The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy

Shane Homan, Shane Homan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501345333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teoria e gusto musicale

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy is the first thorough analysis of how policy frames the behavior of audiences, industries, and governments in the production and consumption of popular music. Covering a range of industrial and national contexts, this collection assesses how music policy has become an important arm of government, and a contentious arena of global debate across areas of cultural trade, intellectual property, and mediacultural content. It brings together a diverse range of researchers to reveal how histories of music policy development continue to inform contemporary policy and industry practice. The Handbook maps individual nation case studies with detailed assessment of music industry sectors. Drawing on international experts, the volume offers insight into global debates about popular music within broader social, economic, and geopolitical contexts.

1

Introduction: Situating popular music policy

Shane Homan

Popular music first emerged as of intellectual interest within traditional academic disciplines such as sociology and English studies in Britain and the United States in the 1970s. This was at first driven by enquiries about consumption and embodied attachment: the role of music in everyday leisure contexts; how it is situated within the household, etc. Subsequent studies provided useful insights into the different uses of popular music, forming an important component of ‘subcultural studies’ and other contextualized forms of identity construction. These projects – examining how popular music forms the ‘glue’ for various urban scenes and tribes – come to lie at the intersection of sociology, criminology and leisure studies and an emerging cultural studies. How goth or punk music fans (for example) arranged themselves spatially, semiotically or politically produced work that was both interesting and a significant advance on prior constructions of popular music as simply an ‘add on’ leisure form. The ‘holy grail’ to be found – popular music at the centre of life and as spaces for an alternative politics of consumption and production – has at times proved elusive. However, by the 1980s, popular music became part of a wider range of popular culture (magazines, books, television, film, games) that demanded attention to their methods of production and consumption, and the myriad ways in which they constitute ‘entertainment’, ‘media’, ‘culture’ and ‘leisure.’ Subsequent research did much to begin the demolition of the semiotic fences between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art – and that ‘mere’ entertainment could possess interesting forms in which to interrogate social structures.

In similar ways, the emergence of media industries studies was useful in beginning to think about how media companies arranged production; constructed and adhered to formats; thought about their core markets/consumers; and worked within key power structures. Initially derived from Marxist perspectives, media power was decisively linked to economic structures (see, for example, Fuchs and Mosco 2015). Equally, much of this work sought to align mainstream capitalism with mainstream culture, where major media companies served the interests of the state. The flaws of media monopolies (less consumer choice in product, distribution and ways to consume; increased power of companies to also dictate terms to governments) became a core research interest. While it never went away, media monopoly has again become a feature of popular music studies, as attention shifts to the commanding presence of internet platforms within the music industries. However, in a broader sense, just how and where fan, musician or management activities were abetted or constrained by the state was not yet of interest. However, ‘culture lives a hybrid life as a creature of the state, commerce and civil society’ (Durrer, Miller and O’Brien 2018: 3); and I now turn to the gradual incursion of popular music within the wider machinery of the state.

Before we proceed further, it is worth briefly understanding central definitions in this book. I do not want to revisit the considerable debates about what occurs when ‘popular’ is placed in front of ‘music’ (cf. Frith 1996) as part of much wider debates about ‘mass’ and ‘popular’ culture. While acknowledging that music genres and practices cross boundaries, Middleton and Manuel (2015) provide some useful components: popular music is represented by the scale of its consumption and production; and can be developmentally aligned with mass media as its central forms of distribution. This accounts for ‘mainstream’ music genres – pop, rock hip-hop, country, dance/electronica, blues, r&b, soul – while also recognizing that what is regarded as a ‘niche’ genre is historically contingent. For example, is jazz regarded in the twenty-first century as ‘art’, ‘niche’ or ‘mainstream’ music? We would also include non-Western musics that accord with these definitions, either as adaptations or as fully formed local genres (with a much wider debate, too, about the policy contexts and discourses of ‘world’ music). As discussed in the next section, branching popular music enquiry out into much wider social, political and cultural contexts does not necessarily result in a ‘reductive … “sociologism”’ (Middleton and Manuel 2015), but acknowledges the existing discourses about music that existed before its arrival.

