Simon Frith is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh. From 1985 to 2000 he reviewed live music for the Sunday Times , Observer and Scotsman and from 1992 to 2016 chaired the judges of the Mercury Music Prize. Matt Brennan is Reader in Popular Music at the University of Glasgow. He has served as Chair of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (UK and Ireland branch) and is the author of two monographs, When Genres Collide (2017) and Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit (2020). Martin Cloonan is the Director of the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies in Finland and coordinating editor of the journal Popular Music . He chaired Freemuse for its first 20 years and, with John Williamson, co- wrote a history of the UK's Musicians' Union, Players' Work Time (2016). Emma Webster completed her PhD, Promoting Live Music: A Behind- the- Scenes Ethnography , at the University of Glasgow in 2011. She has held a fellowship at Oxford Brookes University and AHRC- funded post- doctoral positions at the Universities of Edinburgh and East Anglia, working on the UK Live Music Census and Impact of Festivals projects.

She co- founded Live Music Exchange and is currently working in research support at the University of Oxford.