The Handbook of Global Music Industries offers an ambitious and timely account of the contemporary music industries as a dynamic, globally interconnected field shaped by technological transformation, shifting labour conditions, platform economies, cultural policy, and changing forms of musical production and circulation. Bringing together an international group of established and emerging scholars, the collection provides a wide-ranging exploration of the structures, practices, and debates that increasingly define music industries research in the twenty-first century.
The contributing authors address multiple dimensions of the music industries, including artists and managers, recording and publishing, streaming and playlist cultures, live music ecologies, copyright and geopolitics, digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, and the lived realities of creative labour. Particular attention is given to the infrastructures, intermediaries, and power relations that organise contemporary music markets.
Recurring themes include precarity and entrepreneurship, multinational label hierarchies, platform governance, copyright reform, export strategies, discrimination, mental health, and post-pandemic recovery. By combining structural analysis with grounded empirical research, the collection offers a globally situated account of how platform logics and enduring inequalities continue to shape contemporary music industries.
Distinguished by its genuinely global perspective, the handbook moves beyond narrowly Anglo-American frameworks to examine music industries as diverse, uneven, and contested cultural formations operating across multiple geographic, economic, and institutional contexts. Its scope reflects the growing recognition that the music industries can no longer be understood through singular models of production or distribution, but instead require sustained engagement with questions of globalisation, digital mediation, labour, infrastructure, governance, entrepreneurship, live performance, and cultural value.
The collection combines broad disciplinary reach with a strong awareness of emerging developments within the field. Across its chapters, it addresses the rapidly changing conditions of music production and circulation while also engaging critically with the wider economic and political forces shaping contemporary cultural work. Questions of inequality, platform power, precarity, access, and sustainability sit alongside discussions of innovation, participation, audience formation, and industrial transformation, producing a volume that is both analytically rigorous and responsive to contemporary debates.
Structured to support both specialist scholarship and interdisciplinary engagement, the handbook is designed to function simultaneously as a major reference work, a teaching resource, and a framework for future research. Its thematic range and international orientation make it especially relevant to scholars and students working across popular music studies, media and communication, cultural industries, sociology, cultural policy, creative labour, and global media studies.
At a moment when music industries worldwide are undergoing profound structural change, the handbook offers a substantial and intellectually expansive contribution to understanding how music circulates, generates value, organises labour, and shapes cultural life across different global contexts. The result is a collection that positions the study of global music industries not as a narrow subfield, but as a crucial site for examining wider transformations in culture, technology, economics, and power.
Autorentext
Chris Anderton is Associate Professor in the Cultural Economy at Southampton Solent University, UK. His primary research areas are the music industries, live music and festivals, and music history, culture and fandom, especially in relation to progressive music styles.
Martin James, Professor, is an independent scholar based in the UK. His areas of specialist interest include the UK and US music press, and late twentieth-century alternative music, specifically punk, post-punk and electronic music.
Daniel Nordgård is Professor in Music Industries and Digitalization. His primary research is on digital transitions in the global music industries, focusing on music ecosystems, business models, rights structures and digital platforms.
Sergio Pisfil is a Lecturer and Researcher in Music at Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC), Peru. His primary research areas include live sound, live music studies, and the history of rock music.