Professor David Hesmondhalgh

Profile

I grew up in Accrington, Lancashire, and was the first person in my extended family to go to University. I did my PhD in the 1990s at Goldsmiths, University of London, on independent record companies and their links with punk, post-punk and rave culture, supervised by Georgina Born, now Professor at University College London. My first full-time teaching and research job was also at Goldsmiths. I worked in the Sociology department at the Open University from 1999 to 2007 where I chaired the production of a major course, Understanding Media, which involved five books and various other distance-learning materials. I came to Leeds as a Professor in 2007, and from June 2010 to December 2013 was Head of the Institute of Communications Studies - this was the name of the School of Media and Communication at the time.

Research & publications

Much of my research has been about music. My book, Why Music Matters (published in 2013), was about the ways in which music might enhance people's lives, individually and collectively, and what often stops it from doing so. It's been translated into Spanish and Russian. In 2021, I co-authored a book-length report on the earnings of musicians for the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office – links to a downloadable copy can be found in my list of publications below. 

I've also published a fair bit about media industries and cultural production. My book The Cultural Industries (Sage) is an analysis of changes and continuities in television, film, music, publishing and other industries since the 1980s, and of the increasingly important role of digital platforms in these industries. The fourth edition, published in 2019, was a revised, updated and expanded version of the third, published in 2012. It's now unrecognisable from the first edition of 2002, and has grown to over 500 pages. It's been translated into various languages, including Chinese, Russian and Italian. 

Another widely-cited book is Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries, (co-written with Sarah Baker, 2010) which examined work in the contemporary media and cultural industries. Culture, Economy and Politics: The Case of New Labour (Palgrave, 2015, co-written with Kate Oakley, David Lee and Melissa Nisbett) was a critical study of the cultural policies of the British 'New Labour' government of 1997 to 2010. I've also edited various books and a special issue of Popular Communication on 'Race, ethnicity and cultural production', co-edited with Anamik Saha.

I’m currently leading a five-year research project, funded by a European Research Council Advanced Research Grant, on Music Culture in the Age of Streaming. This will end in November 2026. It includes analysis of streaming in China and case studies of streaming in many other places.  Publications arising from the project can be found in my list of publications below; I and my post-doctoral colleagues on the project are currently working on books based on our research. 

PhD supervision

I’m an experienced PhD supevisor and examiner. As of 2024, I’ve supervised 17 PhDs to completion, and have examined 44 PhDs, including 18 overseas, in eight different countries. I currently supervise many PhD students (postgraduate researchers) in the School of Media and Communication and beyond. At Leeds, these include the following; links to the profiles of researchers based in other Schools and Faculties are provided here. Links to the profiles of postgraduate researchers based in my School can be found further down this webpage.

• Gummo Clare – the London Jazz Scene
• Nathan Coleman – drill music in London
• Aditya Lal – working conditions in Indian music industries
• Chengyao Liu – Chinese short video platforms
• Miqi Liu – Chinese fiction platforms
• Channing Morsali – class and gender in the UK television industry
• Yunus Emre Öztaş – working conditions in Turkish and UK cultural industries
• Yuan Yao – gender in the platformised Chinese recording industry.

Fellowships and affiliations

I was elected a Fellow of the International Communications Association in 2017, and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2021. I’ve been awarded paid Fellowships/Visiting Scholar positions at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania (2016), Microsoft Research New England (2019) and Aarhus University (2021). 

I have affiliations at Leeds with the ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre, the Centre for Employment Research Innovation and Change, and the Bauman Institute. 

Research interests

My research interests include the following, and I welcome PhD enquiries in these and other areas:

• digital platforms as they relate to media and culture, e.g. music and video streaming services
• media industries/cultural industries/creative industries
• all aspects of media and cultural production, contemporary and historical
• music, society and culture, including popular music
• social theory and theories of media, and the relations between them, especially with regards to inequality and justice (including dynamics of race, gender, and class)
• media work, employment, careers etc.
• media and cultural policy

• MUSICSTREAM: Music Culture in the Age of Streaming

Qualifications

• BA Oxford, MA Northwestern, PhD London

Professional memberships

• Fellow of the British Academy
• Fellow of the International Communications Association

Current postgraduate researchers

• Gummo Clare
• Chengyao Liu
• Yuan (Ringo) Yao