Conceptualizing popular music's heritage as an object of policy : preservation, performance and promotion

The origins, visibility and function of policy developments signalled by UNESCO’s Creative Cities of Music initiative informs the three key concerns of this chapter. First, we are interested in whether the growing attention to popular music’s heritage is an amplification of the idea that the value of popular music lies not only in its economic promise, but is expressed also in the ways in which it has accrued an abiding cultural worth for individuals and communities that consumed them. Second, we attend to the question voiced by Rosen of how popular music’s heritage is to be preserved and to whom that responsibility falls. The terms of that question can be extended in order to scrutinise the purpose and ends of the recognition of popular music as heritage and any obviousness about the demand for attention to it from policy makers. Third, we explore the challenge of making sense of a global field of practice in any systematic manner given the range of cultural, political and social contexts in which it takes place. Taking these issues together, in this chapter we conceptualise popular music heritage as an object of policy that falls at an intersection of civic and commercial interests, between a prioritisation of economic returns and cultural values. This character locates popular music heritage within a wider framework of interests, actions and strategies for analysis. As Dave O’Brien (2013: 130) has commented in outlining cultural policy and its character as a form of public policy, it ‘reflects something more than that which can be reduced to market transactions and the methodological apparatus of economic valuation’. This chapter is an opportunity to explore the specificities of cultural policy for popular music heritage as policy, revealing something about its place and role in the cultural economy more broadly.