Selling Out: Culture, Commerce, and Popular Music

The relationship between popular music and corporate brands has never been so cosy. Product placement abounds in music videos, popular music provides the soundtrack to countless commercials, hyper-promotion of musicians takes place across social media platforms, and corporate-sponsored competitions and workshops lure aspiring musicians. Activities that might once have attracted charges of 'selling out' are now considered savvy, or even ordinary, strategies for artists to be heard and make a living. But are all artists, sounds and messages invited to play along? At what cost? And how do changes in popular music culture reflect broader trends involving commercialisation, privatisation and corporate power? Selling Out: Culture, Commerce and Popular Music traces the evolution of the 'selling out' debate in popular music and considers what might be lost when the boundary between culture and commerce is dismissed as a relic.

Bethany Klein is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. She is the author of As Heard on TV: Popular Music in Advertising (2009) and co-author of Understanding Copyright: Intellectual Property in the Digital Age (2015).