This special issue of Popular Music has its origins in a seminar organised at the University of Stirling in 2004. This meeting, one of a series on cultural policy, brought together researchers from a number of European countries who were asked to describe state music policy in their respective countries and to reflect on what differences, if any, such policies had made to recent national music history. As the seminar’s organisers, we were interested in a couple of issues: first, how policy approaches to popular music had changed since it first began to appear on the European political agenda in the 1970s; second, how local political and cultural conditions had affected ideas of what popular music policy could or should be.

Popular music policy making incorporates the art and rationality of ‘governmentality’. In doing so it seeks to move beyond benign policy making efforts and some of the prevailing approaches to cultural policy studies – primarily arts policy – to apply interventionary strategies into the space dominated by global recording companies. Major recording companies and the business-as-usual approach of Return on Investment dominates local and national popular music through the macro-level perspective of global trade regimes, thereby avoiding the micro-level activities needed by citizens locally. Critical approaches to the potential loss of localised music production in the face of globalisation are drawn from the heterodox, interdisciplinary schools of institutional economics which, in this case, uses instrumentalism to create a model that insists on research-based popular music making policies that respond to citizen needs. Using examples from the Australian experience, the Instrumental Policy Behaviour Process (IPBP) is proposed as a model for generating localised, resource-allocating approaches to popular music policy making.

This article examines the intersections of music policy and citizenship in the Caribbean island of Barbados. The article focuses on the development of music policy from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. It is argued that it is possible to trace efforts made by Barbadian state managers to shape citizenship. However, these efforts at defining an ideal Barbadian citizen should not be understood exclusively in national terms. In fact, the article demonstrates that the ways in which national identities in Barbados are constituted through calypso and soca performances have their roots in global shifts in development policies. Therefore the article integrates a three-tiered focus. It considers national policy decisions, international policy decisions, and finally it examines the ways in which decisions taken at these levels shape and are shaped by what takes place within the calypso/soca music industry and within calypso/soca performance.

Much has been written about the cultural, social and political impact of German popular music within the country, but the role of German popular music outside of Germany has not been sufficiently examined. The research presented here is designed to investigate an example of Germany’s export of contemporary popular music as state-sponsored promotion of its national (pop) culture. San Francisco’s weekly radio programme Radio Goethe – The German Voice, which distributes popular music from German-speaking countries to English-speaking audiences, is explored. The main purposes of this programme are to portray a modern Germany to a foreign audience and to arouse interest in the country. The weekly 60-minute series began airing in 1996 and is sponsored by the German federal government. Radio Goethe is carried by over thirty college radio stations in the USA, Canada and New Zealand, and in 2004 the German creator and host of the series received a Federal Cross of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz) for his intercultural work. This article briefly documents the history of the series and critically examines the presentation, style and language of the music. The results of qualitative research on the meanings that listeners assign to the music – based on questionnaires and focus group interviews with American members of the show’s audience – are presented. This case study is framed within existing debates about the relationships between popular music, national identity, cultural representation, and state-supported music export. Data from interviews with the founder of the show and the cultural ambassador of Germany in San Francisco are analysed to clarify the goals of and assumptions behind the radio series.

This paper examines the recent NSW state government reassessment of the role of live music venues, and the gradual inclusion of live music within broader urban cultural policy across Australia. Focusing on Sydney, it maps the live music venue at the intersection of competing policy agendas, alternatively viewed as ‘vibrant’, exciting sites that represent a rejuvenated inner-city culture; or as sites of disruption, encouraging anti-social activity on the margins of legality (or sometimes both). The ‘rehabilitation’ of live music in the eyes of key government sectors was not simply a matter of ‘good’ cultural policy, but the result of a combination of many factors. The paper documents and analyses a six-year campaign by various stakeholders to implement noise, building code, late-night trading and liquor law reforms designed to ensure the survival of live performance venues and scenes.

