Popular Music as Promotion: Music and Branding in the Digital Age - Hardcover

Meier, Leslie M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745692214 ISBN 13: 9780745692210

Publisher: Polity, 2017

Synopsis

'Business-as-usual' has been transformed across the music industries in the post-CD age. Against widespread hype about the purported decline of the major music labels, this book provides a critique of the ways these companies have successfully adapted to digital challenges – and what is at stake for music makers and for culture.

Today, recording artists are positioned as 'artist-brands' and popular music as a product to be licensed by consumer and media brands. Leslie M. Meier examines key consequences of shifting business models, marketing strategies, and the new 'common sense' in the music industries: the gatekeeping and colonization of popular music by brands.

Popular Music as Promotion is important reading for students and scholars of media and communication studies, cultural studies and sociology, and will appeal to anyone interested in new intersections of popular music, digital media and promotional culture.

About this title

About the Author:

Leslie M. Meier is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her research examines the music and cultural industries, advertising, marketing, and promotional culture, and consumer culture inside contemporary capitalism.

Review:

"This is a truly excellent book. Based on a wealth of original research, including interviews with music and brand personnel, plus analysis of trade magazines and conventions, it makes a powerful argument about the way popular music has become subsumed under branding and advertising. Important."
Jason Toynbee, formerly of The Open University

"Leslie Meier asks hard questions about what music is for, at a time when corporate brands own, produce and distribute what we listen to. Her analysis of contemporary licensing, digital marketing and artist-brands brings new depth and subtlety to the ongoing tensions between art and commerce. Popular Music as Promotion makes a valuable contribution to critical scholarship on our thoroughly promotional culture."
Melissa Aronczyk, Rutgers University

About this edition

• Publisher: Polity
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0745692214
• ISBN 13: 9780745692210
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216