Distributed for Intellect Ltd
The Intellect Handbook of Global Music Industries
At a moment when music industries worldwide are undergoing profound structural change, this handbook offers a substantial and intellectually expansive contribution to understanding how music circulates, generates value, organizes labor, and shapes cultural life across different global contexts.
The Intellect 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 labor 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 labor. Particular attention is given to the infrastructures, intermediaries, and power relations that organize 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 globalization, digital mediation, labor, infrastructure, governance, entrepreneurship, live performance, and cultural value.
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 labor, and global media studies.
