Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry - Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out

Drawing on a deep and long-term first-hand engagement with major labels in the early years of the 21st century, this book sheds novel light ''behind the scenes'', at a time of drastic and far-reaching transformation. Refreshingly, it centres not on artists and the most powerful decision-makers but on everyday experiences of work and sense-making among back-office corporate employees. Doing so reveals the internal activities and conflicts that, while hidden from immediate public view, enable processes of change: from paperwork, data systems, managerial pressures and redundancies to graduate training schemes, departmental politics and shared playlists. Following some of these more mundane features provides a new route into understanding the broader cultures and infrastructures of the global recording industry. This oft-forgotten office work tells a different story of contemporary digital music - one more sensitive to the complex intersections of bureaucracy and enterprise, passion and critique, knowledge and experience, that texture the conduct of work and organizational life.>

Product details

• Authors: Toby Bennett
• Assisted by: Matt Brennan (Editor), Simon Frith (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 19.10.2023
• EAN: 9781501387234
• ISBN: 978-1-5013-8723-4
• No. of pages: 264
• Series: Alternate Takes: Critical Resp; Alternate Takes: Critical Responses to Popular Music
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music > Miscellaneous; Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Organizational Behavior, MUSIC / Individual Composer & Musician, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Corporate & Business History, MUSIC / Recording & Reproduction, Organizational theory & behaviour, Music recording & reproduction, History of specific companies / corporate history, Musicians, singers, bands and groups, Organizational theory and behaviour, Music recording and reproduction