry, and those who work in it, the COVID-19 outbreak has been predominantly framed as an economic crisis, one in which the economic systems through which revenue is derived from music-based products and practices have been abruptly closed off by a crisis of public health. Using Lefebvre's trialectics of spatiality as a theoretical lens, we will argue that, for live music, the COVID-19 outbreak can be seen as a crisis of spatial materiality. During a time of lockdown and social distancing, spaces of music production (rehearsal spaces, studios) and consumption (venues, nightclubs) have found themselves suddenly unfit for purpose. Drawing upon empirical data from ongoing research projects in Scotland and the Midlands, we will highlight the ways in which COVID-19 has disrupted the spatial practice of music. From there, we will argue that there is a need for new representational spaces of music, and the creation of new forms of musical-spatial practice, appropriating spaces of the domestic and the everyday, and fusing / overlaying them with new cultural meaning and (crucially for musicians) a reconsideration of value by potential consumers.