Popular music journalism in the digital age: a cross-national content analysis of popular music journalism in Danish and German news media

This dissertation entitled ”Popular music journalism in the digital age. A cross- national content analysis of popular music journalism in Danish and German news media” identifies patterns and trends in 2678 print and online articles from 2015 and 2016. The content analysis is based on a mapping of the coverage of popular music in Berlingske, Ekstra Bladet, Jyllands-Posten, and Politiken in Denmark, as well as Bild, Spiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Welt in Germany. Based on the concepts of gatekeeping and authority, the study investigates the editorial prioritizations as they appear in the textual practices, i.e., the articles in the sample. The content analysis measures, among other things, the distribution of journalistic text genres, music genres, and gender in relation to female and male artists, as well as to female and male music journalists.
The findings show that Danish and German popular music journalism are fundamentally quite similar. Thus, the majority of articles are news rather than reviews. Further, the Danish and German news media primarily cover the rock and pop genres, and have a limited geographical dispersion with a strong focus on either national (Danish and German, respectively), or Anglo-American artists. On average, female artists are featured in one out four articles, whereas only one out of five music reviews is written by a female journalist. News about and reviews of live music accounts for nearly half (48%) of the Danish coverage with a significant presence of Roskilde Festival and Copenhagen Jazz Festival. German news media pay less attention to live music, and rarely publish coverage of music festival.
A central point in the dissertation is the relationship between the journalistic focus on the traditional music album, and the growing preference for music streaming with the audience. The Danish media, in particular, maintain a strong focus on the album when covering recorded music, whereas the phenomenon of music streaming and playlists is rarely mentioned. Across the data set of 2678 articles, the video company YouTube is mentioned only four times, despite the fact that it is the largest music streaming platform worldwide. In summary, the results from this study show, that Danish and German popular music journalism is relative homogenous, and that the music journalists
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apparently find it difficult to turn new digital music phenomena into compelling journalistic narratives.