Drawing on a deep and long-term first-hand engagement with major labels in the early years of the 21st century, this book sheds new 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 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, providing 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 organizational life.

In this interview, Angela McRobbie reflects on her intellectual and professional trajectory from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, amid her associations with Stuart Hall and the emerging cultural economy agenda at the Open University. The interview expands on, and incorporates elements from, her contribution to a 2020 workshop marking two decades since Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke convened a ‘Workshop on Cultural Economy’ at the OU in Milton Keynes. The interview forms part of a special issue, titled What Was Cultural Economy?

This introduction article establishes the territory for the Symposium What Was Cultural Economy? After setting out the reasoning behind the collection and its eight contributions, the introduction describes the terms on which the 'cultural economy' concept was launched, within the Open University's Faculty of Social Sciences, at the end of the 1990s. Noting the collective work involved, I highlight the role of Stuart Hall, and the brand of cultural studies he represents, as a key vector. Hall's position as totemic public intellectual obscures his work as a teacher, curriculum designer and colleague, channelling the 'cultural turn' through this internal academic context. As such, I also stress the OU's course team model of intellectual production, drawing from recent historiography on workshops as devices for the practice of collective intellectual and cultural work, coupling this to the figure of the 'vanishing mediator' as a driver of material and symbolic transformation. I then move to sketch out some of the key interpersonal relations, institutional contexts and intellectual trajectories through which cultural economy was first formulated. In conclusion, I ask what implications this little history might hold for a present-day journal engaged in the workshopping of ideas at increasingly international scale.

To get in the right frame of mind, I begin drafting this review in a hotel bar. I order a Negroni and press shuffle on ‘The Frankfurt Kabuff Party 1 (extremely legendary)’ Spotify playlist1. The opening glissando of Dancing Queen shimmers in my ears and I shake my head at the audaciousness of the authors’ conceit. A familiar space and texture is conjured in my mind’s eye. A bar. A blurry after-work crowd, untucked shirts, loosened collars, bobbing in unison. I realise I’m smiling. For a moment, I’m with them.

The intermediary work of persuasion and justification is an important but often hidden aspect of urban cultural policy. Rather than the frictionless flow and ‘transfer’ of knowledge, the global assemblage of creative economy policy – especially novel, oppositional or more ‘just’ visions of creative cities – is an accomplishment. One such vision is the call to develop a hybrid cultural-industrial policy that would attend to the internal processes and dynamics of culture as a production system. Drawing from the pragmatic sociology of justification and critique, the paper focuses on the ‘Music City’ construct as a live example of this vision, and the best-practice ‘handbook’ as key justification device. Handbooks are used by intermediaries to spread ideas, signal expertise, convince and ‘educate’ those that might fund them, coordinate heterogeneous stakeholders, and to enthuse and achieve legitimacy among a broader public. In so doing, they present a repertoire of arguments, rooted in competing value formations, that respond to doubts and disputes with potentials for compromise and appeals to a ‘common good’. Analysing the justificatory ‘grammar’ of a new Music City discourse suggests avenues for further research exploring how justification work takes place in situated contexts of urban cultural practice.

For contemporary cultural policy, 'non-creative' work continues to form a conceptual blindspot: a foil to define and value creativity against. This paper develops existing categories to augment the task-focused notion of 'embedded creativity' with a more situated view of work's cultural and institutional embedding. It first interrogates this 'embeddedness', taking a 'cultural economy' approach to intermediation and administrative support. Drawing on observations from an in-depth qualitative study of employees in major record labels, the second part articulates the heightened importance of 'admin' to recorded music industries, after 'digital disruption'. Routine bureaucratic labour presents an atypical example, revealing much about the hidden relational and identity work that goes into constructing 'creative industries' as such. The intention is not to show that 'embedded non-creative workers' are in fact 'creative' but, on the contrary, to articulate the distinct contributions and value of support work in this context, questioning a persistent reliance on creative/non-creative dualisms. Policy research would benefit from enriched understanding of culture's assembly in marketable objects, reorienting understandings of 'cultural' labour markets and careers, and reimagining the role of traditional cultural 'administration' in the contemporary 'creative economy'.