The Finnish government has historically been active in regulating the practices of popular music. At the same time, the music industry, rock media and musicians have traditionally insisted on markets free from state intervention. This article focuses on the history of the interrelationship between cultural policy and popular music, especially rock exports, in Finland. It argues that the high level of organised forms of culture and the lure of internationalism form the historical basis for the nation-state–popular music relationship in Finland. Following the demands for ‘competitive society’ in the 1990s and the international breakthroughs of Finnish pop and rock music performers after 2000, this relationship has intensified. Contemporary policy is in many ways healthier than in the past, yet it also raises crucial questions about hierarchies and identity relationships in popular music and society.

The New Zealand popular music industry has recently undergone impressive growth, and is poised to make a significant international impact. Two aspects of this newly privileged position are examined. First, broadly sketching twenty years of developments, I argue that Government willingness to get behind the local industry, especially the role of the post-2000 Labour Government, is a crucial determinant of the present success story. Secondly, I consider the debated relationship between local music and New Zealand cultural identity, with particular reference to two prominent musical styles: Kiwi ‘garage’ rock, and Polynesian-dominated local rap, reggae and hip-hop-inflected music. I argue that the local must not be overly valorised, and that it is necessary to distinguish between ‘local music’ as a cultural signifier and locally made music, with both worthy of support.

Is the proportion of German language music in total record sales in Germany a cause for optimism or for concern? This question is very difficult to answer as the national branch of the IFPI only supplies statistics on ‘national repertoire’ and not specifically on ‘national language repertoire’ – and even that covers music sung in any language, not only in German. Since the call for a music quota for radio stations lacks a precise definition (German or German language) there is some reason to suspect that the real aim behind this discussion is not to support German music culture but rather national economic interests. As a matter of fact, the average proportion of German language songs in the charts is currently the highest it has been in the last thirty years.

An analysis of the Top 20 in the national end-of-year charts of various European countries shows that the number of national language songs is generally increasing again after a substantial decline in the 1980s and 1990s. This is the case not only with record sales but also with airplay. This means that the increase cannot only be due to the massive drop in sales of international repertoire caused by file sharing on the Internet.

When New Zealand’s ‘third-way’ Labour government came to power in 1999 it placed a greater policy and funding emphasis on the arts and culture. Like other ‘promotional states’ (Cloonan 1999) the Labour government sought to support the domestic popular music industry through a voluntary radio quota. Drawing on qualitative research, this article describes the ways in which the state, through New Zealand on Air, negotiates and leverages domestic popular music artists onto commercial radio. In this process, state agents mobilise social networks to ‘join-up’ commercially appropriate artists to radio programmers. The success of this programme is based upon state agents developing an institutional isomorphism with existing music industry practices. Even so, popular music makers contest New Zealand on Air’s sympathetic policy settings by citing forms of institutional exclusion.

This article addresses the ongoing impact of Canadian Content Regulations as applied to commercial radio. While commercial broadcasters have repeatedly called for a relaxation of the regulations in response to the changing music industry, particularly the increased impact of the Internet, it is possible to demonstrate that the regulations have had a positive impact on Canadian listening habits. An examination of the ‘national’ charts provided by Last.fm, a website that tracks users’ listening habits, shows that Canadian users listen to Canadian tracks in excess of the amounts currently regulated for radio. Commercial broadcasters’ claims that the regulations prevent them from competing fairly with new technology thus run counter to such evidence. As official charts, and hence commercial playlists are still reliant on older modes of tracking music, via in-store purchases, an incomplete picture of the current state of the industry exists, and it is this picture that seems to shape the claims made by the commercial industry. Additionally, this paper explores the rise of a successful Canadian ‘scene’, spearheaded by bands such as Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene, that demonstrates the impact of policy in creating a national music culture that is confident enough to no longer have to be explicitly Canadian, either sonically or lyrically. Cancon regulations would appear to have aided in situating Canadian acts comfortably within a wider music culture within Canada.