Writing popular music fiction

Abstract

A recent short story I completed in a style area described as popular music fiction, using fiction to critically explore issues within popular music and communicate these to a wider audience, will be the main focus of this article. The ideas behind the short story and the incorporation of research and subject areas to create a fictional setting, especially intersections with otherness, diversity, resistance, technology, creative practice, business and the future, will be discussed. Key central themes were those relating to race, including lack of presence and attribution and concerns about AI, especially concerning how data is acquired to model music made by current music practitioners. The main character of the story is an AI and is used to foreground these concerns, the nature of musical work, its creation, transmission and consumption.