Toby Bennett publishes book on corporate life in the digital music industry

Toby Bennett’s Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out (Bloomsbury 2024) is an ethnographic study of organisational transformation inside the music industry’s largest global firms, as they regained stability after a turbulent period of ‘digital disruption.”

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 organisational life.