Arts and cultural policy

Most Western (and many other) nations have instituted Arts ministries since the Second World War, initially premised on ensuring ‘high’ art forms such as opera, ballet and classical music were maintained. From the 1940s to the 1960s, these art sectors formed the bulk of state subsidy in the UK, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, France, the United States and elsewhere based on a settled discourse of ‘culture’. It has involved four broader defences in relation to classical music. First, that classical music derives from the wellspring of societal traditions reaching back centuries. Second, it has been consistently argued that this music is the height of ‘excellence’ – that its composition and performance represent the peak of human creativity. While this might be reaching too far into stereotype, its proponents nonetheless observe that the wider societal perception remains:

Associated with the word [‘classical’] today, therefore, are connotations of clear hierarchies, of value judgements that are somehow objective and fixed across time, and of a principally Eurocentric view of culture. Even when considering contemporary ‘modern classics’, the implication is of acceptance into a revered canon of Great Work within a circumscribed tradition.

(Eastburn 2018: 141)

Third, such traditions should continue at the centre of reception and education to prevent a ‘lost’ cultural phenomenon, and to ensure new generations are weaned away from pop culture:

[Young people] don’t have the freedom to choose Bach instead of Britney because they have never been taught how to exercise such freedom. Just imagine how our musical world would change if even a fraction of the amount of money young people spend on purchasing recordings of every new ‘pop’ sensation was spent on recordings of, say, western art music, or of indigenous music from across the world, or of the traditional music of some ancient culture!

(Walker 2005: 137; see also Walker 2009)

Fourth, the unique arrangements of high art forms (ballet companies, symphony orchestras, opera companies) incur extremely high costs in rehearsing, performing and touring, where state subsidies ensure their survival. In short, such cultural enterprises should not be concerned with the economic constraints of commercial popular culture. Large-scale arts organizations’ costs of production (such as orchestras) cannot be met by ticket revenues – Baumol’s ‘cost disease’ – leading to a mixture of revenue solutions (donations, sponsorships, private philanthropy) combined with government funds (Brooks 2006). Perhaps a fifth broader defence can be added: how classical music is situated within ‘heritage’ discourses, in terms of both performance and educational practices. It is worth briefly re-rehearsing the above arguments for coming to understand how popular music has been defined in the past substantially by these absences – for what it is not. In turn, the sustained arguments for popular music as ‘Other’ against high musics have influenced how it has been funded, regulated and organized socially.

The above arguments have been successfully challenged on several fronts, led in the main by a campaign for the arts intelligentsia and societies to take popular culture on its own terms. In one sense, this has simply been a case of ‘following the money’, in providing testimony to just how ‘popular’ popular music is. In another, it is also making the case for similar ‘public good’ arguments to that of high musics. Discussing Sandel (2012), John Street argues that a ‘Springsteen concert cannot be accounted in purely cash terms. It lives in the communal experience and understandings that exist outside the reach of market value’ (Street 2015: 8). At the same time, particularly since the conversion from ‘rock and roll’ to ‘rock’ in the 1960s and 1970s, many were prepared to argue for popular music on similar discursive terms to High musics in terms of creativity, genre traditions and complexity. This was augmented by the ‘“high” analysis of popular music’ that emerged in the 1980s in academic journals, books and mainstream media as popular music studies (and cultural studies) found more stable footings in universities (Hill 2020: 42). Perversely, the efforts to take popular music ‘seriously’ have created their own canons, hierarchies and value judgements.

