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The Death and Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age . By Jim Rogers . London : Bloomsbury Academic , 2013. 284 pp. ISBN-10 1-623-56001-2
Understanding the Music Industries . Edited by Chris Anderton , Andrew Dubber and Martin James . London : Sage Publications , 2013. 248 pp. ISBN-10: 1-446-20795-1
Reviews
It is appropriate to review these titles together for both general and specific reasons. The general reasons devolve onto their different (but complementary) attempts to wrestle with, map and analyse the enormous upheavals in what is too easily misconstrued as 'The Music Industry' since the beginning of this century. Specifically, though, neither title quite gets to the heart of its 'territory'.
Clearly, much has changed where the formerly core, music-industrial practice of 'buying records' is concerned: sales of recordings have plummeted; record shops, in fact whole chains of retailers, have closed; albums continue to be made but what tend to be bought are individual tracks. So profound and far-reaching has change been for the recording industry that two of the formerly 'Big Five' major record companies have disappeared - BMG in 2008 and EMI in 2012. The immediate difficulties that follow from this brief encapsulation of seismic change is that reading the runes or, perhaps, 'ruins' of the collapse of what at one time seemed an unassailable industry is a particularly challenging exercise. It is challenging because the temptation to identify the recording industry with 'The Music Industry' is such a difficult one to resist. Yet resisted it must be because, in order to understand what is industrial about music, we need to be able to see a range of complex practices involving the demand and supply of music products as a set of production relations.
In the days before Napster, the majors dominated the production and selling of albums and the production and selling of albums drove the bulk of the activity of music publishers and live agencies. Considered in this way, when the recording industry began to enter crisis it was reasonable, although misleading, to declare this a crisis for 'The Music Industry' as a whole. What helped to promote this mis-identification was, and continues to be, the political lobbying actions taken by...