ABSTRACT
Introduction Since the very beginnings of popular music studies, researchers have been confronted with the related questions of what is meaningful about this kind of music and how to analyse its artefacts. Among the various respondents to these problems are scholars who have focused on the social significance of music, concentrating on the analysis of listening habits and symbolic orders, and others who have identified melodic shapes, harmonic structures or groove patterns (or the interaction of all these) as particularly relevant. This paper argues that, for all the promising approaches to popular music research, it is crucial to realize that the way people create and experience popular music complies with the inherent logics of media production. This will be explicated using the example of one of the pioneers of German minimal pop music, Trio.