It is not surprising that by the 1990s researchers were investigating various branches of popular music from policy perspectives, including perhaps the first interrogation of the live music venue as a site of conflicting regulations and state anxieties (Street 1993). Through a prism of ‘unpopular culture’, Steve Redhead completed a series of analyses of urban music and nightlife, and the rise of ‘raves’ and the nightclub (1993, 1995, 1997) that in turn examined the legal frameworks of music (amidst other popular cultural forms) and the consequences of transgression. In 1991, Paul Chevigny completed a landmark study in how cultural regulation is deployed to mask other intentions. In this case, the introduction of New York City’s ‘cabaret laws’ restricted where its (primarily black) jazz musicians could play, and in what combinations. The reversal of the laws was achieved through recourse to broader constitutional rights that fought against efforts to ‘clean up’ the city for tourists amidst the adverse claims made for ‘vernacular’ music, even as the city admitted its jazz venues – and musicians – to be ‘a city and national treasure’ (Chevigny 1991: 102). Spanning sociology, criminology, law, politics and cultural studies disciplines, this kind of work in the 1990s was important collectively in placing different forms of music activity at the intersections of urban consumption/production.

The role of the state also came into focus in its powers to enhance or censor. Martin Cloonan explored British popular music censorship (1996) and different national industrial contexts globally (2003). Drewett and Cloonan’s subsequent (2006) collected edition on music censorship in Africa usefully revealed how different histories of market formations, and historical understandings of the limits of the state, can inform censorship practices.

Another important example of an early ‘popular music policy studies’ was Bennett et al.’s Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions (1993). Presenting a variety of industry and government contexts globally, its strength was in the tensions between local, national and global policies and activities. Similarly, other work – Manuel (1993) and Malm and Wallis (1984, 1992) – emphasized further the need to examine the effects of media ownership, technologies and specific national media policies. In relation, how popular music is constructed and sold in specific tourism markets has added a valuable sub-branch of intersections of leisure, nation and music genres, including political economy approaches to music tourism (see, for example, Connell and Gibson 2003; Guilbault and Rommen 2019).

Popular music policy came to be part of a ‘critical cultural policy studies’ (Lewis and Miller 2003). Drawing on Foucault, Lewis and Miller assembled the collection in the name of a ‘progressive politics’ (Lewis and Miller 2003: 8). In 2003, they identified two broad forms of policy positions: (i) ‘the market as a system for identifying and allocating public preferences for culture’; and (ii) ‘identify[ing] certain artifacts as inalienably, transcendentally, laden with value … [it] encourages a dirigiste role for the state that coerce the public into an aesthetic’ (Lewis and Miller 2003: 4). While the first sees the state provide a ‘light touch’ regulatory framework in terms of infrastructure ownership (for example), the latter describes well the series of decisions made about funding symphony orchestras: an ‘“endangered species” approach to culture’ (Lewis and Miller 2003). How (and if) these two basic positions have changed are discussed below. Yet the 2003 collection is also interesting for its first two chapters that epitomize a much larger debate within cultural policy studies. In the opening chapter for the book, Stuart Cunningham argues fiercely for a more pragmatic – and practical – discipline:

a policy orientation in cultural studies would shift the ‘command metaphors’ of cultural studies away from rhetorics of resistance, progressiveness, and anti-commercialism on the one hand, and populism on the other, toward those of access, equity, empowerment … It offers one major means of rapprochement between the critical and the vocational divide …

(Cunningham 2003: 21)

For Cunningham, this entailed academics coming to grips with the fine detail of local policies (content quotas, Broadcasting Acts, who is given the keys to national media infrastructure, etc.) and a broader remit of interrogating how national culture is envisaged and implemented. In the following chapter, Jim McGuigan warns of ‘becoming [too] useful’ to industries and governments, with distinctions to be maintained between ‘“useful knowledge and “critical” knowledge’ (McGuigan 2003: 28–9). Drawing on Habermas’s construction of the ‘public sphere’, McGuigan argued to retain a broader field of enquiry as a

corrective to a certain kind of instrumentalism which is implicit in the economic reductionisms and technological determinisms that frame much policy debate … it has now become common, however, for ‘culture’ to be resituated within the economistic and technicist discourses of public policy and in this way is tied into the governmentality of communications media on industrial and economic grounds.

