Music Industries

Two main ideas govern our approach to this article: (1) there is no single music industry, and (2) music industries are created, driven, and run by human beings. There are a multitude of industries, markets, intermediaries, and musicians. They all live in culturally specific contexts, and their actions are influenced by government and economic structures, personal and professional relationships, experiences, and goals. Because of the close relationship between industry and capitalism in the minds of many, music industry studies have often focused on how capitalist markets—from local to global—incentivize (and sometimes determine) the work that musicians and cultural intermediaries (tour managers, producers, agents, etc.) do. Perhaps as a result, scholars and students often fall into conceptualizing music industries as involving (unidirectional) production and consumption, from musician to listener. Here, we hope both to address these phenomena and provide a more expansive view of what music industries are and what they do. After all, governments, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, individual fans, and musicians are all (also) essential to music industries. Producers can be consumers (and vice versa); cultural intermediaries both mediate production and consumption and are producers and consumers themselves. While we have sought to engage with different types of music industries in diverse contexts, we have also limited the scope and scale of this bibliography. We have focused on peer-reviewed scholarly publications and have thus excluded the plethora of popular media sources, textbooks, instructional texts, periodicals, quantitative data sources, industry reports, and other primary sources that are important to music industry studies. We also have included only English-language works here. Much of the scholarship in this article focuses on popular music contexts in the United Kingdom and the United States. This may be a result of our predetermined limiters (language and peer review). Yet, this also demonstrates a need for more English-language music industry scholarship focusing on other contexts. Like many studies of music and culture, this bibliography moves between different disciplines and methodologies, including anthropology, communications studies, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, and sociology. Authors are interested in specific cultural contexts and larger sociological trends. They examine how specific individual musicians and intermediaries make production choices, how governments might justify their support of music projects, and the cultural and economic significance of music festivals and genre categories, among other topics. Though we have organized this article according to fourteen separate themes, many of the works engage with multiple themes. We have tried to note the relevant crossover works in each section’s summary. Scholarship is sometimes difficult to put into boxes, and, while organizing works into categories can be helpful, we recognize that this strategy is not perfect. We hope this article will be helpful to our colleagues conducting research in this area and teaching music industry courses. We do not offer a definitive article but rather a place to start exploring and engaging with music industries—both in North America (where we are based) and around the world.