Popular music studies have experienced a strange fate in Italy. After a promising beginning in the 1970s and the early 1980s (with the direct contribution by musicians and scholars like Franco Fabbri and Umberto Fiori to the new intellectual formation), a situation of stasis followed. The latter was characterised by the presence of individual important voices but without the support of a constituency strong enough to guarantee in Italy the institutionalisation of this new field of research.