(McGuigan 2003: 38)

This debate has had various flashpoints since, although the subsequent chapters in the Lewis/Miller collection dealing with music – examining radio music formats (Berland 2003), the discourses and regulation of music copyright (McLeod 2003) and the idea and practices of music nation-states (Shuker 2003) – revealed a healthy diversity of approaches, where coming to grips with state machinery, and critiquing it, does not have to be an either/or proposition. Such divisions might seem ancient history; but they have resurfaced in different forms.

Cultural and creative industries

I have described up to this point some of the ways in which popular music has been situated in relation to broader social and governmental conceptions of ‘culture’. This was also dependent upon the idea of the ‘cultural industries’ – the set of industries and arts organizations (including heritage) envisaged by and in the purview of governments. It has been well documented that the shift to the ‘creative industries’ in the late 1990s was precipitated by the UK Blair government’s 1998 Creative Industries Mapping Document, which famously married traditional arts (museums, crafts, art, etc.) to a wider range of industries (fashion, games, publishing, IT, etc.). For those sectors struggling to be noticed by government, this broader linkage of arts with industry, doing away with older hierarchies of value, was regarded as valuable. For others, the alignment of these industries with central economic discourses stripped out other criteria of value; privileged the individual artist over structural protections; and was dubiously linked to wider urban and social policy (Hesmondhalgh 2013a: 165–80). For still others, ‘[t]he creative industries paradigm has been a very successful rhetorical device for the promotion of this sector, though it has had a mixed reception: cultural analysts have objected to the economic slant on cultural production, while economists ask themselves what difference it makes to measurement in national income accounts and the industrial organization’ (Towse 2020: 143).

This shift is in part reflected in the increasing number of state ‘Arts’ ministries re-titled and redesigned as inherently ‘Creative’: for example, Creative Wales; Creative New Zealand; Creative Scotland; or programme (Creative Ireland; Creative Canada, Creative Finland, Creative Denmark) and agencies (such as CreateHK for Hong Kong). In the main, these examples have replicated the original UK template of placing the former ‘cultural’ industries under a broader umbrella including media, design, gaming, etc., while emphasizing these sectors’ ability to go to market. Where financial support exists for these sectors, it is also now predicated upon their broader application across the state, ‘to position creativity across a range of governmental objectives and away from simpler subsidy models of support’ (Homan, Cloonan and Cattermole 2016: 5). It is also a more outward-looking project, in moving beyond cultural citizenship discussed below (and the benefits conferred upon local citizens of attending a cinema, a live concert or reading a book), and restating the case for a nationalism that can be put to work at home and abroad. It also brings potential problems, if national governments are seen to be simply outsourcing industry policy to the industries themselves.

The repurposing of a national arts ministry to a Creative New Zealand (for example) also performs a cheerleader role, espousing a vitality of efforts and funding for consumption internally and externally. This has been consistent with those states which (pre-Covid-19) invested more heavily in their cultural budgets. It can also work in reverse: in 2019, the Australian government removed ‘Arts’ from the Minister’s title and departmental focus within a renamed Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications (McIlroy 2019). This was widely perceived as a demotion by those in and outside the cultural sector as the government argued the merits of reducing the number of departments from eighteen to fourteen. It also seemed consistent with various battles fought between Australian cultural sectors and the former Arts Minister and reduced funding of key organizations, such as the Australia Council, leading up to the departmental reshuffle.

That ‘Communications’ was retained in the Australian departmental review – though seemingly tacked on at the end of the larger portfolios – is a reminder that cultural/creative policy intermingles with other state concerns, not least media policy, where broadcasting policy, for example, shapes decisions made about local content. We can borrow from Des Freedman’s (2008: 13–14) analysis of media in making distinctions between policy (goals, norms, instruments shaping behaviour); regulation (specific agencies and activities managing policy) and governance (the wider systems, institutions, public and private and national/international). Accounting for all the actors in these local, national and supranational contexts evokes instant complexity when we think about the range of spheres of public life and interested parties across communities, industries and ...