What is this?

This is the Blog of the BogFires Research Project, conducted at the Helsinki School of Economics by Professor Antti Ainamo, Research Director Toni-Matti Karjalainen and Doctoral Researcher Laura Laaksonen. The project is funded by the Academy of Finland.

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BogFires project explores the structures and practices of Finnish rock export and internationalisation. The empirical starting point for the BogFires research project is the recent success of a number of Finnish metal and hard-rock bands, such as HIM, Nightwish, Children of Bodom, Hanoi Rocks, The Rasmus, Apocalyptica, Amorphis, Negative, Sonata Arctica, Lordi, Sentenced, Stratovarius, etc.
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A specific focus is on the micro-level content production of the Finnish metal and rock music.
We regard music as a specific area of cultural exports and cultural entrepreneurship ... as well as a contributor to the ”Finland” brand.
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The project generates information and knowledge about the practices of Finnish bands and their various stakeholders. The generated knowledge is not only useful for the music industry and other fields of cultural exports, but also applicable to other business areas.
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The geographical focus of the project is on the most important export areas of Finnish Metal: Nordic countries, Central Europe, England, USA, and Japan.

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In addition to being a topical issue, Finnish rock export (especially from the viewpoint of Finnish Metal) is a theoretically interesting phenomenon, while successful bands have:

• spread from a local niche in Finland into a part of mainstream developments in the world of heavy metal music,
• become a notable phenomenon in business and management terms,
• become internationally consecrated as a specific genre or sub-category of heavy-metal music (“Finnish metal”),
• increased with such consecration Finland’s international recognition as a generator of innovative cultural products.

The project executes data collection, analysis, and interpretation proceeds along three sub-projects:

(1)Principles and practices: Theorization of “Finnish Metal“ as a process of entrepreneurship, with a focus on both business and cultural entrepreneurship.

(2)Structures and gatekeepers: Description of the distribution networks and core players in the Finnish music industry, with a focus on the process of internationalization of Finnish metal bands.

(3)Contents, concepts, and brands: Identifying the instrumental, aesthetic and symbolic mechanisms in Finnish metal, with a focus on understanding the interaction of the various band-specific and collective strategies at play.

The project will result in insightful descriptions and theoretical explanations of the structures and practices of Finnish rock exports. BogFires will generate in-depth knowledge of the mechanisms that go with culture export, creative industries and the “national branding” movement in the case of metal and hard rock. The findings will be reported through internationally refereed academic journals, book chapters, and the popular press.

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toni-matti.karjalainen AT hse.fi