Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry

Drawing on a deep and long-term first-hand engagement with major labels in the early years of the 21st century, this book sheds novel light 'behind the scenes', at a time of drastic and far-reaching transformation. Refreshingly, it centres not on artists and the most powerful decision-makers but on everyday experiences of work and sense-making among back-office corporate employees. Doing so reveals the internal activities and conflicts that, while hidden from immediate public view, enable processes of change: from paperwork, data systems, managerial pressures and redundancies to graduate training schemes, departmental politics and shared playlists. Following some of these more mundane features provides a new route into understanding the broader cultures and infrastructures of the global recording industry. This oft-forgotten office work tells a different story of contemporary digital music - one more sensitive to the complex intersections of bureaucracy and enterprise, passion and critique, knowledge and experience, that texture the conduct of work and organizational life.