The Music Industry Does Exist

This chapter engages with scholarly calls for greater plurality: music industries. Talk of a single music industry is seen by critics, at best, as a convenient fiction and at worst profoundly misleading. Powerful corporations and lobbying groups have set the discursive terms of trade, so the argument goes, and placed imaginative limits on our understanding of how music is, or rather should be, put together as an economic object. Building from such arguments, I seek a renewed critical approach to industry (singular). My engagement proceeds in two halves. The first part of the chapter outlines influential calls, from British popular music scholars John Williamson and Martin Cloonan among others, for greater plurality. They and others object that talk of a single “industry” commonly determines what is valued as an object of research, policy, and career aspiration. I place this in the context of wide-scale economic shifts of deindustrialisation and globalisation, echoing a broader movement from “culture industry” to “creative industries”. As such, the call for pluralism has subsequently led to work aligned with both a “critical” and an “administrative” strand of music industry research—which sit uncomfortably alongside one another. The second part of the chapter argues that, used with care, a more unitary conception retains value, helping us grasp some of the shared frameworks and logics that hold this complex terrain together. “Music industry” usefully describes the symbolic and discursive world of a distinct professional community, alongside a set of material value chains organised around the production of a particular set of interlinked outputs. With the institutional economist Thorstein Veblen, I suggest that “industry” holds critical value in relation to music “business”. It alerts us to the shared logic underpinning an unfolding global complexity, across multiple spatial scales. It also potentially speaks to popular music’s longstanding utopian function: generating a public good, on the widest possible terrain.