The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Music Industry Studies

The Handbook of Critical Music Industry Studies provides students and researchers with the means to think about how the performance, recording, and publishing of music could be if we do things differently. People are hungry for a more equitable music performance and recording system. The industry exudes patriarchy, white supremacy, cultural imperialism, ableism, and worker exploitation. In the context of gendered (e.g., #MeToo and #TimesUp) and racialized (e.g., Black Lives Matter) inequity, rampant precarity and casualization, and modes of musical dissemination that are changing faster than policymakers and regulatory bodies can keep up with, the timing for assembling such an interdisciplinary collection could not be more appropriate. Essays in this handbook will tackle power structures at root in the music industry and the academic study of the field. Topics covered include the politics of representation and power in the global music industries, the labor of music, music as media (including data and algorithmic culture), and copyright/intellectual property, among others.

Dr David Arditi, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington, is a scholar of digital technology. Arditi has published four books. His most recent publicationis Streaming Culture: Subscription Platforms and The Unending Consumption of Culture (2021). In 2020, Arditi published Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians and Power in Society with Palgrave. This book explores the way old forms of capitalism take root in new parts of the economy. His first book, iTake-Over: The Recording Industry in the Digital Era, explores the way the major record labels used their power to change the legal and public reception of digital technologies.

Dr Ryan Nolan is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor of Popular Music and Experience Design at Falmouth University, UK, where he teaches on popular music and the music business. His research adopts philosophical, sociological, and critical-theoretical approaches to the study of cultural industries, with a particular focus on music. He has a PhD from Aarhus University, where he submitted a thesis on the social conditions of contemporary music production. Nolan is a visiting researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University), the Contemporary Aesthetics and Technology group (Aarhus University) and sits on the editorial board of The Sociological Review. In addition to academia, he is a musician and has toured around Europe with several bands.