Simon Frith is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh, where he previously held the Tovey Chair. He was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s and from 1972 to 1987 taught Sociology at the University of Warwick while working as a rock critic for a variety of magazines, including Let It Rock and Melody Maker.

Matt Brennan is reader in Popular Music at the University of Glasgow. His most recent book, When Genres Collide, was named as one of Pitchfork’s ＂Favourite Music Books of 2017＂ and received an Honourable Mention at the Association of American Publishers’ 2018 PROSE Awards. He has served as chair of the UK and Ireland branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.

Martin Cloonan is director of the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) at the University of Turku, Finland.

Emma Webster completed her PhD, Promoting Live Music: A Behind-the-Scenes Ethnography, in 2011. She has since held AHRC-funded postdoctoral positions at the Universities of East Anglia and Edinburgh and an Early Career Research Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University. She is a founder and director of research group Live Music Exchange.