ABSTRACT

Popular music has historically used advertising to promote itself as a commodity form for leisure consumption, using posters, street advertising and the press. The concept of African-American music, is frequently equated with 'black music', or the two terms are used interchangeably. The study of age, as a demographic/sociological category in popular music, has focused largely on 'youth' – historically, the main consumers of post-1950 popular music – along with a clear pattern of age- and gender-based genre preferences, with these often inflected with ethnicity. A broad label, and a loose genre/style, alternative rock became used in the late 1960s for popular music which was seen as less commercial and mainstream, and more authentic and 'uncompromising'. Applying auteurship to popular music means distinguishing it from mass or popular culture, with their connotations of mass taste and escapist entertainment, and instead relating the field to notions of individual sensibility and enrichment.