ABSTRACT
The longest-running and best-known Europe-wide broadcast, the Eurovision Song Contest, is devoted to popular music, but it is not on radio, the medium that would seem most suited to music, but television. By contrast, it has now mostly been forgotten that a similar show featuring pop records, called European Pop Jury ran for nearly two decades starting in the mid-1960s. This article compares, contrasts and above all contextualises these two programmes as it traces the paths of popular music through European broadcasting. In so doing, it highlights the technical, institutional and discursive constellations that have allowed, but also limited, the circulation of popular music over European borders. It thus maps not just the creation, but also the fragmentation of technological and cultural spaces in Europe. It points ultimately to both top-down and bottom-up formations of ‘Europeanisation’ understood as acts of appropriation and translation of music over borders.
