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, Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry sheds new light on life ‘behind the scenes’ during 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 back-office corporate employees. Doing so reveals the internal activities and conflicts that, while hidden from public view, enable processes of change: from paperwork, data systems, managerial pressures, and redundancies to graduate training schemes, departmental politics, and shared playlists.

This 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 that texture the conduct of work and organisational life.