View case studies on the benefits of this data in research
Research Insight: LGBTQ Pop Pre- and Post-Stonewall Mike D’Errico UCLA Musicology and Digital Humanities Research question Comparing cultural production before and after The Stonewall Riots, what can be said about the public visibility and reception of gay and lesbian popular music? Why understanding it would be useful The 1969 Stonewall Riots are considered a major turning point in the socio-political and cultural presence of the gay and lesbian community in the United States. While the 1950s and 1960s marked severe homophobia both socially and legally, Stonewall provided a spark in the fight for LGBTQ rights more broadly. From the debates surrounding Macklemore’s “Same Love,” to legal struggles over same sex marriage, visibility among the LGBTQ community remains a fraught and contested terrain. How might research into the reception of gay and lesbian popular music at a crucial moment in its history help to historicize the stakes of this struggle for public visibility? How does Music Industry Data answer the research question Before the Stonewall Riots, there were very few LGBTQ musicians that were topping the Billboard charts in the Unites States, and of those musicians not every one of them selfidentified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual during that time period. As the brief sampling in the first graph reveals, of the small amount of musicians who topped the charts during the four years preceding Stonewall, few released singles that breached the top ten charts.
Academic Rights Press ©2014
Chart-topping Lesbian or Bisexual Musicians from 1965-1969 In the years immediately following Stonewall (1970-1975), the amount of self-identifying LGBTQ artists that topped the charts increased significantly. Furthermore, many of these artists released singles that remained in the top ten for multiple weeks.
Chart-topping Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual Musicians from 1970-1975 Combined with the critical resources from the various academic journals on popular music listed in the Music ID database, these findings begin to suggest that The Stonewall Riots had a positive impact on the public visibility of gay, lesbian, and bisexual commercial musicians. Of course, more extensive research is needed to tease out the complex relationships between musicians who primarily participated in the “commercial” music industry, and those who remained “underground,” dedicating their resources to various political activist movements. Quantitative research alone cannot speak to these concerns.
Academic Rights Press ©2014
What elements of the answer would not have been possible without Music Industry Data? Without the quantitative data of the Music ID charts database, it would take a lot longer to tease out the fine details surrounding consumer trends in the popular music of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Comparing the chart statistics of multiple artists and time periods into a single graph allows for the quick comparison of broad economic trends, which should provide a spark for further qualitative research. Consider the benefits of this kind of research for scholars and students in interdisciplinary settings: What are the benefits to faculty? Just as the presence of undergraduate courses on LGBTQ Popular Music and Culture is gradually increasing, the Music ID charts allow faculty to integrate actual numbers and statistics that help document the rise in public visibility among LGBTQ artists. What are the benefits to students? For students, this data provides a resource that can supplement public discourse surrounding the public visibility of various popular musicians. In this way, the quantitative data of Music ID offers a healthy complement to qualitative research happening within the same social, political, and cultural domains. What interdisciplinary impact does it have? The incorporation of commercial “big data” on a historical level asks the music scholar to think outside of the strict Humanist agenda of hermeneutic and semiotic interpretation, toward a broader methodology that borrows from disciplines such as the social sciences and economics. Combining these approaches will bring the scholar in much closer contact with emerging subfields such as the Digital Humanities, and other transdisciplinary approaches that have employed qualitative and empirical practices.
Academic Rights Press ©2014
