This book attempts to offer a broader, less Anglocentric and more dynamic understanding of the recording industry. It starting premise is the idea that the recording industry is not one thing but is, rather, a series of recording industries, locally organised and locally focused, both structured by and structuring the international industry. Seven detailed case studies of different national recording industries illustrate this fact, each of them specifically chosen to provide a distinctive insight into the workings of the recording industry. The expert contributions to this book provide the reader with a sense of the history, structure and contemporary dynamics of the recording industry in these specific territories, and counteract the Anglo-American bias of coverage of the music industry.
The International Recording Industries will be valuable to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, cultural economics and popular music studies.
Lee Marshall is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bristol. His research interests focus on popular music, intellectual property and celebrity. Previous publications include Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star (Polity, 2007), Bootlegging: Romanticism and Capitalism in the Music Industry (Sage, 2005) and Music and Copyright (co-edited with Simon Frith, Edinburgh University Press, 2004).