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Concentration, diversity, and consequences: Privileging independent over major record labels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2018

Andrew Mall
Andrew Mall*
Affiliation:
Northeastern University Department of Music, Boston, MA, USA E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The field of popular music studies has long been interested in the relationships between record labels and the music they make available to consumers. At the micro level, research on record labels provides insight into the tensions between art and commerce and those between individuals and institutions. At the macro level, this research illuminates changes in socio-economic trends, music industry structures and structural inequalities. A meta-analysis of this literature reveals an ‘indie prejudice’: a preference for (and even a bias in favour of) independent labels coupled with a dismissive approach to the study of major labels and musical mainstreams that impacts our ability, as a scholarly field, to speak with authority about the largest segments of the commercial record industries. What larger implications for our scholarship might confronting this prejudice reveal? What master narratives have structured popular music studies’ preference of independent over major record labels? In this article, I argue that the art/commerce dichotomy has remained influential, although it can have unintended and dangerous side effects if it becomes a guiding assumption.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , October 2018 , pp. 444 - 465
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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