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Professor Simon Frith is Tovey Chair of Music at the University of Edinburgh. He is a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and a founding editor of the journal Popular Music. His major publications include The Sociology of Rock (1978), Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll (1981), Art into Pop (1987), Music for Pleasure: Essays on the Sociology of Pop (1988), Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (1996), and Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays (2007). He is also co-editor of On Record: Rock, Pop &#38; the Written Word (1990), Sound and Vision: Music Video Reader (1993), The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (2001), and Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media &#38; Cultural Studies (2004). His recent work includes the research project “Live Music in the UK”, to result into a three-volume work, the first of which has been published in 2013 as The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950-1967 (Ashgate). More information about this research project can be found on the blog Live Music Exchange.  Interview by Nuné Nikoghosyan (October 2015)How did you decide to take on the academic path and become a researcher? I don’t think I ever decided to become a ‘researcher’ as such. After I finished my undergraduate degree in England I realized I was good enough at academic work to do postgraduate work, which would also give me a way of going to the USA. This lead to a PhD and thus to a career in academia.How did you become involved in studying popular music, in particular?I partly went to graduate school in Berkeley, California (in 1967) because of my love of music and my interest in what was happening to pop. And though this had nothing to do with my academic studies, as a grad student I did like reading, and so read all the books about popular music, jazz, blues, etc. that I could find. While I was at Berkeley I met Greil Marcus (another grad student). He became reviews editor of Rolling Stone and commissioned a few reviews from me when I got back to Britain. This gave me confidence to submit work to the emerging British underground/rock music press which led me, in turn, to meet and become friends with other British music writers. Meanwhile I’d started my academic career (at Warwick University) and got a letter from a publisher asking if I’d like to write something for an academic book series in the field of Media Studies. I suggested the book that was published as The Sociology of Rock. Thereafter popular music became my specialist academic as well as journalistic field. (My PhD had been on the history of education and I taught historical sociology, the sociology of culture, focusing on education and youth. It was a long time before I was able to teach popular music studies, well after I’d left sociology).As part of your biography, you mention, "For much of my my career, as both an academic and journalist, I have been engaged with the problems of taking popular music seriously.” In more concrete terms, what did this involve and how did you first go about it?From two directions. Academically, after Sociology of Rock was published I got to know other university people working on popular music (in a variety of departments, disciplines and countries) and was involved in the formation of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and the journal, Popular Music, which were precisely forums for discussing what was involved in taking popular music seriously. Journalistically, I worked as a writer and editor on new kinds of music magazine (such as Let It Rock) that sought to approach popular music critically and conceptually and not just as part of the sales process. I was lucky that the times were right. Both the academy and the magazine business were interested in new kinds of student/student course and new kinds of reader/music fan and so were willing for music journalism to take on academic elements and for academics to consider popular culture.In your experience, have there been major changes or tendencies in this field of study since you started your career? When I started, popular music scholars came from a variety of different academic disciplines although the majority probably came from the social sciences, loosely defined. Since then there has been much more interest from musicologists (and the field of popular musicology has emerged) and, more generally, ‘popular music studies’ has become an academic field in itself. This has some problems – a tendency towards orthodoxy, for example – but has meant that we have a much better and broader sense now of the complexity and variety of popular music. In the early days the focus tended to be on rock. Nowadays popular music studies has become a significant strand of ethnomusicology (and vice versa).Your latest research on the social history of live music in Britain has given way to a 3-volume publication with Ashgate. Did the research lead you to any surprising or challenging conclusions that you could briefly tell us about?It will result in three volumes! Only one has been published so far; still working on volumes 2 and 3. As for surprising conclusions, I suppose what the research brought home to me was, first, the importance of dancing to the history of music (still a neglected topic in the academy); second, the relatively short time-frame in which the recording/publishing model of the music economy has been dominated – music is much better understood as a service than as a commodity; third, the importance of jazz for the emergence of rock, which is too often treated as a revolutionary (rather than evolutionary) development.According to Howard S Becker, sociology and photography share a common goal – exploring society. Would you say that sociology and music also have something in common?Music seems to me to be essentially about sociability – about our practical, cultural and symbolic relations with other people, precisely the aspects of human behaviour with which sociology has been concerned.What other ongoing or future projects could you tell us briefly about? Most important ongoing project is finishing the live music volumes. Otherwise I’m interested in the history of popular music criticism and in what it means to ‘listen’ to music.Image source: http://www.lne.es/gijon/2013/06/25/simon-frith-musica-experiencia-opera/1432577.html 