As the series website blurb says (or used to say), the series began with a simple idea and that was to look at the relationship between music (musical performers / artists, musical cultures, and so on) and the times and particularly places from which they emerge. 

That was one aspect that I think differentiated it from other music-focused series that were around at the time we started (which was 2010). A couple of others that predated Reverb were the Continuum (later Bloomsbury) series 33 ⅓ and Chicago Review Press’s Vinyl Frontier, both of which published books about classic or landmark albums.

As a reader of books about music and musicians one thing that I always found disappointing about the more conventional biographies of musical artists was that the story - and the books - inevitably peter out, or become less interesting, the closer that they get to the present. So, with Reverb, we wanted to be able to look at specific points in time, especially in those titles that are about artists and performers, and see how the relationship between music and place could be seen to reveal in more detail stories that might get passed over too hastily in books that tried to cram in a whole life.

Where our books have a particular artist as the subject, they are not about the personal lives, the ‘dirt’, and all that rock ‘n’ roll cliche stuff. They are determinedly about looking at and taking seriously popular music as an art form, as pretentious as that might sound.

It was also our idea to make the series slightly more academic or scholarly than the books published in, e.g., the 33 ⅓ series, which were often books about favourite albums written by fans. Our authors might of course be fans of the subject, but they are also - with one or two exceptions - academics who are interested in broader social, historical or cultural trends. Another important aspect in this was the focus on creativity and creative process. If our books look at specific artists or performers, they are not interested in logging the extent of how the music affects the fans of the music - the number of records sold, the chart positions of the hit records - and all that kind of stuff that has for a long time sustained a more superficial kind of writing about popular music and culture.

Our idea was to create a series of books that would be a kind of music-focused counterpart to another Reaktion Books series, and that was the ‘Topographics’ series (which no longer publishes):

So, not biography, not fan accounts, but  - broadly - cultural histories of music and place, written predominantly by academics from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.