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Shane Homan is Associate Professor in media and cultural studies at Monash University, Australia. With a PhD from Macquarie University (1999), he has also taught at the Universities of Western Sydney and Newcastle. His research and publications in popular music studies over the past decade have mainly focused on the Australian and global music industries and cultural industries policy, but also youth and popular music. He is the author of The Mayor's a square: live music and law and order in Sydney (2003, Local Consumption Publications), editor of Access All Eras: Tribute Bands and Global Pop Culture (2006, Open University Press), and co-editor of Sounds of Then, Sounds of Now: Popular Music in Australia (2008, ACYS Publishing), Popular Music and Cultural Policy (2015, Routledge) and Popular Music Industries and the State: Policy Notes (2016, Routledge), among others.He has also been Chair of the Australia-New Zealand branch of IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) and General Secretary of its international executive. His research has provoked music industry reform in the areas of music venue regulation, nightclubs and performer copyright structures.Interview by Nuné Nikoghosyan (April 2016)How did you decide to take on the academic path and become a researcher?I was a drummer with various bands in Sydney through the 1980s, and also had set up a small drum teaching businesses, teaching drums to mainly schoolchildren. I had dropped out of a teaching degree in 1983, but always had thoughts about returning to study. So I completed a Communications degree in 1992, did an Honours thesis on copyright structures in Australia at the same university (University of Western Sydney), and then completed a PhD thesis on music venue regulation in 1999 at Macquarie University, Sydney. How did you become involved in studying music, in particular?My experiences as a drummer with Sydney bands in the 1980s informed my thinking about music policy and regulation in more specific terms. By the early 1990s, I was intrigued that quite a few of the venues I had played in the 80s had stopped providing live music – that is, they had either switched to other forms of entertainment (trivia nights), or used previous entertainment spaces for gambling or dining. So I was keen to investigate the core reasons why Sydney’s venues were disappearing, and specifically the mix of cultural, social and governmental factors. Music policy and regulation is not deemed a sexy choice for many in popular music studies, given its cultural studies heritage in emphasizing texts and sounds, but I’ve always thought there are compelling narratives to follow in how the state interacts with the different cultural industries. In your experience, have there been major changes or tendencies in this field of study since you started your career?Since I became a full-time academic in 1999, popular music studies has grown significantly in Australia, although (perversely) cultural studies has declined within Australian universities within Arts major offerings. There has been an encouraging increase in younger academics and researchers looking at not just music itself, but its political and cultural contexts and implications. For me, an interesting trend has been the interconnectedness of disciplines in keeping with the obvious global connect of practices and peoples – so popular music studies is engaging more, for example, with urban studies and the nature and growth of arts policies for cities; or copyright, where different perspectives (law, cultural studies, musicology) have been useful even as copyright laws and regimes become globalised through trade agreements and the like. And, as governments become more adept at managing and massaging information, it is appropriate that we as popular music academics utilise a greater range of studies and expertise. Building on that, and in light of your publications Sounds of Then, Sounds of Now: Popular Music in Australia (2008, ACYS Publishing) and the most recent Popular Music Industries and the State (2015, Routledge), where would you say “local” music stands today in an age of internationalisation and globalisation? In both books you’ve kindly mentioned, the older certainties about the role and influence of the nation-state were examined in various ways. We can certainly see an increasingly global network of policy structures, particularly when it comes to things like copyright law. The one, persistent accumulative effect of the regular trade rounds has seen the larger nations who are key cultural exporters (especially the US) place consistent pressure on smaller nations to acquiesce to more (and more) protection of copyright in the name of the larger corporations. So we’re seeing a standardization, if you like, of expected global norms expected of countries with very different cultural practices, legal structures and relations of power. At the same time, I think we have to be careful about over-stating globalization. National structures still matter. National or regional broadcasting policies, for example, or live music infrastructure, still play important roles in producing very localised settings for popular music. For live music, ‘the local’ means assessing how smaller subcultural scenes form and maintain themselves, and equally, how they sit side by side with more obvious global trends, such as the monopolistic practices of a Live Nation, who now dominate larger concert productions in many countries. It’s how the local and global intertwine that remains fascinating. For the last decade or so, the music industries have been going through major changes, especially in regards to their production and distribution models. In your opinion, is the situation slowly stabilising nowadays or are we yet to see more radical changes in these industries?  