Starting from a conversation between Jonathan Gray and Henry Jenkins, Wayne Marshall ponders the utility of “paratext” (”all those things that surround a book that aren’t quite the ‘thing’ itself…the cover, prefaces, typeface, and afterwords, but also reviews”) for music:
…“Crank Dat”…perhaps best illustrates the problem with trying to apply a theory of para/texts to music [...]

Nancy Baym, a professor at the University of Kansas, the author of these books, this blog and one of the leading scholars thinking about the relationships between music and fans, (not to mention an old-school R.E.M. fan) attended two recent-ish conferences that approached that issue in very different ways. The “Futures of Entertainment” conference, hosted [...]