This article considers the critique of inequality, exploitation and exclusion in contemporary UK music industries, in light of the latter’s growing internal concerns over work-based gender relations. The creative sector’s persistent inequalities are at odds with its professed liberal, egalitarian, meritocratic values and attitudes. Yet, within music’s industrial production cultures, a dismissive postfeminist sensibility has come under pressure through a reflexive critical moment of popular feminist discourse, expressed in trade press critique, between 2013 and the present moment. Drawing from a study of intermediary work in UK major record labels, the article takes a pragmatist approach to documenting and theorizing this critique – alongside institutional mechanisms, like company policies and corporate PR, that respond to it – in terms of growing industrial reflexivity. Tensions over the representation of work, the nature of inequality, intergenerational and epistemic injustice emerge as key themes, with implications for critical research on popular music industries.

This chapter considers “passion” as an enthusiastic orientation to work within creative worlds: work motivated by intense attachments to the products of work and their conditions of production. Drawing on Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology of critique and justification, the chapter argues that the passionate lens most usefully trains our sights on normative questions: not what or how—but why such work is undertaken. Embedded in research on cultural and creative industries, the contemporary recorded music sector is presented as a “passionate” industry in transformation. Interviews with workers, who both criticize and defend their industry, act as a springboard to explore three possible interpretive approaches: affirmative, critical, and pragmatic. Theoretical flexibility is needed to keep “passion” open to future inquiry—particularly regarding inequalities in creative work.

this further accentuate the author’s accomplishment in reuniting Fela with the “common man” status which he so preferred in life. Kalakuta Notes offers distinctive insights into the eclectic roots of Afrobeat, giving an overview of its present state and a projection of its possible future. Along with the stories of Fela’s life and his “early days” as a highlife/jazz (Afro-Highlife) performer and musician in Ghanaian clubs, the gradual formation and mastering of Afrobeat is covered, with rich facts stretching through the first part of the book. This continues towards the end of the book, albeit in a more reflective manner, with a comparative focus on other African musicians such as Victor Olaiya and Segun Bucknor who, like Fela, also delved into Afro-Western musical fusion. The combination of these two segments of this book creates a factual trail that credits Fela with the sole invention of Afrobeat, thus clarifying discrepancies that tend to attribute the origin and style of the genre to other Afro-fusion artists, with some of whom Fela had close affiliations. Further notes by Collins include an exploration of Western African popular music of the early 1940s and late 1960s, in this instance through an examination of Fela’s life, as well as his contemporaries in Ghana, Nigeria, and the diaspora. In his introduction, Collins presents a brief history of highlife (an important ingredient of Afrobeat), its affinity to Afro-Caribbean brass rhythms, and further assimilation of foreign musical styles such as jazz, soul, and rock—all of which are integral to Fela’s creation of Afrobeat—into the West African musical scene. Interviews with renowned percussionist Dr. Willie Anku, as well as the founder and leader of the Pan African Orchestra, Nana Danso, offer further insight into Fela’s music, notably in terms of his exceptional technical abilities as a composer. These interviews confirm Fela’s creative genius and show how highly he was revered, not only for his charismatic expression as a musician and performer but also in terms of the depth of his musical nous. Kalakuta Notes unmasks the legend of Fela by bringing its audience closer to the life and music of a man like no other. The book does well to create a reconciling balance between the dominating discourse of Fela’s enigmatic social contributions and the indelible influence of his music on the African musical scene as well as on world music, through Afrobeat.

Gill Partington"s exegesis of Christian postapocalyptic novel series Left Behind leads her to posit the emergence of a "postfictional" mode of writing, the "networked genre", arguing that it is in fringe arenas where the most radical transformations of traditional modes of novelistic engagement are likely to be found.By calling upon their belief in the imminence of the prophesied moment of Rapture, the series engages its readers" profound personal investment in their faith, forming a rehearsal of sorts for their own impending narrative pathways.Her claim is thus that the books "represent a reality, but one which has yet to take place".Online interactions on websites, forums and social networks, as well as immersion in the spin-off computer games, both anticipate and extend the series, and are requisite components of its postfictional status.If we are to accept the Left Behind phenomena as paradigmatically postfictional, then this may be because, as Partington implies, these creative artefacts emerge from the convergence of two "real-world" trajectories that already blur the boundaries between fact and fiction: systems of belief (specifically but not exclusively religious) and networked technology.Here I consider some of the implications of such a convergence, focusing on conspiracy theories and patterns of online