Alex van Venrooij is Assistant Professor in cultural sociology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a MA degree (cum laude) in theoretical sociology from the University of Amsterdam and received his PhD in 2009 from Erasmus University Rotterdam. His dissertation research focused on cross-national differences and longitudinal changes in the discourse structures of popular music critics and was conducted as part of the VICI research project ' Cultural Classification Systems in Transitions '. He was a visiting student at the graduate school of sociology at Emory University in Atlanta and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2012 he received a VENI/NWO grant for a 4-year research project 'The Dynamics of Genres: A Comparative Study of the Success and Failure of Electronic Dance Music in the US, Uk and the Netherlands'. He is a member of the editorial board of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, Media and the Arts.