Music Research Seminar: Toby Bennett

Toby Bennett (University of Westminster)) will join us to present on ‘Musicking the organisation: Corporate life in the digital music industry’

Location: Lecture Theatre 2, School of Music

In this presentation, I ask how music textures and shapes processes of industrial transformation. I do so by drawing from my book (Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry) examining the restructuring of UK major record labels from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s, in response to the “digital disruption” of popular music distribution. The reassertion of major label control was no foregone conclusion. Work within popular music studies has, within this context, drawn frequent attention to the labour of recording and performing musicians, or sometimes to small-scale music entrepreneurs, and their various entanglements within financialised technological structures and corporate power. Yet, the role of the organisation itself has drawn little analytic interest. For this we must look elsewhere. Sociologically- and anthropologically-informed music scholars (from the likes of Christopher Small or Howard Becker to Antoine Hennion or Georgina Born and collaborators) have consistently sought to decentre the figure of the artist: allowing for creative agency while highlighting the backgrounded conventions and processes of mediation through which music objects come into being. Meanwhile, research in organisation studies (from Alexander Styhre, Nic Beech, Charlotte Gilmore, Marek Korczynski and others) has paid close attention to music – either the creation, production and distribution of music as a “special case”, or the everyday experience of music as a cultural resource for managers and employees. I argue that such antecedents offer a useful means of explaining the kinds of organisational change that was necessary within the major labels. Moreover, rather than paint a critical portrait of the contemporary musician’s plight, they might also help us explore the construction and maintenance of organisational systems, and forms of working practice, that are more adequate to music as a distinct aesthetic object. 

Speaker bio:

I am Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture & Organisation in the School of Media and Communications at University of Westminster. I lead the MA Global Media Business, in partnership with the Communication University of China. I am also a member of the Communication and Media Research Institute, coordinating the research seminar series, and a production editor for the Journal of Cultural Economy. My book "Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry" (Bloomsbury 2024) documents how employees in major record companies managed and shaped digitisation processes.

This will be a hybrid event. The guest speaker will be present with us in the School of Music, and colleagues and other guests are encouraged to join us there. But if you are unable to do so then please consider joining us via Zoom.

No booking is required. Those wishing to attend online should contact series convenor Dr Ellis Jones (e.n.jones@leeds.ac.uk).