The cliché is certainly true that the music industries have been the canary down the mine in terms of the effects of digital disruption, which we now see being played out across the newspaper, television and film industries. It says a lot for the major recording companies that it took another sector company, Apple, to sort out the initial ways to deliver digital music platforms. We now also see the major streaming companies – the aggregators – exercising just as much power as the older recording structures. In broader terms, the recording industries have not fully realized that the ‘specialness’ of music – the individual relationships we built with record stores, artists, venues, other fans – has been shattered by the multiplicity of digital offerings, where music is now simply another product. Perversely, the fact that the recording sector has resorted to legal and commercial solutions simply moves the consumer – and the debates – further away from the unique nature of relationships between the music, fans and musicians. I can’t see a singular solution emerging, but what will be interesting is how the recording sector deals with the increasing power of Spotify, Pandora and others to dictate commercial, legal and cultural terms.In light of your book Access All Eras: Tribute Bands and Global Pop Culture (2007, OUP) and other works, how would you comment on the recent “retromania” trend, especially in music?Yes, the Simon Reynolds book captures well the many links between popular music and nostalgia. In Access All Eras the various authors examined different local conditions and practices of the tribute act phenomenon, and even how the tradition of cover bands operate in places like Papua New Guinea. Copying has always been a key feature of rock and pop since the 1950s, as a way of learning and proving your ‘chops’ (as an apprenticeship of sorts in terms of technique), and also paying homage to your formative influences.  Eric Clapton is a great example, as someone who was determined to learn the nuances of the great blues players, and then developed his own style which reeks of those older players like Buddy Guy. Yet nostalgia also exercises an enormous hold on the music industries today.  Aspiring starlets on The X Factor and similar contest shows must first pay homage to earlier genres and stars before they can reveal a skerrick of originality. How many stars were forced to first release a cover song to establish their bona fides with the company and their audience? The premise of the book was to investigate a sector of the industry that is large, but not discussed too much because we’re dealing with imitation, and thus viewed in some quarters as a ‘dark’ side of music-making. But we need to recognise how the enjoyment of a covers or tribute band is a weekend ritual for many people, and remains the cornerstone for many live music pubs and clubs. The ‘elite’ tribute acts, such as the Bjorn Again franchise, or the Bootleg Beatles, do very well playing in nice theatres and in some ways, delivering performances that are truly inter-generational in terms of both the songs, and the audiences, who span from young children to their grandparents. In another sense, how music nostalgia is used (exploited?) by the entire audio-visual sector – radio, television, film, music – as filler in place of proper investment in new works, remains a very good question.What other ongoing or future projects could you somewhat tell us about?I’m excited by two new research projects that have been funded by the Australian Research Council. The first, Interrogating the music city: Pop and the cultural economy of Melbourne, is a three year project that examines the rise of the ‘music city’ concept, and its utility to industries, audiences and cities. We are examining the history of pop and rock in our case study city, Melbourne, in order to tease out and assess how urban planning, venue licensing, scenes and subcultures and other various city and state policies and practices combined to make the city privilege music to various extents. While the history of scenes, television shows, venues, recording companies etc will be fun to do – and more than a touch daunting – we are also interested in producing a retrospective assessment of both the accidental and planned natures of listening and making popular music in cities.The second project is with Newcastle University (Professors Richard Vella and Stephen Chen) to examine the economic and cultural value of Australian music exports. The four-year ARC Linkage grant of $226,000 will allow the project team to examine the effectiveness of Australia’s primary export scheme, Sounds Australia, compared with similar schemes in Canada, Scandinavia and Europe. Australia is currently experiencing its most successful music export success in its popular music history; acts as diverse as Tame Impala, Sia, Gotye and Courtney Barnett have found willing concert and broadcasting audiences in key international markets. So it’s a good time to properly investigate the role of the state in promotional discourses and strategies. The research team also includes the Executive Producer of Sounds Australia, Millie Millgate, with financial and in-kind support from the Australia Council and Australia’s primary copyright body, APRA, the Australasian Performing Right Association.Thanks for the chat!&#160;Image: by consent from Shane Homan